For the sake of curiosity, I tested the evolution of encoding speed of Lame using different versions. To simplify things, encoding is done at default settings (128kbps/cbr). Computer features MMX/3dnow/SSE/SSE2, audio file is about 1 minute long.

Here are the results:

3.20: 3.51s
3.50: 6.49s
3.70: 3.78s
3.80: 3.70s
3.90: 3.74s
3.93.1: 4.58s
3.96.1: 5.53s
3.97: 5.31s

By looking at this, it's clear that overall Lame has became slower over time. We tryed to keep speed reasonable, but as we increased quality our speed optimisations were not enough to compensate for the extra computations.

We had a notable speed decrease when releasing 3.94. In 3.94, we switched our default psychoacoustic model from GPsycho to NSPsytune. NSPsytune was already used (starting with 3.90) when using the preset/alt-preset settings. To have a comparison value, here is the "preset cbr 128" speed of versions prior to 3.94:

3.90 --alt-preset cbr 128: 9.62s
3.93.1 --preset cbr 128: 6.55s

So between 3.90 and 3.97, NSPsytune's encoding time decreased from 9.62s to 5.31s. Not bad at all, but still quite slower than early Lame releases.

May I ask if those ancient builds were obtained from RRW? :)

BTW, I would be very grateful if you could send me anything from yesteryears...

Yes, they are from RRW.

I do not have binaries of older Lame versions, so the oldest easily available one is 3.20 from RRW.
Theorically, versions starting from 3.03 could be build from within VC6, but the major problem is to find source code, as we only used Sourceforge from about version 3.50.

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