Why does Cake want me to switch to protools?

I have been a loyal cakewalk customer for many many years. Today i tried using my x2 to create an mp3 file and it says I need an encoder. I purchased that long ago yet my option only option is to go to cakewalk.com. Cant find it on the website, navigation is impossible. cant call support they stopped tele support. it seems my option is to make an appointment. Thanks for mega unwanted hassle. I guess its finally time to switch. Thank you for letting me know you have gone from outstanding service to junk. Thank you for the heads up on switching programs.

If you want the activation program added back to your account and cannot use the first process described in the link I provided, you will need to send email using the URL near the bottom of the link.

For whatever the worth - folks with account purchase history merging issues have finally been catching up to within a day or a couple of days when you email the folks supporting that - again it is my recommendation that you DO email them with whatever serial numbers and products you have info on - and they can and will get your account history properly propagated to your current account.
 
A few days back a friend of mine sent in HIS account purchase history - being in the SAME situation as yours, where he had old prior accounts/emails and such - and in literally a handful of days at MOST, his current account had all of his prior history properly merged.
 
SOOOOO - I believe you CAN get your prior purchase of the encoder associated with your current account, and can get that whole issue resolved pretty quickly and painlessly - certainly so, when compared to completely dumping Sonar for Pro Tools.
 
And - it is NOT Cakewalk squeezing extra money out of folks for the encoder.  Someone not connected to Cakewalk developed it, and entered into a license agreement with Cakewalk to get that licensing fee.
 
And there are multiple existing threads that describe how to configure one of the freeware MP3 encoders to work directly from Sonar - I suggest you use Google Search to look for them, using search terms like:
 
site:forum.cakewalk.com mp3 lame encoder manual configure Sonar
 
I actually ran a search using the above terms and it returned 108 results, and here are the links to the first few of them:
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/1255631
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/1922300
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/1426529
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/2745061
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/1568355
 
Most of the above threads will likely contain someone's complete description of the steps to manually incorporate an external freeware MP3 encoder into Sonar's export audio processing.  I will leave it to you to review any of the above, or other links from the search results, or to simply send the email to the store support folks and not have to do any of the manual encoding.
 
You should now have at least a couple of ways to address/resolve your issue with MP3 encoding in the Sonar export audio dialog.
 
Bob Bone