Sonar 8.5 - Cakewalk Takes a Breather

For the past 7 years every Fall like clockwork Cakewalk has released a new version of Sonar, more frequently than any other DAW manufacturer. So I suspect it’s either the economy or that even the Sonar faithful are becoming a little burned out on new releases (or probably a little of both) that prompted a different strategy this year — Sonar 8.5. Unlike some manufacturers normally Cakewalk only does bug fixes in “point” releases and doesn’t charge for them. The upgrade to Sonar 8.5 costs $99 and has a surprisingly generous amount of new content. In response we decided to issue a free course upgrade for our Sonar 8 customers instead of doing a new course. Here’s my take on the new features in Sonar 8.5. If you’re a first-time Sonar customer, you may also want to take a look at my blog on Sonar 8.

Matrix View – Ableton Live Session View for Sonar

One of the major attractions for Ableton Live has been its Session View which allows you to build a project so that it can be performed in real time. The Session View is not only useful for live performances but for experimenting with alternative arrangements of a song. The new Matrix View in Sonar 8.5 provides basically the same functionality. Think of a Matrix View column as a vertical slice of a project timeline and a row as a track. You can trigger different columns or cells in real time to create various arrangements. Matrix View is a totally new tool in Sonar and still seems to have a few rough edges. I had trouble getting the cells to sync properly when I triggered a column, so it may not be ready for your next DJ gig quite yet. But it’s well-designed and a good entry into non-linear sequencing for Cakewalk. Our Sonar 8.5 update includes a new tutorial on the Matrix View.

Drum Tools – The Beat Goes On

Cakewalk has chosen once again to feed the insatiable appetite of DAW users for bigger and better drum tools with Session Drummer 3, Step Sequencer 2, and the PX-64 Percussion Strip. We have also added a new tutorial demonstrating how these three tools can be used together.

Session Drummer 3 is basically a facelift for the existing Session Drummer drum sampler. The real news about Session Drummer is the new content. Steven Slate Drums is the “in” acoustic drum library this year, so Cakewalk included several Steven Slate drum kits as well as a new library of samples from the classic Roland TR drum machine series. In addition there are tons of new MIDI drum grooves from Groove Monkee, Steven Slate, and Smart Loops.

The PX-64 Percussion Strip is a combo audio FX plug-in which contains practically all the FX you would normally use for drum sound processing: Transient Shaper, Compressor, Expander, Equalizer, Delay, and Tube Saturation. The Transient Shaper is basically the same design as the TS-64 Transient Shaper introduced in Sonar 8. However, this Transient Shaper is easier to use because of the graphical display and seems to be less resource-hungry on your computer. There is one design glitch with the Compressor though. The Compressor has simplified parameters and displays only Threshold and Ratio controls. Thus attack and release times as well as make-up gain are automatically handled under the covers. There is something fubar with the coordination of the release time and the make-up gain, and the result is a rather annoying tail especially on kicks.

Step Sequencer 2 is an upgrade to Sonar’s pattern sequencer tool which is used mainly for design drum patterns in real time. There are now additional functions for developing beats for individual drums. For example, now you can add flams or set a probability for how often a step will be triggered.

Audio Snap 2 – From Bad to Worse

Sonar 8.5 also includes Audio Snap 2 which is a major revision to Audio Snap. The Audio Snap 2 pallet has a different look and there are some additional tempo functions.

However, Audio Snap continues to have issues with correctly identifying audio transients, especially for audio other than drums. Below is a comparison of transient mapping between Sonar Audio Snap and Pro Tools Elastic Audio of the same bass groove. Sonar was unable to correctly estimate the tempo of this clip whereas Pro Tools got it right. If you compare the transients that each DAW identified, it’s pretty easy to see why. We had to remove the section on the Global Tempo Mapping from our tutorial because we couldn’t get the new version of that function to work at all. In general I have high respect for Sonar as a DAW. Thus I’m somewhat perplexed as to how Cakewalk keeps missing the mark on this tool (see my earlier blog Rube Goldberg Design, Bungled Execution).

VX-64 Vocal Strip

Sonar seems to be into combo FX plug-ins these days, and, personally I think it’d a great idea to have everything that you would normally use to process a certain type of audio in a single plug-in. Thus analogous to the PX-64, Sonar 8.5 also introduced the VX-64 Vocal Strip which includes De-Esser, Compander, Equalizer, Doubler, and Delay plug-ins, as well as several Tube Saturation functions.

A De-Esser removes sibilance in vocals by filtering out specified frequencies once the amplitude reaches a certain level. A Compander is a combination compressor and downward expander. You can think of a downward expander as a soft gate which can be used to remove sounds in a vocal track when the vocalist is silent. The Doubler and Delay can be combined to turn a solo into a chorus. This plug-in also has a large number of useful presets for the most common vocal processing.

Good Things Come in Small Packages

Although this update is not as ambitious as the usual annual Sonar update, it is nonetheless a good value given the new features that you’re getting for $99. If you’re a Sonar fan, go for it.