I was really down on Cakewalk since the ProAudio ver 4.xxxx or so days. Never could get it to work in a stable way. As I got into a situation that I wanted to find a software that I could do multitracking with, Cakewalk and Sonar didn't get much consideration because of past experience. I respected Cake for midi and used Cakewalk Express Gold extensively for it but was looking to other sources for audio sequencing.
About a year ago wandering around Staples I seen
the Music Creator 2002 package for 29.95. It looked like the Sonar demo I had looked at briefly but never spent much time with. I can't usually get the feel for a product if I can't save something in it. Don't like to spend time on stuff I'm gonna throw away. So for the few bucks and the ability to save I figured what the heck.
Basically it was a somewhat watered down version, but not enough to not beable to appreciate it's power. First off, the audio engine was nothing like the bad experience I had years earlier. I basically had the midi capabilities of Express Gold, I could do 8 real-time effects and a half dozen real-time midi effects, and on my system the whole thing was tight and really really stable. I'm just a simple country/folkisk songwriter and for a mere 30 bucks I was pleased beyond no end.
I upgraded to HomeStudio Xl, bought the Cake FX2 and FX3 and the experience was only more satisfying.
HS did have a few quirks but nothing drastic. The most common for me was when I copied and pasted midi events in another part of a track and then tried to draw in the controller pane a whole bunch of unrelated note from hell would appear in this pasted section. I'd just undo it save it and shut down and restart and it didn't do it no more. This is something that might have happened 1 in 25 times I copied and pasted like this. I generally don't build midi tracks in a cut and paste manner so for me it was no big deal.
For a simple songwriter I still felt I had one heck of a system for minimum bucks.
Last week I got
my Sonar 2.2 (not XL) upgrade. As much as I liked HS.... there's a night and day difference. Not so much in capablilties which are drastic in themselves but in performance and how Sonar reacts to the tweaking I've done on audio parameters. This thing is purring on my system.
Matter of fact, yesterday after almost two years of loading and trying every musical software under the sun, I wiped my OS drive clean, reinstalled the OS and reinstalled only the software and plugs I've come to regard my bread and butter stuff and I'm humming.