what settings are you using with lame, and how big are the files? Ive tried lame, and it does sound better, but the files are very large. Any suggestions?

The file size almost entirely depends on the bitrate you choose and should be the same with every encoder. I usually run lame with

lame -V 3 -b 128 -mj -h

This works out as about 160kbps on average (variable bitrate, so it sounds better than 160kbps constant bitrate).

Borislav