Sonar 6 and Reaper automation...

[urobolus.com]

Hello again,

I'm currently in the process of setting up my system for to test both Sonar and Reaper to decide which I like best. At this point I've just mostly read things about Reaper and Sonar 6 (I've been using Sonar since 2, but can attest I'm not a 'guru' with it by any means). I like some of the improvements I've been reading about with Sonar 6, mostly cosmetic things.

At this point I'm kind of 'neck-and-neck' between the two but that'll hopefully be determind when I get my DAW re-setup. It seems like Sonar comes with a lot of things that are intriguing, but are also things I could get seperately for Reaper. The stability and, from what I've read, the fact that Reaper uses less system resource, has me leaning in that direction....

Anyway...

I'm reading about this ACT (Active Control Technology) that Sonar has now. It sounds quite interesting. The thing is I'm going to be using a Novation Zero SL, mostly because the LCD screens and the knobs and sliders (good for automating native and some DSP plugs). The Zero SL utilizes its own automapping too though...

Can someone explain the difference between the two technologies? Is Novations similar to ACT. I must say, I find the ability to click on a plug-in window in Sonar, and it automatically reassigns your controller to a template, that comes with ACT sounds pretty f'in cool. Is the novavtion automap similar?

Thanks again for the help!

 

[pipelineaudio]

As far as I can tell, ACT just means that the manufacturer of a hardware device in question gives a crap about its customers and is willing to do what it takes to make it work nice with software. I couldnt find anything unique about it to give it its own name, seems eerily similar to the way Vegas will map plug parameters to an MCU for example

That said, cakewalk has always been really smart about integrating with hardware, and the user created control panels for many devices attest to that.

Also, certain hardware companies are willing to help cakewalk and not reaper. This means Justin has to work out how to integrate these devices himself, with no help from the company and no SDK. Of course he has been able to do this sucessfully in all cases so far, because he really is a kickass coder.

 

[urobolus.com]

As far as I can tell, ACT just means that the manufacturer of a hardware device in question gives a crap about its customers and is willing to do what it takes to make it work nice with software. I couldnt find anything unique about it to give it its own name, seems eerily similar to the way Vegas will map plug parameters to an MCU for example

That said, cakewalk has always been really smart about integrating with hardware, and the user created control panels for many devices attest to that.

Also, certain hardware companies are willing to help cakewalk and not reaper. This means Justin has to work out how to integrate these devices himself, with no help from the company and no SDK. Of course he has been able to do this sucessfully in all cases so far, because he really is a kickass coder.

Thanks for the reply.

From what I can tell the Novation automap and the Sonar ACT pretty much do the same thing (except I haven't read yet that the Novation auto swaps the config depending what VST window is on top). A guy over at the Reaper forum says he is running Reaper with a Remote SL with no problem, so I guess my bases are covered in that direction. Still damn hard to decide whether I want to go with Sonar are Reaper. I just got my DAW back up and running a few hours ago, so tomorrow I'll get a chance to compare the two and check out resource hogging and explore this "limited MIDI" in Reaper I've been reading about and see if and how it effects me.