Cakewalk Sonar X3

[trimph1]

Yeah. It kind of reminds me that certain sectors of the market will still be feeling the hit from the recession for awhile yet...

But in Roland's case, it was the shock/trauma of X1 that did it...

[LawrenceF]

Yeah. It kind of reminds me that certain sectors of the market will still be feeling the hit from the recession for awhile yet...

But in Roland's case, it was the shock/trauma of X1 that did it...

I guess. It also illuminates the ongoing debate about whether prices are too high or not. It's probably hard to lower prices when you're already losing money, and "just hope" that the new discounted prices result in many more sales and actually make up the losses.

Once you do that, drop the retail price of something, take that gamble, there's no going back. Raising it again would just cause a shit storm.

Actually, that (or something similar) may be why S1 1.0 was priced (listed) where it was. To sell the product at good sales prices while it's functionality rises in apparent value compared to it's list price, while never actually raising the list price.

[dsan@mail.com]

Mmm I dont recall those midi plugins; might be worth looking into.

Ive never seen anything 'lost'. The licensed stuff certainly doesnt always go into the installer for a subsequent version (that'd cost them accumulating license fees) but if its already installed, it continued to work, and it was almost always possible to reinstall it from the older media if you started a clean machine.

If I remember correctly, I think the fx were called SEM, or Style Enhancer. They were produced by Ntonyx, the makers of Onyx Arranger. (What a great program that was! Similar to the now Rapid Composer by Music Developments)

When added to a track you could alter the midi file by introducing CC controllers, pitch, etc., alter the notes in the track and other useful creative actions.

They were an early form of random midi and quite useful actually.

I don't remember which version they were introduced but about 2 versions later they disappeared.

It is possible they still exist in Sonar, I can't say that I have looked for them so really don't know for sure. When I install I install into a fresh folder and don't over write the existing files. Could be why I lost them in version 8 (I think it was this version.)

Same with CAL programs. These though I know can be dropped in from another folder and point Sonar to the location.

I'll look into this when I have some time.

In case anyone is interested, Ntonyx are still around: http://www.ntonyx.com/

Thanks for letting me know about this!

Happy Musiking!
dsan

[satYatunes]

Anyway so this is what we know so far...
Cakewalk SONAR X3 Producer DAW Software NEW Features:
- Skylight Interface enhancements and color customizations
- Craft the perfect vocal performances with Melodyne Essential
- Sculpt your mixes with precision using the new flyout QuadCurve EQ/Analyzer
- Comp multiple takes together instantly for the ultimate performance
- Play vintage piano sounds with Applied Acoustics Systems Lounge Lizard SONAR
- Get authentic drums sounds with the full version of XLN Audio Addictive Drums
- Have a session guitar player with you at all times with AAS Strum Acoustic SONAR
- Fine tune your mixes with the 19 included Nomad Factory Blue Tubes FX
- Get incredible filter and distortion effects with Tone2 BiFilter 2
- Bring back the vintage, warm sound of tape with the ProChannel TapeSim
- Access Vintage-style world-class recording studio reverb with Nomad Factory - BlueVerb
- 58 total FX including the new Boutique Suite
- Improved video support including YouTube export
- Save your projects to the cloud with Gobbler integration
- Full support for VST3 synths and effects

"Sculpt your mixes with precision using the new flyout QuadCurve EQ/Analyzer."
Wow, Finally. This is great. They should have done it in X2 though.

I would like to see what type of improvement is done on "Video support". It was a hassle to use that feature. I participated in a jingle scoring contest and it took me a while to do it in Sonar cause it kept on saying the "Format not supported" while adding video to the project. I tried so many formats but still it didn't display the thumbnails on the track. It was really frustrating and time consuming. Manual doesn't have enough info. Some nice people in CW forum tried their best to help. I finally did the audio in Sonar and later used WMM to merge it with the video. I don't think lot of people use this feature in Sonar.

Apart from some improvements, it looks like a FX shop of third-party plugins now . I hope all are not locked to X3. At least one can use them in other DAW if X3 turns out to be unstable/buggy. I was disappointed when I saw Breverb locked to X2 only. Now, talking about Breverb, I see another Reverb by Nomad, does it mean that Breverb is no more part of X3? (I understand you can still install from the X2 installer). What is this Boutique suite? Are they calling all these Boutique suite or there are additional 58 FX?

[mabian]

"Sculpt your mixes with precision using the new flyout QuadCurve EQ/Analyzer."
Wow, Finally. This is great. They should have done it in X2 though.

* - Rant mode start - *

Come on... it's just marketing fluff... you can sculpt your mixes with precision using *any* EQ out there (and IIRC this very same wording was used when a previous version was launched, maybe talking about ProChannel EQ or so).

How long do we have to hear the same old story over and over? Sigh...

It's not the DAW, it's the skill of who use it. (IMHO of course...)

* - Rant mode end - *

- Mario

[satYatunes]

Well "Precision" part was not my point. I am happy to see the Flyout option for the ProChannel EQ. If they used "Precision" word in the previous versions when there was no Flyout then that was bad because IMHO precision work was impossible in the small size ProChannel display, at least for me. I cannot speak for others.

Your comment about "Skill who use it" was right. So if an EQ is already there then why go looking for another one. But it had to be usable first to do any precision work.

[cryophonik]

Come on... it's just marketing fluff...

Geez, marketing fluff on a Sweetwater product page? WTF. I've NEVER seen that before.

[mabian]

Actually I bet it comes directly from Cakewalk announcement.

- Mario

[cryophonik]

Actually I bet it comes directly from Cakewalk announcement.

- Mario

I'm sure it does. How dare they try to sell us on their new features with fancy marketing hyperbole. Not that it matters. Most of us are going to make a buying decision based on how well the new features actually perform, not the label they're given.

[Daan22]

* - Rant mode start - *

Come on... it's just marketing fluff... you can sculpt your mixes with precision using *any* EQ out there

- Mario

I don't mean to upset you more, but here's another company who uses that same word... And I'm sure there are many more. How DARE they......tsssssss

http://www.uaudio.com/store/mastering/precision-eq.html

[beltrom]

Well "Precision" part was not my point. I am happy to see the Flyout option for the ProChannel EQ. If they used "Precision" word in the previous versions when there was no Flyout then that was bad because IMHO precision work was impossible in the small size ProChannel display, at least for me. I cannot speak for others.

I have the same problem to some extent. So for once "precision" is probably quite accurate in the marketing, compared to current situation.

[LawrenceF]

Not expecting marketing fluff is like not expecting a Grizzly to shit in the woods.

If there's some 12 year kid old out there who'll buy $500 Sonar based on the marketing and blow his paper route money, well... that's how people learn, by making subjective mistakes. I'm not Ralph Nader.

[beltrom]

Well, what do you know. My favourite eq doesn't have precision. Damn!!!

http://www.toneboosters.com/tb-equalizer/

Guess I have to drop it...


Steinbergs had highest precision and superior precision depending on eq...
Must try those...

[careyletendre]

The reason is they are not really great coders at the end of the day.

FYI Noel Borthwick the CTO of the company and active programmer:

Noel's strong interest in jazz has always been juxtaposed to his parallel interest and career in computers and software engineering. He graduated in 1983 from the University of Bombay with a Bachelors degree in Physics and Mathematics, followed by post graduate studies in Computer Science. He started work as a software engineer in the IT space writing financial applications, but soon moved to the more creative computer graphics field, working with pioneering graphics and animation software company, Computer Graphiti in India. He then partnered his own graphics company Delta-T for a brief period, before leaving India for Canada to take on a job with graphics giant Corel Corp in 1994. At Corel, he worked as a lead engineer on the graphics team for CorelDraw for several years. During this time, his interest with software sequencing applications led him to make contact with Cakewalk (then Twelve Tone Systems). His relationship with the company, initially as a beta tester, led to a job with Cakewalk, working on music and digital audio applications. Currently a resident of Boston, Noel is now CTO of Cakewalk, Inc, producer of world renowned digital recording and sequencing software, where he has been a key developer for SONAR since the inception of the product in 2000. He is also a well known developer in the Windows multimedia community, for whom he has contributed articles on the benefits of various operating systems for music production.

Here's a recent post about the new VST3 implementation:

1. The ARA implementation was more natural to do based off VST3. Although Celemony had a VST2 implementation their VST3 layer was better tested and I didn't want to do a huge new implementation based off an older standard. Also I was refactoring large areas of our VST engine for this and it was a good time to make such a change.
2. A few big plugin vendors such as Waves have stopped maintaining their VST2 releases (due to resource constraints not due to limitations of VST2)

My original perceptions about VST3 are still valid after having developed this. While its a more modern API there is virtually nothing that couldn't be achieved by some simple extensions to VST2. I don't fault Steinberg for wanting cleaner API (most developers are hate old designs) but it could have been handled in a more transparent and backwards compatible way than they did it. VST3's object model seems over-engineered to me. I didn't have much trouble getting it but I think many developers will have a hard time with the excessive abstraction in the API's. This and the completely lack of backwards compatibility are the main reasons for its slow adoption. One good thing in VST3 is that the basics like sidechaining are part of the spec so there is slightly less creative interpretation among vendors.

Anyway we have it now and a good side effect of doing it was that I cleaned up a lot of the VST2 and general plugin code as well so it benefits all users. I have written a blog post on X3 VST enhancements that will come out soon.

Now does this sound like someone who doesn't know what he's talking about?

It never fails to amaze me how people can so easily talk shit about others people they don't know.

Carey

[clintmartin]

The Cakewalk forums just went offline. I bet when it comes back we will start to hear another side of the story. I can't wait for X3 it's looking pretty sweet to me.