There is a bug on the patched version of LAME 3.97 (Album Art patch) that messes the mslength frame on the id3 tag. The track length is incorrect on Winamp 5.25 and i think it could be the same bug on the early LAME 3.98 betas.

http://rarewares.org/mp3-lamepatches.php

The description of the patch mentions some other things added: "Includes the decoding fix for mp3 files and the fix for decoding through stdout." I'm not sure what the decoding fix was but from the date of the patch you would be inheriting alpha / 1st beta code. The bug in question didn't get fixed until b4. At this point, it seems 3.98b4 is a better choice for production use than a patched 3.97.

I would have to agree with these comments. 3.98b4 is probably the right choice now. Certainly it makes no sense to apply current bug fixes to an earlier release, that's why we have version numbering.

The 'decoding fix' was applied to the 3.98 alphas and has been in the CVS since then. It simply ensured that the encoder delay and padding were correctly accounted for on decoding so that the output wave file contained the same number of samples as the original source wave file. IIRC, the previous versions did not strip the padding at the end of the mp3 file.

The bug seems to appear when you add album art on lame by using the --ti switch. It seems to be okay for the --tv switch, but you are better of using LAME 3.98b4 or stick with non-patched LAME 3.97 and use a tag editor instead if you want to extra tags and custom genres, since the id3 patches had not had major testing until LAME 3.98 went beta.