This explains a lot about Cakewalk/Sonar

[dburns]

Well, I love it.

No, I hate it.

But, really, I love it.

J/K I hate it.

What am I talking about?

Does it matter?

Any way you look at it, mine is better.

[mrcleats]

Maybe this is worth its own thread ... what if someone made a daw which included no bundled effects or instruments, with the devs' brainpower continually focussed on making an uber-stable, inuitive, non-flakey host / mixer, which can deal over time with all / most of the tempermental plugs, and solid audio and midi editing tools and routing?

Once it had proven itself in the wild, I for one would flock there like a hot potato. I already have all the VSTis and FX I'll ever need. I don't need a high-maintenance platinum-haired playboy bunny who changes her look each month; I need a solid, stodgy Slavic wife with massive calves and forearms to help with the harvest, year after year.

WIll someone else say the "R" word, c'mon Evil Dragon are you around? Don't make me be the one, not in a thread with hibidy (the Grant Shapps of KVR) and Theo (a good guy, but not exactly Reaper's biggest fan) abroad.

Ah, balls to it, I'm going to say it - Reaper. There!

Ok, yeah, some bundled legacy effects. but nothing distracting from the dev's brainpower, the sequencer bits get more or less all the focus.

I feel better now.

[Grizzellda]

I messed with MuLab for around 15 hours over two weeks. Found a lot to like, actually, until... I wanted to loop playback while adjusting a volume envelope which spanned the looped range. Very basic editing capability. Couldn't figure it out. Wrote the dev, whose answer seemed kind of off, veering immediately into the topic of loop creation. I was going to follow up when I hit the Waves / Nectar problem, a show-stopper, so didn't bother.

I hear you. My point is that Jo is always listening to users, and pretty responsive. But he's just one guy, and there is alot of stuff going on with developing a DAW.

You could try talking to him again about it...or...look for new DAWs!

[lingyai]

Maybe this is worth its own thread ... what if someone made a daw which included no bundled effects or instruments, with the devs' brainpower continually focussed on making an uber-stable, inuitive, non-flakey host / mixer, which can deal over time with all / most of the tempermental plugs, and solid audio and midi editing tools and routing?

Once it had proven itself in the wild, I for one would flock there like a hot potato. I already have all the VSTis and FX I'll ever need. I don't need a high-maintenance platinum-haired playboy bunny who changes her look each month; I need a solid, stodgy Slavic wife with massive calves and forearms to help with the harvest, year after year.

WIll someone else say the "R" word, c'mon Evil Dragon are you around? Don't make me be the one, not in a thread with hibidy (the Grant Shapps of KVR) and Theo (a good guy, but not exactly Reaper's biggest fan) abroad.

Ah, balls to it, I'm going to say it - Reaper. There!

Ok, yeah, some bundled legacy effects. but nothing distracting from the dev's brainpower, the sequencer bits get more or less all the focus.

I feel better now.

Nice try, you old rascal!

No, I said able to handle ornery plugs (Reaper can't handle Waves, I understand), proper editing tools (lacks a staff view, correct?) and most importantly, intuitive to use. That's a personal thing; in my case, the 10 days or so I spent with Reaper around three years showed me it wasn't intuitive at all, at all, at all.

As in, made me want to find the museum where Edvard Munch's "The Scream" is kept, take a running leap *into* the scene like a magic looking glass, and keep running, hair on fire, until I vanished from sight.

"Intuitive if you just invest some weeks in a foreign way of thinking" to me is not intuitive.

Folks who like Reaper I'm sure are great people, who live, laugh, and love just like the rest of us. If Reaper makes them happy, cool. I might even go so far as to say they deserve the same legal rights as anyone. But can we not make this a Reaper thread, please? Mwah!

Here's something else perhaps worthy of its own thread -- whether the notion of the single "big tent" DAW which Does It All is just a mirage. For years I've had to pragmatically shuffle stems, FX presets etc between Cool Edit Pro/Adobe Audition, Sonar, Acid, MuLab, Studio One v2 and Mixbus because there was always some problem with one which kept it from becoming Mama.

Maybe that will never change, and accepting it now would save me money; more importantly, the time invested in learning a new DAW and pouring project hours into it; and most importantly, loads of stress and buzzkill, because spending time getting up to speed with yet another saviour candidate which dead-ends for some reason or another just ... bums me out no end.

I can foresee keeping my present version of Sonar, at the very least, as a certain kind of stem creator -- I love its comping and melodyne workflow, but using something else for editing and mixing -- leaning towards S1v3, even though nonessential but awesome-if-it-works features like scratchpads do not seem to be quite ready for prime time, judging by Presonus forum posts.

[mrcleats]

Fair enough (not sure about the Waves/Reaper thing, I haven't got a load of Waves stuff but what I have works fine). So, ok, on topic, Sonar's a good product nowadays - I'd agree that the way X2 was handled was a mess, yes it should have had more bug fixes - but, frankly, a lot of other previous versions of various DAWs were a mess too. What I don't get is why Sonar seems to carry its legacy more than the others. Especially as the company has since changed hands and is clearly on a completely different trajectory than X2 days.

Platinum is pretty bloody impressive, but if people ask on here about it, they just get the same old irrelevant nonsense about previous versions - I just don't see that it's helpful.

I also don't have any issue with the forum, sometimes it's helpful, sometimes not so much and sometimes it gets stupid. Y'know, it's a forum, sometimes some people on forums are dicks....you can do your own punchline here!

[ObsoleteAcc99]

Well, overall, I do feel that a big part of the deepness of Sonar is the amount of bloat it now has. Every update has seen an additional something added to the program.

It would be great if the problem of stability was dealt with before throwing more stuff into the mix

Agreed
The basic DAW itself is very much legacy software with bits bolted on IMHO.
There are issues to be addressed rather than bundling more third party stuff with it.

perfectly put.

[Otherworldly]

Platinum is pretty bloody impressive, but if people ask on here about it, they just get the same old irrelevant nonsense about previous versions - I just don't see that it's helpful.

Haven't you read every single post in this thread? I won't blame you if you haven't . . . this topic goes on and on because fanbois are jumping in 'repeatedly' replying intolerantly, which is not helpful. As for Sonar X3 Platinum, it's not only about the latest version, it's also about other numerous disappointing factors as I had explained earlier. I shared my experience honestly based on years of experience with Cakewalk. I have moved on 'recently' to other hosts such as Cubase, which is my main go-to DAW, and I couldn't be happier. If you prefer to stay with Sonar then I respect your choice, that is certainly your prerogative

I also own Studio One and Live, long before I moved on from Sonar. I have always use Live occasionally for hacking audio segments, and for investment reasons I'm hanging on to Studio One because it's moving in the right direction to what I want. As for Cubase Pro, its better than I expected.

I've shared my in-depth experience earlier, now it is time to move on.

All the best!

(Note: Post edited to correct a typo)

[excessional]

Sonar X3 Premium? That never existed.
Sonar X3 Professional was the flagship edition from about 3 years ago until about a year ago, since which time it's being Sonar Platinum.

I've been using Plat for several months and other than an issue with an out of date Synthmaster vst (which a delete and reinstall of Synthmaster fixed) I have had exactly zero crashes under either win 8.1 or 10. It runs fine on an i5 laptop just using Asio4all with no noticeable latency, so it's not even much of a resource hog.

Sonar in general is a bit complex and doesn't have the most intuitive workflow, but anyone who is using Plat couldn't genuinely think anything other than it's the best Sonar yet.....

It's noticeably faster than the older versions as well.

[RockinMillie]

Hi RockinMillie,

Earlier I saw an unintentional error. Thanks for editing it out.

You're very welcome.
Sorry about that, I can't help it, I'm blonde (well blonde-ish)

not in a thread with hibidy (the Grant Shapps of KVR)

Perfectly put, but only us Brits would appreciate that simile. I do love scouse humour.
BTW he's resigned (Grant Shapps that is)

Sonar in general is a bit complex and doesn't have the most intuitive workflow

I think that this is spot on. It's probably more than a bit complex.
To step into the real world: Some people can make Sonar work well for them, some can't.
My personal experience was, as I said before, that I needed to RTFM to resolve the issue I was having.
Who knew that there was even a buffer setting for disk I/O for the DAW ? None of the other DAWs I used have this feature.

It's horses for courses and everybody is different, with different computers. If Sonar was completely unusable, Cakewalk would have been out of business long ago.

(* edited 3 times because I'm blonde).

[RockinMillie]

dupe

[Dúnedain]

In the past when I was still using Sonar I was a frequent visitor of the forum and I must say most forum members were always very helpful, so I never had any issues with them.

[Akanishta]

Sonar now is a lot different than it was a year or two ago. There were a ton of issues with X2 and X3, but since they moved to the monthly releases, it's been great. X3 used to be pretty unstable on my machine and I spent the first few months of this year demoing other DAWs to see which I could move to, but I'm pretty happy with all the fixes they've been doing. Stability is a lot better, the track routing changes were a nice feature, the expanding insert window was awesome, and two patches ago they finally addressed the Waves incompatibility issue, and in the last patch, they fixed the Metric Halo incompatibility problem. The only plugins that still have issues that I know about are with URS, and how NI Replika will corrupt session files.

And I agree about some things that were mentioned about staff view. If you're composing a large arrangement, you most likely aren't using Sonar for it, you'd be using Sibelius and just exporting each instrument as separate MIDI files and importing those to individual MIDI tracks in your DAW. Sibelius is also a ReWire device so you can load it right into your DAW.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

Maybe this is worth its own thread ... what if someone made a daw which included no bundled effects or instruments, with the devs' brainpower continually focussed on making an uber-stable, inuitive, non-flakey host / mixer, which can deal over time with all / most of the tempermental plugs, and solid audio and midi editing tools and routing?

Once it had proven itself in the wild, I for one would flock there like a hot potato. I already have all the VSTis and FX I'll ever need. I don't need a high-maintenance platinum-haired playboy bunny who changes her look each month; I need a solid, stodgy Slavic wife with massive calves and forearms to help with the harvest, year after year.

WIll someone else say the "R" word, c'mon Evil Dragon are you around? Don't make me be the one, not in a thread with hibidy (the Grant Shapps of KVR) and Theo (a good guy, but not exactly Reaper's biggest fan) abroad.

Ah, balls to it, I'm going to say it - Reaper. There!

Ok, yeah, some bundled legacy effects. but nothing distracting from the dev's brainpower, the sequencer bits get more or less all the focus.

I feel better now.

You are right, i really dislike it, but honestly my bashing of it stopped ages ago. The last time i ever dissed reaper on purpose was calling it "creeper" at the PUF once, and that forum has been closed for ages.

Seriously i realise it is mega powerful and i have been so stubborn in trying it 20 times to this day, all different versions, and it always does my head in when i need to do the more complex stuff. Playing audio and basic midi i am fine with but I can't get to the heart of it nor even get through the options LOL! And even with every skin imaginable, i must have tried 30 of them, i couldn't click with it.

So yes, i am not a fan but please don't think i am like the old days of tearing reaper apart. I respect quite a few individuals i know who swear by it here at KVR and also people i know at home. I will only ever give an honest and totally subjective opinion of it but in the fashion i just did above, with an explanation.. no purposeful nastiness i promise

Even though I also had nothing but issues with cakewalk, i am still happy to recommend it to people (to try the demo of course first) cause i know the automation timing is rock solid as is PDC and multicore usage. So the core is very strong and it is very feature rich

[ObsoleteAcc99]

PS mulab is missing fundamental core stuff IMO.. i believe multicore is only a recent addition and there is still no PDC to speak of.

[Jace-BeOS]

Jace, I've always found your posts to contain some of the more rational, intelligent, and well-stated arguments here, while avoiding ad hominems, name-calling, a berating tone, etc. I.e., a breath of fresh air.

Thank you for that kindness. I do get a bit intense over some of this stuff.

Sonar 2 XL was my first "real" host, purchased as a graduation from Voyetra Digital Orchestrator, a pure-MIDI platform that could drive the soundfonts on my Soundblaster but had no plug-in support.

Oh hey, me too! Actually, I went to Sonar 2 XL from Cakewalk Pro Audio, and I seem to remember using a version of Digital Orchestrator Pro that had basic audio track capability. It came bundled with a Pinnacle Multisound Studio sound card. It was a brief detour away from the SoundBlaster/Cakewalk partnership. The detour ended because the developers of the card couldn't be bothered to provide the software that provided the primary function of the built-in sampler and sample RAM features promoted on the box (until the product was exiting the market for failure to thrive, and no wonder why). Then it was back to Creative's cards and Cakewalk.

I guess many PC musicians are apt to have taken similar paths, seeing what was available to us on the non-pro-studio budget.

I bought Cubase almost on a lark to see if it might "click" better. I found it confusing and unintuitive and so shelved it for a few years while I puttered around with Sonar, still finishing very little.

Same again for me. I never did get used to it though, and it was crash prone on Mac OS, leaving me no ability get used to it. I was making a huge shift from one platform to the other at the time, so I barely tried it on Windows. I only just recently removed it from my Snow Leopard music boot drive, after letting it crash on me once more. Waste of money I didn't have. At least I learned my lesson sooner there.