I am constantly amazed at the unbridled intolerance that is constantly and gratuitously tossed out on the red carpet by experienced music makers IN ALL FORUMS ONLINE, ON ALL TOPICS, not just here....... Harmony Central is particularly offensive in this way......

LOL.... Didn't you know they were all born experts? They didn't start anywhere.......

These threads come and go and there started by users who just dont know what they dont know. Instead of thinking you got riped, you should maybe investigate this more and youll relaize its due to licensing and youll relize that you can get over 20 MP3 encoders for free. Im mean..WTF

FBB , I wasn't an expert till I got one of these



(it's a programming cart / assembler etc.. for the c64)

LOL....... I never had a c64. My first comp was an Amiga 500 which in true FBB fashion I had to pull to pieces to see how it worked. Then got an A1200 and even put a HD in it. 2.5" 20MB - hi-tech or what?

Dabbled in C for a while (for fun !! ) and then I was devastated when the Amiga technology got buried in the big Windoze conspiracy and been stuck with an inefficient OS ever since, although XP was a big improvement, shame it took MS so long to get to where Commodore were before squandering it. I even fired the old Amiga up a few years ago and it still amazed me how swift it was given the spec 20MB Hard drive 68030 chip and a whopping 16MB of memory.

*Eyes mist up recalling fond memories*.......

In fairness to the new users, maybe Cakewalk could have a sticky with the top ten questions that are asked over and over, like scroll lock, rxp player, mp3 decoder, etc...

May could try this as well

http://cwenc.sourceforge.net/

FWIW - I too think it's silly that in this day and age, MP3 export ability is not included out of the box. I use Wavelab to master, and then create mp3 from there, so no biggie for me personally, although there are times when I'd like to cut a quick mp3 right out of SONAR. I'd be willing to bet that 99% + of music created these days ends up as mp3 - at least in addition to whatever else it goes on - and many times exclusively as the end-medium. So hiding behind a "consumer technology" argument doesn't hold water for me. CD's are a "consumer technology" so by that argument ... SONAR shouldn't allow you to burn those either.

Licensing . yeah .. so what? Running a multi million dollar software development department myself, I can tell you that LOTS of things that we use for our software are licensed from other companies. You simply eat it or include the cost if it is an expected feature. If Cake doesn't want to eat it - raise the price $20 and include it is my opinion.

I sprung for the Cake encoder a long time ago and am glad I did. It was simple to install and just works - which is the way I like things to be.

apparently it came with Pro Audio 9.... ive always just entered that serial (which i still have around) and have never had to pay for the mp3 encoder.

I find these forums very interesting and informative. I myself bought the mp3 encoder for cakewalk back in 2005 when I bought cakewalk. I was not aware that there were free mp3 encoders back then either. But if I am not mistaken, mp3 is for compressing the file to send it over the net faster, but it certainly decreases the quality of the file, is this true?
I hope this can be answered without getting my head bitten off....but just in case, "AARRGGHH!!" lol