iOS 7 m4a to mp3 encoding - is it possible?

Question

I've searched through all the internet and didn't find a clear answer on my question - How do you record an m4a file (because as this answer states iOS doesn't support mp3 recording) and later convert it to mp3?

Recording an audio file seemed to be a piece of cake, but then the nightmare began.

It's 2013 around and I haven't found any clear example of this procedure on the web. Some people say you can't do it because of some GPL license. Others suggest to use Apple's examples which never ever mentions mp3 at all! There's also a famous question on SO dating back to 2009 one of the answers to which says -

No difference on iOS: App Store apps aren't allowed to load dylibs.

There's also trouble getting hold of the actual LAME library on iOS - this question's comments read that people have trouble compiling it on iOS 6 and above.

With iOS 7 out in the open I would like to raise the question again - is there any example of a sample project I can find that actually does deal with mp3 conversion on an iOS device?

Note that this question is not a duplicate of the aforementioned questions and is just an effort to clarify things out. Finally it all comes to the one and final question -

Is iOS m4a to mp3 conversion possible?

Answer 1

As far as I could research it - the closest we can get to it is to convert Linear PCM input reordered from the microphone to MP3. It has lots of downsides as of the time of the conversion to the huge size of the .caf file. You can check out the project here.