Most applications use lame 3.97b2 for MP3 encoding now. Blind listening tests comparing against other audio formats also use it. This version of lame has been around for quite a while - since September 2005. Can we get an ebuild for it in portage? Archive is here: http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.97b2.tar.gz
Thanks, version bumped in portage.