Sonar 8 - Producer Edition

DAW software that has all the tools to turn anyone into the worlds next best producer.

May 17, 2009, 06:27 PM

Views: 1689   Comments: 1

Ah Sonar, my secret lover. Whatever you do don't tell me girlfriend! I have been an avid follower of Cakewalk [that are the makers of Sonar] for many years now and started music production using a computer maybe 8 years ago using Cakewalk Home Studio and thanks to my neighbour at the time forcing me to give computer recording a try.

A lot of change has happened since then including the release of Sonar which pushed Cakewalk from gimmicky cheap software makers that you could buy in Best Buy into becoming a major player in the Professional Recording DAW software market being distributed throughout the world to all the major Professional Recording stores. I have stuck to my guns solidly and stood by Cakewalk and Sonar since the moment I started recording and producing on a computer and avidly promote it to anyone asking what recording software I use.

So, when I learned a shiny new review copy of Sonar 8 was on it's way to me I was super excited. In fact, I decided that to give it a full run for it's money to re-wire my entire studio into a new layout just for Sonar 8's introduction into the realm. Since then I have used the software in a monstrous variety of sessions from full bands, to metal bands, to pop, to dance and as can be expected with a software of this type it handled it all fine and was an awesome new upgrade to my studio.....kind of. Although for new users Sonar 8 Producer Edition will be a dream come true, for me I noticed more glitches, more CPU issues etc.


So What's New in Sonar 8 Producer Edition?


From the outset Sonar 8 Producer Edition has a slightly slicker overall look and feel, with the interface looking smoother and the overall graphical representation being improved etc. With any new release there are always new toys under the hood and boxed in. The most notable of these for me was some of the new VST plugins that come as standard. Listed below are the new VSTs I loved and used, what I used them for and why:

• LP-64 EQ - This bad boy has proved really useful and I have found myself using this as my main EQ going forward due to the quality of the sound output from it.
• LP-64 Multiband - Excellent Multiband Compressor that will allow even novices to get mastered mixes at levels expected.
• Boost 11 - Another mastering tool that helps your mixes to achieve the maximum punch and volume.
• TL-64 Tube Leveler - Awesome for adding Tube Warmth to your mixes or too individual entities in a mix.

Also included are shed loads of other plugins, the intention of being a complete studio in a box. I must say the included plugins and instruments are the best I have ever seen, particularly if you get the Producer Edition version of Sonar 8. Everything you could ever need, Amps Sims courtesy of Guitar Rig, shed loads of Reverbs, Compressors, Delays, Mods, EQs, Dynamics Processing etc.

There are also new VSTi instruments included with Sonar 8 Producer Edition aswell including Beatscape, Dimension Pro, True Pianos Amber and all the other VSTi instruments you already would expect and more [full list below]! There is so much packed into Sonar 8 in fact that even a seasoned user such as myself never really touches the surface of what it can do although I am quite an advanced user and use A LOT of the features within it! Future growth for EVERYONE. Woop.

Also a new and major re-working is their audio engine. This new and improved engine allows you to make audio settings changes without having to restart Sonar and it works much better now with multiple applications being open at the same time. The Transport functionality has also been slightly improved and now includes a Pause, Rewind and Fast Forward button and more importantly you can now arm and disarm tracks during playback and recording allowing you to record things pretty much on the fly.

Sonar 8 Producer Edition can also now assign audio tracks/buses to be routed to hardware outputs allowing you to incorporate your rack gear VERY easily although there is still the presence of the annoyance that is Sonar groups ASIO drivers into pairs meaning that if you have an 8 input interface you can only select four stereo pairs. Fix this already!


Full List of Included Plugins and Instuments in Sonar 8 Producer Edition


Plugins and FX
Amp, Tape & Tube Simulation

• Native Instruments Guitar Rig 3 LE
• Amp Sim
• Tape Sim

Dynamics Processing

• Sonitus:Compressor (sidechaining)
• Sonitus:Gate (sidechaining)
• Sonitus:Multiband
• Sonitus:Surround Compressor
• DSP-FX Compressor

Channel Strips, Stereo & Panning

• VC-64 Vintage Channel 1.5 (sidechaining) powered by Kjaerhus Audio
• Channel Tools L/R—sample delay and Panwidth control, MS Decoding
• Sonitus:Surround

Delays & Modulation

• Sonitus Delay
• Sonitus Modulator
• Sonitus Phase
• DSP-FX Delay
• DSP-FX Flanger

EQ

• Sonitus:Equalizer
• DSP-FX Equalizer

Mastering

• LP-64 EQ linear phase mastering EQ
• LP-64 Multiband linear phase multiband limiter/compressor
• Boost 11 peak limiter
• TL-64 Tube Leveler

Reverbs

• Lexicon Pantheon (Studio includes SE version)
• Perfect Space Convolution Reverb powered by Voxengo
• Sonitus:Reverb
• DSP-FX Reverb

Signal Analysis

• Analyst—spectrum analyzer
• BitMeter—monitor digital activity of audio

Synth & Specialty Effects

• TS-64 Transient Shaper
• Z3TA+ FX (synth that can be used as a multi FX unit)
• Roland V-Vocal 1.5
• MPEX Time/Pitch Processor
• Pentagon I (synth that can be used as a vocoder)
• SurroundBridge™ enables any effect as a surround effect

More

• 42 Effects in Producer
• 31 Effects in Studio

= SONAR 8 Producer Exclusive, feature not included in SONAR 8 Studio


Virtual Instruments
Beatscape - New to SONAR 8

• 16-pad looping/performance instrument
• Great for layering and triggering audio clips and creating beats and grooves
• 4 GB of custom-designed loop construction kits

Dimension Pro - New to SONAR 8

• Wavetable based synthesizer
• Electric pianos, organs, basses, orchestral, strings, woodwinds, brass, ethnic, pads/layers, and other real-world instruments
• Over 1500 patch presets, 8 GB of content

• Award-winning piano model designed to transparently integrate with your hands and playing style for even more realism
• 7 model variations
• Reverb and velocity controls
• SONAR customers are eligible for a 30% discount on 4Front TruePianos

Rapture LE

• LE version based on the award-winning Rapture wavetable synthesizer
• Searing synthesized sounds, leads, basses, pads, sequences, and more
• Nearly 200 patch presets, expandable

Session Drummer 2

• Drum and Percussion Sequencer
• Programming multi-layered, realistic drum parts either a la carte or using included patterns
• 4 kits with over 55 drum presets in varying styles: Rock, Swing, Shuffle, Reggae, more

Z3TA+

• Waveshaping synthesizer
• Analog synth modeling, leads, basses, synths, pads, and more—even use it as an FX
• 6 banks, with 750+ patches

Cyclone

• 16-pad groove sampler
• Perfect for drums and other loop-based music
• Load, edit, and trigger your own Groove Clips and ACID®-format loops

Roland TTS-1

• 16 channel multi-timbral GM2 instrument
• Keys, horns, strings, guitars, drums, more
• 256 patch presets, 9 drum kits

Pentagon I

• Vintage analog sounds
• Sound design, all the controls you need to replicate virtually any analog synth
• 6 banks, with 550+ patches

PSYN II

• Subtractive synthesizer
• Bass, leads, pads, more
• 8 banks with 550+ patches

RXP

• REX loops/sample player
• Programming and sampling drums and other pattern/groove based content
• Over 250 MB of REX loops included

SFZ

• SFZ SoundFont sampler
• High Quality band limiting sample-playback engine for SF2 files
• 256 voices of polyphony, unlimited layers per voice

Roland GrooveSynth

• Groove synthesizer
• Genuine Roland® synths and beat boxes including the legendary 808 and 909 sounds
• 30 different instrument categories

DropZone

• Drag and Drop Sampler, REX editor
• Bass, piano, pads, drums, vocals, REX-format loops, and more
• Nearly 300 MB of programs, REX files, and multisamples

= SONAR 8 Producer Exclusive, feature not included in SONAR 8 Studio

As you can see from that exhaustive list there really isn't anything more that could be packed into Sonar 8 Producer Edition without your computer and the whole world in fact exploding! A true studio in a box. Each and every single one of the products listed above is a solid plugin in their own right. Imagine the beauty of Sonar being all the amazing tools, well with Sonar 8 Producer Edition you get a mechanics toolbox worth of useful tools, fx and instruments. An audio mechanics dream.


Why Sonar 8 Producer Edition?


Choosing your DAW software is all down to personal preference. Some people turn their nose up at anything that isn't Pro Tools, Mac Users are all commited to Logic and Cubase has a right royal following. Sadly, in many cases when professional DAWs are mentioned Sonar is not even mentioned.

I am here to try and change that though as everything that I do at my studio (Screamadelica) is produced using Sonar and I am whole-heartedly happy with it even with it's minor flaws and occasional crashes. It does everything I want and more and I can grow with it as my skill-set improves.

Why should you buy Sonar 8? Because when you do, you will quickly start producing quality mixes and will be on your road to making a living out of music production. The only other things as equally important to a recording studios start-up [regardless of size] is good studio monitors, a good mic preamp, a Toneport, a MIDI controller and one good microphone. That is literally all you will ever need to make mixes that are as good as anything you hear on the radio, the only real limit is your creativity because Sonar 8 Producer Edition has all the functionality, FX and Instruments you will ever need (and then some).


Sonar 8 Producer Edition Setup, Use, Bugs and User Experience


Sonar 8 Producer Edition Setup
Setting up Sonar is completely self explanatory although it does take a while to install. Can't moan at that though as it's filling your computer full of audio making goodies! So get the installer started and go make yourself a cup of tea or something. One thing that did come up during my trial of this was the need to get Sonar installed on a Mac to see if the MIDI to audio Latency we were experiencing using Superior Drummer was a PC or a Sonar problem. Turns out the install disc does not contain both versions so once you have bought it for one platform you are stuck with it! How freaking annoying.

Sonar 8 Producer Edition Use
When you load it up for the first time it checks your hardware and gets everything semi setup for you. I had to go in and program my FW1884 Mixer and FE8 Fader add-ons to work with Sonar 8 Producer Edition but that took very little effort. The audio was setup to work right away and as such you could literally start recording within a couple of minutes after install.

I could easily load in and open Sonar projects from previous versions and it appears new Templates have been added to make the Producers life easier. Everything you are used to in Sonar was where it used to be and it looks better generally and comes over more than ever as a serious Professional Audio product. Whenever I create a new project in Sonar I always use the built in Stereo Mastering template because a) it has all the Mastering Effects on the Master Bus and it is setup so that you can mix and add effects all within the tracking window which for me negates the need to use any of the other views 99% of the time.

As with anything, getting used to Sonar is going to take a while but it is definitely worth putting that time aside because once you know it you will be making professional, record label quality, radio friendly mixes in no time. On the other hand basic use of Sonar is pretty self explanatory and if you ain't afraid of clicking and breaking things then you will find your way around it quickly!


Noteable Sonar 8 Producer Edition Bugs
Split Track Annoyance
Whilst producing my first track since the upgrade I noticed my first Sonar 8 change to the basic functionality which I didn't like and that ended up costing me time and having to change the way I approached things. Before, you could select an audio clip, right click, split it into two and it would keep the left side highlighted and not the right. I would use this to place my cursor where I wanted the sounds to begin and then split them and press Del. What was left would be what I wanted and the excess would be removed. With Sonar 8 when you split a clip everything stays highlighted which means you need to reselect what you don't want AGAIN to delete it. REALLY annoying if you are doing a stop start guitar part with 6 or 7 guitars.

Audio Engine
The first bug I noticed with Sonar 8 was, although it claims everywhere that the Audio Engine has been improved for efficiency (including here) that in fact it seemed to not work quite as well for me and all of a sudden my 3.2 GHz Dual Processor with 2 GB Ram started struggling to play and had CPU issues with some of my bigger projects [24+ tracks]. Of note here is prior to upgrading, Sonar 6 played those same files perfectly fine and they didn't incorporate anything new to Sonar 8. Me an my friend kindly refer to it no as C'PISSUES - CPU Issues.

For the regular Joe though this won't be a problem at all but for your Power User [like myself] I did [and still do] find this very annoying. It is of course partially down to my excessive use of Plugins to get the sound I want and I found my best resolution was to get a good mix on, export the WAVs, create a mix version of the same song, import all the WAVs and then carry on, this pulled the CPU down from 90+ percent to about 10 and I found for some songs unfortunately that I had to do this 3 or four times [48+ tracks]. It is important to note when doing this that you should name the new file something different as the bounce down is a destructive edit as in the effects etc can't be removed afterwards.

SONAR TIP: Not sure if this is new with Sonar 8 or not but I have found a speedy way to import multiple audio tracks into a file with ease. Create a New Project, Highlight all the Audio Files and drag them to a space underneath Track 1. This will import all audio tracks and will physically create it all for you. This find has taken my mix import times down A LOT!

Crashes and Unexpected Errors
I also have experienced quite a few crashes/unexpected errors since the upgrade to Sonar 8. Most scary of these meant that it would crash again before it could write the recovery file so, if you were not good with your save finger and versioning that you could potentially have a completely corrupted project with no working recovery file. All that is left to do at that point would be cry probably! Luckily for me this was no worries as I have a great Save finger and am good at versioning.

PRODUCTION TIP: There is nothing more important than saving. You should get into the habit of clicking save just before you do anything and everytime you add a major change or instrument add a version. For Example add a number at the end. This does increase your hard drive usage but for a professional studio losing a project to corruption is not an option.

Save Errors
Another annoyance that kept happening out of the blue and I could never put my finger on why would be a difficulty in saving. Unfortunately I did not write the exact error down but basically at a point it would not allow you to save your file at all as it would show this error. Sometimes bypassing the effects bin would allow a save to be made but other times you couldn't save it at all. This is a MAJOR headache and resulted in A LOT of waste work for me.

Grid and Select Errors
I also found a bug when trying to move audio data between tracks. When working on grid, in previous versions of Sonar even if the file wasn't trimmed it would still stay on grid. In Sonar 8 it would move it off the grid weirdly and the only wy I found to resolve it was to split the audio file at a bar move it up and then expand the audio back out (i.e. drag the missing audio back). Super annoying and apprently fixed in Sonar 8.3.1 which is available as a free update here:

SONAR 8.3.1 Update

A similar grid based issue I found was with trimming groups of audio files. My main reason with sticking with Sonar for this many years is their non destructive audio splitting tool. Basically you can highlight a track, split it and remove the audio before or after the split BUT that audio NEVER gets removed [unless you bounce down or bounce to clip]. What this means is that if you remove something and then later on wish you hadn't you still have it by dragging the audio file back out. I came across a bug when doing this with groups of tracks. Even though multiple were selected you would still have to do the drag ins on each individual track! How annoying.


The Final Mixdown!


NOTE: This is a graphical representation and the hardware shown does not ship with Sonar 8 Producer Edition!!

Honestly I could go on and on about Sonar 8 Producer Edition and I have literally only just scratched the surface. Sonar 8 Producer Edition is a complete recording studio in a box that has a vast array of powerful tools, FX and virtual instruments in one easy to use and inspirational package.

Sonar 8 Producer Edition is intuitive and makes complete sense straight out of the box but is MUCH deeper than meets the eye and holds gems for users as their skills progress [think automation, buses, audio quantization etc].

Sonar 8 Producer Edition is all you will ever need to professionally record, mix and master and that contains the type of instruments and content that will actually inspire you to create new things an try new sounds right within the box, no further purchase necessary.

Sonar release a new version every year. For whatever reason I missed Sonar 7 completely so jumped from 6 straight to 8. At this point regardless of the previously stated minor bugs I would like my final statement to be:


Get My Hands on It Now! [Where to Buy Sonar 8 Producer Edition]
UK, Scotland, Wales & Ireland
Edirol Europe
Studio 3.4, 114 Power Road,
London W4 5PY
United Kingdom
Tel: 0870 350 1515
Web: Edirol Europe Ltd.

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