Thanks, mudgel for posting this!
Hey guys, I know this seems way too complicated, but don't give up, Lame happens to be an excellent encoder that produces very high quality output. It's just a little opaque, having been developed by nerdy Unix people (which I once was.) For most people, the settings you really need are actually pretty simple.
You should create a system restore point before you starting copying files anywhere into the programs subtree. That way, if something gets munged up it's a quick restore to fix it.
First, I downloaded the zip containing the 64 bit binary files. I then extracted all the files and dropped them in C:\Program Files\Lame. Once that was done, I set things up in the external encoding utility dialog:
For Path, I put C:\Program Files\Lame
For the Command Line, I have this:
lame -V0 --tt %T --tg "Rock" --tl "My Awesome Album Name" --ta "My Awesome Band Name" %I %O
The first thing to understand is that the %T, %I and %O names are placeholders for values that Sonar will provide when Lame runs. You can see the various attribute names and their meanings at the bottom of the external encoder dialog.
%T The song title from the the project info dialog
%I The name of the WAV file that Sonar generates when you export audio; this will be the input to Lame.
%O The name of the MP3 file that Lame will generate.
Next are the parameters to control the Lame encoding:
-V is the parameter that specifies the quality setting for Variable Bit Rate. It defaults to 4, and decimal values can be specified, like: 4.51
0 is the highest quality but produces bigger files. 9.999 provides the lowest quality with much smaller files.
Since file size matters very little to me, I use 0, the highest quality setting. 1 and 2 also produce very good output with somewhat smaller sizes. Experiment to see what balance you're happy with.
Next are the parameters that specify how to tag your music file with information useful to the user. You can specify the title, the artist name, the album name, you can even embed an image of your album art in the file. This data is used by music services and media players to show the user.
Note that these parameters start with two dashes "--". They won't work with one. Ask me how I know. The lame settings I use are:
--tt %T - this tells Lame to use the title provided by Sonar. You can also just enter a literal name like, "My Awesome Song".
--tg "Rock" - this tags the genre as "Rock". This comes from a list in the help docs, or you can run Lame from the command line to get a list, like this:
lame --genre-list
--tl "My Awesome Album Name" - the album name. I change this a lot, obviously.
--ta "My Awesome Band Name" - the name of the artist. I also change this as needed.
And that should produce a very good sounding MP3 tagged with useful information about your song. For most of us it's really all we need unless your sending the file to some service with very specific requirements. Whatever those may be, Lame can no doubt do them, it's really very capable.
I hope this helps you!