No, no. Don’t get your shorts in a bunch. I don’t have any insider info, or a leak or anything.

But my half-abstracted mutterings of the other day, I made a bunch of vague criticisms of Sonar in regards to future of the program. While my speculation came primarily from a grass-is-greener place and not any measurable dissatisfaction, the estimable Peter Kirn of CreateDigitalMusic reasonably wondered what specifically I am finding lacking in Sonar, and where I’d like to see it go with this next supposed version.

So, let’s see…

• ACT (Active controller technology): This is one of Sonar’s biggest “almost there” features. You’ll notice if you watch the promo videos for this feature they always use a particular Edirol controller. Since Edirol is a Cakewalk partner it looks pretty slick, with a nice GUI and and a nice easy handshake between controller and DAW. But I don’t have an Edirol controller. And working with the ACT interface that controls the 95% of the controllers out there is pretty kludgy. In Cake’s effort to make it simple for us musicians, they left out a deeper level of control that doesn’t involve some digging. 75% of the time it works pretty great; it’s that other 25% that’s a bitch.
• Track presets: As I have been trying to “optimize my workflow” I’ve been setting up a bunch of track presets. They’re great: setup a synth you like, or a chain of plugins that has that certain something, complete with folders sends and buses, and call it back up with a few mouse clicks. Sweet. But these aren’t effect chains per se, so if you have an already recorded track it takes a little juggling to make that work. And it doesn’t include buses, and that would be handy.
• Better asset management: That “Audio Pool” feature in Logic sounds awful handy. How about being able to audition MIDI clips? Come on, admit it, the “Clean Audio” utility is pretty long in the tooth.
• Windows… sigh: Come to think of it, some of the modal windows could use a little bit of buffing. It’s pretty apparent there’s at least a bit of legacy code in there that, while perfectly functional and not entirely essential, could stand to be upgraded. And a lot of vst plugins that are more vertical than horizontal (like a few of the fabulous Bootsy plugins) can end up with a swath of dead window space Sonar fills up the Window bar with it’s functions. There’s got to be a more elegant way.
• I refuse to believe that video can’t be improved. I haven’t used it in a while, but last time I tried it was pretty easy to get the video stream to stutter and fall over, even some rudimentary editing, cuing features would be helpful.

Anyway, I’m getting picky. I’m really not that much of a bitch.

I’m sure I’ll think of something later on. So this is subject to revision.

Here’s the big thread at the Cakewalk forums from a lot people who a.) possibly use Sonar a lot more than me. b.) mostly spend more time on the forums than I do.

I was, this morning, pondering the fates of DAWs and my use of them. On one hand, I have a working setup and no desire to upgrade seriously; I’m not getting paid for this and I just want to make some music already. On the other, there may come a point where I want change my mixing or in/out structure, want to take advantage of some new technology, or I’m just sick of whatever bugs are getting in the way of making said music.

More or less my DAW fate will be dictated by what Cakeland¹ decides to with its product line.

If they upgrade Sonar 8 in such a way that it deals with some of the programming deficiencies, without loosing what works, I’ll certainly stick around with it; if they figure out what to do with Project 5, I’ll stick with that.

If they drive Sonar off the cliff, the question becomes what will I use for tracking, editing, and mixing? If they finally admit that they’re not going to anything with Project5, then what?

Live is all the rage and I’m sure and it’s a good VST performance host. But I personally have no conception of recording audio tracks into Live. I mean I know you can do it, but more, will it work for me?

I once again looked at the Reaper screenshots, and, yeah, I just can’t get behind that GUI. I know it’s skinnable and all, but there’s just something about the core aesthetic that I find ungainly. I’m sure if I used it and got used to it it would be fine, and I could strip it down, but why is everything so wide and squat?

So, like a lot of my musings, this is all academic. Cakewalk provides everything I need right now, I’m used to working with it, I’m rededicating myself to taking advantage of shortcuts, templates, fx-chains and using it efficiently. I don’t need/particularly want to drop vast sums money and time into my DAW. The occasional new plugin or soundware. But, I’m really beginning to like the idea of using last year’s tech. There’s just the whole, “if it breaks” thing.

^{1Cakewalk + Roland= get it? Yeah, it’s dumb.}

I know it may seem redundant to purchase an application that more or less replicates a lot of built-in functionality for a program, but if you’re a user of Cakewalk’s Sonar or, especially, Project 5, you will probably be well served by Agitated State’s forthcoming MenuMagic v1.0.

MenuMagic extends your control over plugin organization in both of Cakewalk’s flagship sequencers in just about any way you might care to have them extended, from global renaming to cross-application synchronization to intelligent categorization and beyond.

This has been in development for quite a while – I think it was first announced shortly before Sonar 6, and to be honest with you, not only had I forgotten about it, once Sonar got the plugin manager I thought it would probably go away.

Fortunately, it did not. The built-in Sonar plugin manager is quite handy, but even it has its limitations. This appears to address most, if not all, of those.

What really sold me on this is that it takes care of a major oversight in the Project 5 v2.5 update. Hey, swell, we got the plugin manager, but for some odd reason there is no plugin organization in the program itself. Being that the primary focus of Project 5 was as a softsynth studio this is a rather bizarre omission. And since that update was, what, a year ago? one wonders if once again Cakewalk doesn’t really have any idea what to do with the program and that sooner or later, when they milk the last few dollars from it, they’ll retire it for good. Which leaves one wrestling with absurdly messy plugin management.

Anyway, MenuMagic will now take care of this, one of my two biggest gripes about the program (non-configurable hardware outs being the other; seriously, if I’m not using outs I should be able to not have them cluttering up my workspace). So even if/when Cakewalk lets Project 5 wither on the vine I’ll be able to squeeze a few more years of life out of it.

And now is the time to act. Agitated State is extending the pre-release price of $24.99. Which is about the perfect price for such software.

Surprising absolutely no one, but pleasing nonetheless, Cakewalk have polished their shoes for NAMM and released a new patch for Sonar. A great set of fixes and some nice additions to the step-sequencer.

What’s especially interesting is you may probably will be able to use one of these.

You know, provided Euphonix write some solid Windows drivers and keep up with production. But it does seem poised to make Mackie Control users feel very inadequate.

Loudness wars aside.

This morning I decided I’m no longer going to refer to my final stage before burning to CD or ripping to MP3 as “Mastering.” Cause really, what I’m doing probably in no way resembles mastering. It’s “Finalizing.” Yeah, that makes sense.

Someday, I look forward to actually getting a finished CD mastered by someone who knows what they’re doing, has a good acoustic space, and won’t squash the crap out of it.

Until that time I do it myself. (Right now I’m looking forward to finishing a CD.)

For a long time I’d brought my bounced 2-bus mix into SoundForge and worked from there. I’ve always mixed low so I always have a fair degree of headroom in which to work. Using the plugin chainer I would run the wave through Vintage Warmer+GlissEQ+dbMasteringLimiter – though I’d switched to iZotope Ozone mastering limiter included with version 9.

But with the new version of Sonar, I’ve set up a much more flexible finalizing template. I can having two tracks of different mixes running through 2 busses that I can mix and match, so I can play with different DSP chains. To be honest, I pretty much run it through the same sequence; though I’m using the new Boost10 included in Sonar which is a really great plugin. Plus Sonar has great dithering options. And with my new Sonar-template setup I can run all kinds of eye-candy and tools – VintageMeter, analyzers, and now this.

Ozone has an option for killing intersample overs, but as quickly as I gained that knowledge I it became unavailable to me as it’s tied to SoundForge. So this will slot in nicely to my new finalizing template. So, yea! for SSL for this nice freebie. And some day I’ll have the resource to get one of these.

Cheers to AI for the heads up.

There had been this one glitch that had crept into my audio production that I had been working around for months.

In Sonar 6 certain plugin went missing from plugin menus. So we had gotten this great plugin manager but I was losing menu access to a lot of my favorite plugin instruments. I first noticed with microTonic, a synth I use a lot. I could see it in the list of installed VSTs, and I could add it to the menu editor. But in the actual menu they just weren’t showing up. Oatmeal & V-Station were two others I know of off the top of my head that went MIA. I could get to some through track templates (yea for remembering to create them), but some were apparently lost. to Sonar. I was hoping 7 would be the magic number and it would all be good. Nope.

And not only that, there were a lot of ghost plugins showing up in the Sonar plugin manager and SoundForge, listed weirdly, some of which probably dated back to when I was using the fxpansion VST wrapper.

Yet I was hesitating going back to a completely blank slate, wiping the system and buiding from scratch. Why? A lot of reasons I suppose: because it would have been tedious reinstalling all my plugins – digging out installers, updates – not to mention having to reregister a whole lot of ‘em, but also because I was just curious to see if I could figure out what was wrong.

So in frustration, I ripped all my versions of Sonar off the computer, along with a whole lot of old software. Old Project 5. All those versions of Sonar I had going back to version 2 – outta there. Gone. I didn’t touch my plugins too much, including Dimension Pro and Rapture, but I washed the registry several times with two different registry cleaners, including by hand. I was careful but thorough.

But no luck. The plugins were still not showing up in the menus and the ghost registry entries were still there.

So I started thinking of strategies to clean out my plugin folder. I knew there was a lot of detritus in there. I’m pretty good at deleting what I don’t want, but it was way too easy to tuck stuff out of the way and not really think about it. Freebies I thought might be cool, mag-ware I might have used once or twice, some of lesser SynthEdit creations. I whittled it down to just the commercial plugins and the free/donation-ware I know works and use a lot. I created a 2nd vst folder that sits right next to the current where I moved everything else. So I can still use these miscellaneous VSTs in other programs; perhaps bring some into Sonar using eXT as a plugin. I also tossed any overall folder structure (“c:\program files\audio_plugins\instruments\samplers\..”) and went with just splitting them up by developer and project (“c:\program files\audio_plugins\u-he\zebra2\..”).

Then, with the very helpful configuration information that the Plugin Manager provides, I used a block of CLSID numbers to ferret out where they were sitting in my registry. (I used Registrar Lite 5.5.1 if it’s helpful.) Just a huge block of dead info. So scappled it out. Did a complete update on XP (using the quasi-illegal post-SP2 updater).

So now my Sonar 7 is a lean, mean plugin machine.

Seriously, it’s easier sorting through them, rescanning them, changing properties, and the whole plugin manager just operates faster. Whatever your platform, whatever your host, I highly advocate getting a good handle on what’s going on in your plugin directory.

I’m not a big advocate of moderation when it comes to plugins – whatever you can afford, why not? – but there is something both cathartic and useful in really simplifying your plugin structure.

Here’s a little improvement uncovered via the pig-pile which are the Sonar forums right now:

If you import audio via a menu (as opposed to using the Audio Browser, or dragging it in from Windows Explorer) – which is super easy because an “Import Audio/MIDI” has been added to your right-click menu – you can audition loops directly from the import dialog. Very handy.

And from the keyboard of Bob Damiano, one of the principle engineers, there are these less-heralded features:

Clips View:

* Peak markers are transparent. You can see your waveforms thru them now.
* Clip Names can be transparent. There is an INI flag to turn this on. (good excuse to read the Readme)

PRV/Inline PRV:

* Note overlap indication / hit testing improvements: When notes overlap in time, you can “see thru” them when the mouse is over them so none of the edges get totally hidden. The mouse tools will even find completely covered notes by prioritizing note edges over note middles.
* New selection mode on toolbar: When you select a note(s), any CCs within the time span of that note(s) also get selected. lets you move CCs and Notes together.

That last one is particularly useful.

That I’ll keep this going as I uncover ‘em.

Find any yet?

Edit:

Ah the motherload! After the jump a huge list of (most likely implemented changes and fixes) via Noel Borthwick, another principle engineer.

So if you haven’t visited the Read Me file or weren’t on the development team here’s some of what you might have missed:

Note: This list is not official. So don’t try to hold Cakewalk accountable for any discrepancies between this and the release version.

Complete unedited list after the jump.

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We have acheived full-tilt hardcore geek fanboy.

Anyway, here are some things I’ve noticed right off that bat:

* The install pause to let you choose where you want to install the sample content, including the RXP (which previous choose its own sample directory and had no way for adjusting it). So, if like me, you have a drive dedicated to serving samples and other auxiliary data (impulses, multis, whatnot), you can point all the install data directly there. Smart.

* The install also gives you a complete list of every plugin, going back to some old favorites from the early Sonar days. (And notes which are 32bit.) So, that’s pretty hard to miss.

* The splash screen colors are really nice. I can stand to see that for a year.

* The default track colors are garish and unpleasant. Change them immediately!

* A lot of the enhancements are a bit under the hood – i.e. you have to actually read the “New Features” section of the manual.

* Dim Solo is a switch you throw on or off via a toolbar. Or you can assign it to a keyboard shortcut. I have a user toolbar that I pop out when I need, but I imagine I’ll set this up with a keybinding as well. You set the dim amount to one of three set levels in your options. It’s very cool.

* The MIDI tool improvements are deep. I got a bit of a hint in the hour I just looked at it, but it’s definitely gonna take me a while to incorporate them.

* I opened a monster remix project I’ve been working on and the audio engine hangs in there great. I’ll need further testing but even with this it felt more stable. This may be placebo.

*MIDI Magnifier is the shiznit. Run it over a dense drum track and watch the magic.

More to come…

Here’s my ebay money shot, NIN style.

Since the Cakewalk distribution center is my old home state of New Hampshire, and I’m less than 3 hours away, I now have the Sonar 7 upgrade.

So, very cool. I probably won’t really get to start putting it through its paces until later this weekend. And, as frightened as I am to say it, I think it’s time for me to do a complete reinstall of all my software. I’ve put it off for far too long and wonder if my OS isn’t dragging a little. We’ll see if I’m brave enough for that one.

Useless Google Map After the Jump
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Well, it’s official. Cake not only announced but launched their new Sonar update.

For us longtime users, at least the specs are a plate full of “Yes, please” in terms of work-flow, especially if you do any degree of MIDI. It’s not a complete overhaul, so if you do extensive notation work you might want to look elsewhere. And it’s probably not going to replace anyone’s DV audio editor just yet. But there is no denying that they listened to their customers and, frankly, took everything that was useful in, well, other MIDI-oriented software, and integrated it into Sonar.

The forum is a bit of zoo right now, but here’s the official release thread and it details the goodies pretty thoroughly.

Here’s a few of what I’m most looking forward to:
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