winLAME, a free and open source utility for Windows that handles batch audio encoding, just announced a major update -- the first update in over 3 years!  Unlike most active open source projects, which typically have very frequent updates, winLAME has been dormant since 2006.  It's good to see that this handy utility is still alive.  winLAME 2009 Beta 1 brings the ability to read ID3v2 tags to and from MP3 files, and some updated encoding libraries.  winLAME supports MP3, Ogg, WAV, WMA, and FLAC encoding.

winLAME is great, but (probably due to the long absence of updates) other utilities have surfaced that serve the same purpose and offer maore features.  Xrecode is a free Windows utility supports MP3, MP4, WMA, OGG, APE, FLAC, WavPACK, AAC, ALAC, and WAV audio. You can convert files one by one or perform batch conversion jobs.  And if you want to encode the same file using multiple formats, you can do that too.  Xrecode can also extract audio from video files.