Sonar 5 is up and running

Middleman

Middleman

Professional Amateur
And I like it.

I won't do a long review and I've posted this elsewhere but what the heck.

These are a few of my favorite things.

The 64 bit engine is very smooth, sounds more like tape than digital. Reverb tails are much clearer and distinct as are cymbals and percussion.

The V-Vocal addition works very well and sounds much better than their demos that everyone, including myself, has been beating up.

The midi editing in track mode is very handy and eliminates the need to open the Piano Roll.

The convolution reverb is absolutely killer and rivals some of my UAD plugs ins. The bad news, it is a CPU hog as they all are. This is really one of the better sounding reverbs ITB that I have heard.

Tonight I play with the various new synths to see if anything is useful.

The realtime wave-view for busses is really handy.

I ran across what I believe is a new option for applying audio efx. You have the option of applying efx to a track or series of tracks and the plug in creates a combined wave file on a new audio track with the plug in applied. Not sure if Sonar 4 had this capability. It might be handy for creating quick drum or guitar submixes and controlling it as an audio track vs. a sub-buss.
 
Awesome!

Can't wait to get it and play with it... I am currently stuck in "Is it here yet?" mode.

I am really interested to hear the changes in the engine. I trust your judgement MM, so it will be interesting to hear the beast in action.

I think the new fx structure you refer to has made it into the feature list to allow you to apply different fx to different clips in a track lane. I didn't know that you could also apply this across multiple tracks - cool!

Thanks for the review - go play more and report back!

What about a null-to-zero test track, S4 vs S5, on the same mix?

Ciao,

Q.
 
I'm fried tonight but will run this tomorrow and report back. It's a good check on the old ears.

I just found the new soundfont player. It is very nice and does a better job soundwise (could be the engine) on my soundfont collection than Livesynth Pro provided. Although once again, that could be tested.
 
Wow, that's good news.

All the more reason for me to save up for Sonar 5. :)

Question: This 64 bit technology thing... can laptops make use of it? Are they even available yet?
 
Middleman said:
I'm fried tonight but will run this tomorrow and report back. It's a good check on the old ears.
Click to expand...

No worries mate - not trying to stress you out, just interested in your perspective.

...besides, if you tell me what your Sonar copy is like it almost makes up for the fact that mine hasn't arrived.

Ciao!

:) Q.
 
MM,

What about the CPU bug? I guess it's just a bug with the CPU meter and nothing wrong with the audio engine right?

Hopefully 5 will arrive soon for me. Some really nice new stuff!

Hmmm, I'm gonna have to pull the DVD drive off my backup PC before it gets here. :o
 
The CPU meter, hmm..

Haven't we been here before? Seems like this was a problem back in V3 or maybe early V4.

The good thing is you can basically ignore it and run Task Manager on the side in Windows to see what is really happening. Once you accept the fact that its bogus information you move along to other things like track icons.

Track Icons are very cool. They have effects icons, every guitar, bass, or drum you could possibly use. They are a little short on the hardware icons but they make up for it with color coded, number coded and letter coded icons to help you create visuals. They are so helpful when you are working on 24+ tracks with multiple sub busses and hardware effects hanging off the project. You can color code the outputs and returns for hardware which is extremely visually handy.

There are these new things called insert templates which I ran across tonight and will play with tomorrow.

Sorry Qwerty, I'm having too much fun to do the phase test. I got home late tonight from the day gig and will make an effort tomorrow to send it along.

I am thinking they did something to the overall bussing engine. My plug ins have seemingly come to life providing more of, well, everything. The glueiness of mixes is just better to my ear. I know, I know prove it. Hey, I could be wrong but something just seems different, better.

Later.
 
Middleman said:
Sorry Qwerty, I'm having too much fun to do the phase test. I got home late tonight from the day gig and will make an effort tomorrow to send it along.
Click to expand...

Hey don't stress about it MM - looks like someone else did the test and reported back a "no difference" result over on the Cakewalk forums.

This has now degenerated into an argument over methodology with a lot of confused information relating to the 32-bit vs. 64-bit mix engines.

So don't worry about the test - just have some fun and post us up a song when you are happy with something!

Ciao,

Q.
 
Well, since you guys brought up the 32 vs 64, can anyone tell me the drawbacks to running Version 5 on a stout 32 bit machine? What don't you get or what sort performance degredation might we experience?
 
OK, here is my theory on the possible differences in sound. Even if the files sum to zero, which is actually expected because I recorded my original tracks in Sonar 4 and even thought they sound different in Sonar 5, you would expect the math thus the phase test to result in zero. It's the same file and thus, unless 5 is doing math differently they would sum to zero.

This may have nothing to do with the interaction of the program with the soundcard driver which is outside the math of wave files. If they have improved the data path, meaning are communicating the available wave file data in a more efficient manner through your soundcard then you could be hearing an after the fact result of a better data path. The file data is just being represented better sonically than in the past. But the data has always contained a high quality although not communicated efficiently through the sound driver.

If the sound quality you hear cannot be transferred to a higher quality data file all is for naught. Or in other words you may be hearing things better but a file produced from your efforts is pretty much the same as Sonar 4.

Another procedural problem is the fact that 4 tracked all the original data. You are asking 5 to use the same procedure (if no code changes have taken place in the summing) and thus the procedure will always sum to zero.

However, if you tracked simultaneously 4 and 5 on two different machines at the same time, using the same source, you may just find that 5 does a better job of capturing the data and could produce a sonically improved wave file from the same source. Just speculating here I can't prove this theory.

Just some food for discussion. I don't think the sum to zero test can prove or disprove an audible perception that 4 and 5 sound different unless Cakewalk states that the program to audio driver link has remained static from one version to the next.

The holy grail of course is that if the audio experience is better, can I create a file that reveals that improved experience and can be shared with others?
 
Last edited:
Middleman said:
The holy grail of course is that if the audio experience is better, can I create a file that reveals that improved experience and can be shared with others.
Click to expand...
One can make an argument that a mix that "sounds" better in Sonar could actually be counter-productive to producing a better final mix.

Wasn't the theory behind the Yamaha NS10's that they sounded soooo bad, if you could make a mix that sounded good on them, it was guaranteed to sound great on anything else?

Anyway, the real question I guess is not better sounding, but rather is it more accurate, does it provide a truer representation.
 
This is exactly why I didn't upgrade from 3 Producer. The upgrade cost from 3 OR 4 is exactly the same. Now I have to weigh if this is worth it to me, or if version 6 will be soon enough and have more. I still really enjoy v3 Producer.

I hate upgrades.

H2H
 
Hard2Hear said:
This is exactly why I didn't upgrade from 3 Producer. The upgrade cost from 3 OR 4 is exactly the same. Now I have to weigh if this is worth it to me, or if version 6 will be soon enough and have more. I still really enjoy v3 Producer.

I hate upgrades.

H2H
Click to expand...

Me too... Cakewalk has always done that. That's why, w/ the exception of Sonar 1, I've always skipped one version. The track folders thing from V4 is very cool, something I've wanted for a long time. I'll probably upgrade to this versoin once they've released a few fixes..

A
 
Hard2Hear said:
This is exactly why I didn't upgrade from 3 Producer. The upgrade cost from 3 OR 4 is exactly the same. Now I have to weigh if this is worth it to me, or if version 6 will be soon enough and have more. I still really enjoy v3 Producer.

I hate upgrades.

H2H
Click to expand...
If Sonar 3 works fine for you and you aren't interested in the new features, don't upgrade.
 
Aaron Cheney said:
The track folders thing from V4 is very cool, something I've wanted for a long time.
Click to expand...

Is it different from the track folders in S3P?

I don't have things against new stuff, just I bought v3 and less than a month later they said 4 was coming out.

I was just sayin I'm sorry for the guys who upgraded from 3 to 4 and now 5. They're paying an extra $200 that I'm not by going straight to 5.

H2H
 
Hard2Hear said:
Is it different from the track folders in S3P?

H2H
Click to expand...

You can organize tracks into common groups so yes it is different. I don't believe 3 had this but its not on my machine anymore so I can't check it out. It makes it great for muting groups of tracks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top