Although Sonar X3 does have embedded MP3 capability, the codec is only available for a short trial period. After that you have to procure the unlock from Cakewalk if you want to use the embedded Encoder. The reason it must be procured is due to licensing issues.

The following video shows you how to install the Free Lame Mp3 Encoder which will give you the ability to Encode MP3 from Sonar X3. It discusses both the 32bit and the 64bit install. Now, it is not necessary to install both flavours. Lame is a "DOS" based command line program that works outside the flavour of the calling program (in this case Sonar). If your computer's Windows OS is 64bit based, you need only install the 64bit variant of Lame. If it's 32bit, well.... (you might consider upgrading hardware) you MUST install the 32bit variant of the Lame Encoder.

This being said, If you are running a 64bit machine using the 32bit variant of Sonar X3, you can still use the 64bit variant of the Lame MP3 Encoder. I prove this in the video by performing 4 Encoding using the 32 and 64bit Encoder in both the variants of Sonar X3


As Lame is 3rd Party and cannot directly access the musical data direct from Sonar, Sonar must create an audio file that Lame can access, then encode. It is important that the Source Format in the External Encoder Configuration Utility be set to WAVE. This will instruct Sonar to create a .wav file for Lame to encode.

Documentation for the Process used in the video is available at

http://forum.cakewalk.com/TUTORIAL-Getting-LAME-MP3-Encoder-to-Work-With-SONAR-m1255631.aspx
which was Written by AdamFH - December 29, 2007

(Document link provided by Seth Kellogg (Cakewalk))

Special Thanks to ShellstaX for helping me through some technical Sonar Plugin issues.

Lame MP3 Encoder Download Link
http://www.free-codecs.com/Lame_Encoder_download.htm
The Current version of Lame at the time of this writing was 3.99.5 (x86 and x64)

Lame Command Line argument

lame -b 48 -m j %I %O


Video of the process...

http://youtu.be/GQH6M5isJBc