TooLAME is a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

MPEG-1 Layer II MPEG-1 Audio Layer II or MPEG-2 Audio Layer II (MP2, sometimes incorrectly called Musicam or MUSICAM) is a lossy audio compression format defined by ISO/IEC 11172-3 alongside MPEG-1 Audio Layer I and MPEG-1 Audio Layer III (MP3). While MP3 is m ...

(MP2) audio encoder written primarily by Mike Cheng. While there are many MP2 encoders, TooLAME is well-known and widely used for its particularly high audio quality. It has been unmaintained since 2003, but is directly succeeded by the TwoLAME

code fork In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...

(the latest version, TwoLAME 0.4.0, was released October 11, 2019). The name TooLAME is a play on ''

LAME Lame or LAME may refer to: Music * "Lame" (song) by Unwritten Law * ''Lame'' (album) by Iame People * Ibrahim Lame (born 1953), Nigerian educator and politician * Jennifer Lame (), American film editor * Quintín Lame (1880–1967), Colombian ...

'' and ''Layer II''.

History

After leaving leadership of the

project, Mike Cheng decided to redirect his efforts towards the MP2 format. This was in part due to concern with looming legal threats to those distributing software for the widespread

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

format, due to patents held by Fraunhofer and

Thomson Thomson may refer to: Names * Thomson (surname), a list of people with this name and a description of its origin * Thomson baronets, four baronetcies created for persons with the surname Thomson Businesses and organizations * SGS-Thomson Mic ...

, while use of MP2 audio was basically unrestricted. For more, see: LAME#Patents and legal issues. The first release of TooLAME (v0.1) was November 7, 1998.TooLAME HISTORY
/ref> He originally based his work on ''mpegaudio.tar''. In October 1999, he started over from scratch, instead basing TooLAME on the more capable ISO Dist10 reference implementation, and substantial code from LAME. He aimed for higher audio quality and improved encoding performance.TooLAME README
/ref> Achieving high performance, "About 4 times faster than ISO code." TooLAME was mainly a standalone audio encoder, accepting PCM files in RAW/AIFF/WAV format. However, in the final TooLAME release from Cheng (TooLAME 0.2 m beta 8), support for use as a

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

was included. Cheng repeatedly resisted the addition of features like

libsndfile libsndfile is a widely used C library written by Erik de Castro Lopo for reading and writing audio files. It supports a wide variety of audio file formats and will convert automatically from one to another. It allows the programmer to ignore m ...

integration for support of a much wider variety of input formats.

TwoLAME

Nicholas Humfrey made significant modifications to tooLAME, and released it publicly. At Mike Cheng's request he renamed it to TwoLAME to avoid confusion.

Technical details

TooLAME utilizes the highly tuned psychoacoustic model developed for

, but applied to MP2 audio encoding, instead. Includes a rather complex, rarely used, and poorly supported (by MP2 players)

variable bitrate Variable bitrate (VBR) is a term used in telecommunications and computing that relates to the bitrate used in sound or video encoding. As opposed to constant bitrate (CBR), VBR files vary the amount of output data per time segment. VBR allows a ...

(VBR) mode.TooLAME VBR README
/ref> Frame CRCs, and

Broadcast Wave Format Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) is an extension of the popular Microsoft WAV audio format and is the recording format of most file-based non-linear digital recorders used for motion picture, radio and television production. It was first specified by ...

(BWF) output was added for

Digital Audio Broadcasting Digital radio is the use of digital technology to transmit or receive across the radio spectrum. Digital transmission by radio waves includes digital broadcasting, and especially digital audio radio services. Types In digital broadcasting syst ...

(DAB) use.

Popularity

MJPEGTools documentation recommends the use of TooLAME instead of their included mp2enc.

MPlayer MPlayer is a free and open-source media player software application. It is available for Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS Research Operating System are also available. A port for DOS usi ...

Mencoder MEncoder is a free command line transcoding tool released under the GNU General Public License. It is a sibling of MPlayer, and can convert all the formats that MPlayer understands into a variety of compressed and uncompressed formats using differ ...

includes support for TooLAME (and TwoLAME) audio encoding.MPlayer The Movie Player
(man page)

Code forks

TwoLAME: Mainly code clean-up, API change, performance improvements: http://www.twolame.org/ MCTooLAME: TooLAME fork with

MPEG Multichannel __NOTOC__ MPEG Multichannel is an extension to the MPEG-1 Layer II audio compression specification, as defined in the MPEG-2 Audio standard (ISO/IEC 13818-3) which allows it provide up to 5.1-channels (surround sound) of audio. To maintain backw ...

5.1-channel

surround sound Surround sound is a technique for enriching the fidelity and depth of sound reproduction by using multiple audio channels from speakers that surround the listener ( surround channels). Its first application was in movie theaters. Prior to sur ...

encoding: http://mctoolame.sourceforge.net/ Windows DLLs: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=BB6FAF8F.40CB%25steve%40prx.org&forum_name=toolame-devel http://www.fmjsoft.com/addons.html Toolame-DAB: Integration with the open-source

toolchain ODR-mmbTools: http://www.opendigitalradio.org/mmbtools

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Toolame Free audio codecs 1998 software