On Apr 7, 2009, at 3:06 PM, Ashley Allen wrote: I'd like to do a similar conversion from CAFF to MP3. Is there a recommended MP3 codec? My on-line searches result in either command-line tools or references to LAME at http://spaghetticode.org/lame/. Is this legit?
Apple doesn't ship an MP3 encoder, probably because it would be very expensive for them to license it for all developers to use. (Instead they only license it for use in iTunes.)
Unless you want to pay to license an encoder from Fraunhofer/Lucent/Thomson/whoever, your best option is LAME. Using it does theoretically open you up to patent-violation lawsuits, but I don't think that's likely unless your app is commercial and high-profile. (I'm not a lawyer, though...) There are certainly plenty of applications that use it.
The official website is at Looks like you can get it from darwinports: There's a version built as a Mac framework, with an installer package, at
I have been told that there is a version of LAME built as a CoreAudio encoder component, which would be awesome, but I have never seen an actual URL for it. I've done some stuff using the framework; it's not hard to glue its API into CoreAudio.
—Jens |