LAME Encoder lives up to its Name

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?

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.

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

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

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.

you could try exporting as a wma?

Kind regards

Dave Rich

You paid for a free encoder?

Anyhing less than 16/128 will suck on anything .. but it sucks less on Lame.

Steve

You can use iTunes to encode it to an AAC .m4a file. That will definitely work for a Podcast. AAC will sound better at low bitrates than an mp3. Just go to the Advanced/Importing preferences in iTunes and set it for AAC. Import you audio into iTunes and then right click on the file and select Convert Selection to AAC.

ORIGINAL: joseph.barron

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?

If I understand what you are saying, you are confused. The higher the kbps("bits") the better the sound quality. The tradeoff is that the files are larger with increased kbps. 64 bit is the lowest, not the highest.

I have a couple thousand compact disks, and I decided to rip my entire library. So I spent a fair amount of time figuring this out. Using modern encoders, you might get by at 128, but at 192 you will be very satisfied with the result. Anything less, like 80 is for crude requirements like spoken word. Microsoft even has examples of this on their website.

Yahoo music is distributed at 192. Don't know about Itunes.

MP3 and WMA are more ore less competitive. I ended up using WMA because it is built into Windows Media Player, and I figured it would become a standard like everything else Microsoft.

There is an interesting setting in in Media Player that allows lossless compression with about a 50% file size savings over a Wav file.

How do you install winlame into sonar 5?

I agree... I always encode at 192 if not better if possible... As for an encoder... CD-EX is a free encoder that lets you choose the bit rate and it comes with LAME... it is the easiest encoder I've used and it'll even transfer an mp3 back to wav (why you would do that for listening purposes I don't know... although I have had software samplers that only took wavs and I had soomething I wanted to sample in mp3 format so I converted it to wav and used it...) OH YEAH DID MENTION ITS FREE!!!!!!! Google it... i think its at sourceforge


Mike

The LAME encoder is FREE and even Scott R. Garrigus, or was it Craig Anderton, well one of them wrote an article on how to configure Sonar to use the Lame MP3 encoder. Also, when you upgrade, from an earlier version of Sonar and allow Sonar to copy its settings, the MP3 settings are copied to the next version as well.

Follow these directions:

If you don't want to unlock(buy) the cakewalk mp3 encoder, you can invoke the Lame mp3 encoder directly from SONAR 3, 4, 5. With this you don't need to first export to wav and then encode to mp3. Remember that the Lame mp3 encoder is high quality, open source and free.

Download and install the lame 3.96.1 (STABLE) encoder. ~~~~> HERE <~~~~~
If you want to select your own version of a Lame encoder, download from the ~~~> LAME ENCODER SITE <~~~~

Instructions:
Open SONAR 3, 4, 5 and go to Tools -> Cakewalk Ext. Encoder Config.
In the Friendly Name Field write: Lame Mp3 Encoder.
In the Extension field write: .mp3
In the Description field write whatever you want.
In the Path field write the path where the Lame encoder is located. That is where lame.exe and lame_enc.dll are located. I keep my Lame encoder in my C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Shared Utilities\Lame Folder or (copy and past the extracted zip file to your Sonar shared utilities folder and then when you have to perform this step, click the browse button to find the location.
In the Command Line field write: lame -b 192 -m j %I %O
Press Save button.
Uncheck Keep Wave File.

This will export to a 192Kbps, joint stereo mp3 file. If you want 128Kbps, replace 192 with 128 in the Command Line field. The next time you click on File->Export->Audio in SONAR 3, 4, 5 you'll find 'Lame mp3 encoder' as a type of audio.

Hope this helps,

Peace

Thanks. Very nice instructions. I'll follow them and see if I get better results.

Thanks

I will also figure out what encoder Sound Forge uses.

Just my opinion, but I think lame 3.93 sounds the best.