What does LAME text does in MP3 file?

Question

I see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3 that MP3 file consists of MP3 headers interchanged with MP3 data. MP3 header consist of few bytes.

But here is my MP3 file dump with ID3 tag cut. Header is highlighted with blue.

You can see that "LAME3.96" text is highlighted with green. What does it does there? Is this a part of MP3 elementary stream? Or this is the part of some headers I didn't tag?

Answer 1

LAME is an MP3 encoder , which is a program that takes an uncompressed audio source and outputs a compressed MP3. That piece of text there just indicates that the file was compressed using the LAME encoder. According to the LAME SourceForge page , the latest version is 3.99, pretty close to what you got inserted into the header of that file.

So don't worry, nobody tried to insult your MP3 file! :P