LAME is a high quality MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) encoder licensed under the LGPL.
LAME development started around mid-1998. In the beginning it was a patch against the 8hz-MP3 encoder sources. Later Mike Cheng, (LAME creator), decided to start from scratch based on the dist10 sources, because of quality issues. His goal was only to speed up the dist10 sources, and leave its quality untouched. That branch (a patch against the reference sources) became Lame 2.0. But since version 3.81, LAME was a patch.
LAME 3.81 was the first version in which all dist10 code was replaced.
The project quickly became a team project. When Mike Cheng left leadership, Mark Taylor became leader and started pursuing increased quality in addition to better speed. He can be considered the initiator of the LAME project in its current form. He released version 3.0 featuring gpsycho, a new psychoacoustic model he developed.
Today, there are 4 developers working on LAME, which is considered the best MP3 encoder at mid-high bitrates and at VBR, mostly thanks to the dedicated work of its developers and the open source licensing model that allowed the project to tap into engineering resources from all around the world. Both quality and speed improvements are still happening, probably making LAME the only MP3 encoder still being actively developed.