I learned somewhere on this or another forum or even on the Lame Site, that lame should not be thought of as the answer to the last questions on audio compression but as a project of 'testing around' and tweaking.
But still I came to think of the following: isn't the aim of audio compression to produce the finest quality at the lowest possible bitrate ?
And then: why don't they throw out all the crappy options that produce bad quality and let the settings that produce good quality be a default. For example: it seems as if the alt-presets are now 'state-of-art'. Why not make 'em defaults ?

For some reason or the other (insanity maybe?), the LAME developers have refused to make the best known settings be the default settings. It's been brought up to them many times, check the lame dev mailing list.

Possibly because the Lame developers didn't come up with the alt presets themselves. Just a guess...

Well "-h" is not the default either. I suppose it's because LAME is seen as a general purpose MP3 encoder and is not specifically targeted at the audiophile end of the community. If people want to accept the larger encoded filesize and slower encoding time of say the alt-presets compared to the default CBR 128, fine, let them choose it. Since most users won't notice the difference why penalise the basic LAME performance to suit a minority. Anyway it's not like the increased perforance is not available to those who want it - it's only a switch away

Dosdan,

I agree. It certainly does take the patience of an audiophile to wait 2 minutes or so, for what Xing and others crank out poor facsimiles of in 30 seconds or so.

I suspect the reasoning of the developers is that priority one should be the attraction and conversion of all the Xing-bats out there, and for this to have any chance of happening, the relative speed of basic LAME must remain the default.

Later on, they can mature to the use of presets and switches.

Regards,
Madrigal