Quote:
So, it's a bug in Lame 3.96.1, when the output is redirected...

The VBR header is at the beginning of the file. But Lame doesn't know what to write in it, until it's finished encoding the file. So on a non-seekable output -- such as a pipe -- it cannot write the VBR header. This isn't really a bug; you're expecting it to do the impossible. Any of the usual "vbrfix"-type programs should be able to add the header as a postprocessing step.

Peter