If your budget or studio runs to high bit‑rate/sample‑rate audio hardware, Sonar Producer 8 is right behind you - in stereo or surround.
The Perfect Space convolving reverb is a total bonus, for example. The Producer Edition, reviewed here, has an amazing collection of free virtual instrument, signal processing and MIDI processing plug‑ins that give real meaning to the term 'added value'. Whether your thinking is loopy or linear, or a mix of the two, Sonar is one of the top choices for PC users making music at all levels, from serious home studio to top‑line professional facility. So I'll just summarise the summary: Sonar is a stable and powerful digital audio workstation that lets you create music using MIDI or audio tracks in the way that suits you. The SOS web site has all that information, and more, courtesy of reviews of every update (see 'The Sonar Story' box), and Craig Anderton's regular workshop articles. It's been eight years and eight updates since the dawn of Sonar, and alas there isn't space to provide a complete overview of the existing features here.
It's not often you hear that in a review. Cakewalk are in there, too: Sonar 8 is not light on visible new features and toys that you can grab with your mouse, but some impressive developments involve new code and new ways of doing established tasks that often work better than before but nearly always use less of your computer's resources. Microsoft are working on getting Vista right in Windows 7, and Apple are planning to ìdramatically reduce the footprint” of Mac OS X with the Snow Leopard release. There's a lot of talk about streamlining in the IT world in general, some of it due to the necessity of creating meaningful operating systems for portable gadgets, and some due to what I hope is plain good sense. They're still doing their own thing, for their customers, and this time around 'their own thing' happens to involve a lot of streamlining and tuning up under the hood. We'll get to the big stuff shortly, but it's worth noting that Sonar's developers have largely looked beyond the extravagant, flashy statement and have eschewed the chasing of the tails of other software. As ever, though, the Cakewalk elves have been beavering away, making what was already a pretty damned fine piece of software even better. This regularity doesn't half make it difficult for reviewers: the "it's the end of the year (as I write this anyway), it must be time for a Sonar update” gambit has been done to death now.
As well as creating some excellent new plug-ins and making operational improvements, Cakewalk have been working hard to make Sonar 8 the most CPU‑efficient version yet.īang on deadline, we have Cakewalk's annual update to their flagship digital audio workstation package.
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