I finally broke down and paid the 19.95 to unlock the LAME encoder. I've been doing a PODCast for a clients project, we talk about the music as it is developed and recorded, and tried to use the LAME encoder. It had sooooooooooooo many artifacts, it was seriously painful to listen to. Unless I encode at 16bit, 128K, it sucked.

I went back to sound forge, which sounds better than the LAME encoder at its highest, at 64 bit. Blows it away at 80. What am I doing wrong or is there another encoder available from Cakewalk for S5 PE?

There is better encoder than Lame - Frauenhof, but I dont think that Cake offers it

The general consensus with mp3 users is that LAME is actually better than Fraunhofer one (at least from my searches in the past)...I guess it depends how you use it, but I have never had any problems with it, although I tend to use VBR encoding with the settings at 64k for the lowest and 320 for the highest; never had any artifacts when doing that. Can't comment on the lower bitrate settings, as I have never had any need to go lower than 128bit.

The Fraunhofer encoder used to be included with Sonar up to and including v3, but since then it has used the LAME encoder...don't know what the reason for the change was.

Yup LAME is a very good encoder - check your settings.

Kind regards

Dave Rich

you might not have lame. It is free you donot need to pay for it.

You need to pay for the LAME encoder that is included with Sonar...it's all to do with some stupid licensing thing that the Fraunhofer Institute impose on anyone selling a product that includes mp3 encoding, as they own the rights to the mp3 standard...the details of this licensing has been covered by someone else on this board a while ago.

The free LAME encoder that you can download from the net circumvents the licensing on some spurious grounds, but cannot be used directly within the export box, only by using the 'bridge' functionality that Sonar has which allows you to use any external encoder...

Again, the LAME encoder is not the one that comes with Sonar. Sonar comes with a trial version of the of the Fraunhofer encoder that you can buy for $20.

You can google for installations instructions for installing the LAME encoder. It's a little involved.

OK. Here you go. You can find instructions for installing the free LAME encoder at:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb05/articles/sonarnotes.htm

or just download winlame. - http://winlame.sourceforge.net

That's what I use - very quick and very good/stable.

Kind regards

Dave Rich

ORIGINAL: zoltar74

Again, the LAME encoder is not the one that comes with Sonar. Sonar comes with a trial version of the of the Fraunhofer encoder that you can buy for $20.

You can google for installations instructions for installing the LAME encoder. It's a little involved.

The cakewalk encoder uses LAME since Sonar 4
The quality increases as you move the slider to the left, smaller number, better encoding.

I've moved it to the highest quality level and if it is below 128, it leaves a lot of high end artifacts. With PODCasts, you try to make them small, because they are 10 minutes long. When I use Sound Forge they sound fine. Not sure what else to do.