thanks....I'm kind of a "newbie" though....what exactly is CDex and how do I go about obtaing it!!??

thanks alot....I appreciate the info....I need to visit these forums more often....than maybe I can help someone some day!! Well a guy can dream can't he!!?? LOL!! THANKS AGAIN!!

hey, sorry to resurrect but it seemed more logical than a whole new thread.
i am getting this prompt too. it came up for a while before but then it just stopped coming up. i have exported plenty of tunes into MP3 but now it says i cant and need to do this. all i had to do before was change the bit depth to 16 and it worked fine. am i missing something or has something changed? as i never had it before.
 
edit: never mind, i just checked it out and it was the apparent 30 day free trial i am guessing. though quite why they had to do that i dont know, seems kind of stupid. it would be logical to just leave the encoder as part and parcel but i guess they just want to sting folks for money. going to check out the free ones now. 
what a joke.

Cakewalk has to pay Steinberg a license fee for every mp3 encoder. They pass Steinberg's fee on to the user.
"The business of America is business".
                                 Calvin Coolidge

Pointless really when you can mix down and then use a free stand-alone - I've been using Audacity for ages and it's excellent at what it does and it's free to!  I'll take a high quality mixed-down wav from Sonar and stick it in Audacity and export it as an mp3 adding specific detail. Mp3's are great for sending draft songs via email.
 
I wonder how many of us have actually purchased this mp3 encoder from CW? I would think not too many and subsequently not too lucrative for Steinberg.

I bought it. It was more trouble than it was worth and trying to get it to work right was even worse. As a result, I use a third party solution.

I don't "mind" exactly but I do find this really dumb and clunky.

i am not having much luck with this. i downloaded an encoder called switch but ended up with the same hassles, one week then it blocked all converting unless i paid for it. i tried a few others but i seem to hit trouble with my windows being 64 bit as i get so far and then they just heave up errors and never finish the installation. a couple of them were little more than malware/adware that took a long time to get rid of.
anyone got any recommendations? i would really rather not buy the encoder as there seem to be plenty around, i just cant get them to work. i used to export from audacity as MP3 but i cant get any files from sonar to audacity to do that without them turning into a 5 second screech. 

christofloffer
i am not having much luck with this. i downloaded an encoder called switch but ended up with the same hassles, one week then it blocked all converting unless i paid for it.

 
I suggest you use the lastest LAME encoder (free, opensource, works) which you can run from within Sonar.
See this post for instructions for doing that (links are out of date).  When I went to encode a track, I made some errors filling out the dialog which were quickly corrected with scook's help.  Here's that thread in case you do something similar.
 
The lastest LAME version is 3.99.5 and the 64-bit windows version can be had here :  lame3.99.5-64.zip
 
An older thread that should still be relevant :
 
TUTORIAL: Getting LAME MP3 Encoder to Work With SONAR

I bought Switch, it's pretty useful, just don't do samplerate conversion with it.

wahey, got lame working. took many attempts because i forgot to run as administrator so none of the set up was changed whenever i tried to save. all good now though, straight to MP3 from sonar. if i had run as admin in the first place it would have been done in 10 mins. thanks so much for that, i can finally get back to it again.