I call ffmpeg like -vn -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 -compression_level 0 -cutoff 19500 and the exception is thrown. There's no exception without the cutoff argument, however. I cannot reproduce this behaviour with the lame.exe (v3.100; x64) provided by http://www.rarewares.org/files/mp3/?C=M;O=D