Third Take

Sonar’s stereo buses are great tools when it comes time to mix your project. The concept of buses is rooted in the world of analog mixing consoles, but Cakewalk has redefined the bus into something even more powerful than aux sends or subgroups. Sonar simply has stereo buses, and you can have as many of them as you want, and route them however you want. To understand the power behind this concept, take a look at how buses are used in three common scenarios: Submixes, Effects Buses, and Parallel Compression. Read more

Cakewalk dropped the bomb today.

Already feature packed, SONAR 7 Producer Edition tips the scales with: integrated Step Sequencer view; Smart MIDI Tools; dozens of MIDI workflow and editing enhancements; Roland® V-Vocal™ 1.5 editor enhanced with pitch to MIDI conversion; new instruments: Z3TA+ 1.5, Dimension LE with Garritan Pocket Orchestra, Rapture LE, & DropZone providing over 1000 new sounds; LP-64 EQ and LP-64 Multiband linear phase mastering VSTs; Boost 11 Peak Limiter; internal sidechaining for SONAR’s dynamics processors & multi-input capable VSTs; mix with external hardware and instruments with automatic delay compensation; Dim Solo Mode; shortcuts for audio I/O & bus assignments; integrated audio CD ripping & burning; and Cakewalk Publisher 2.0 for uploading and presenting music online.

There are a lot of things to be excited about there! The mastering plugs could be very nice, the side-chaining is a great (and long overdue) enhancement, and the automatic delay compensation for mixing with external hardware is fantastic for anyone with old outboard gear.

I don’t use a lot of softsynths, but it sounds like they’re packing in some serious instruments with the addition of Z3TA+, Rapture LE, Pocket Orchestra, etc. The MIDI editing features look impressive as well.

The “Cakewalk Publisher” sounded lame at first, but reading the details changed my mind:

Cakewalk Publisher 2.0 — Integrated Cakewalk Publisher presents an innovative new tool to publish and present music online. Cakewalk Publisher provides a fast and easy way to create a customized, online, streaming music player and playlists that can then be directly uploaded from SONAR to band websites, and hosted on MySpace and other Internet sites.

• Simply drag files into Publisher to quickly create playlists
• Build custom Flash-based audio players with choice of colors, size, layout, etc to match web designs
• Support for album art: choose an image and URL for each song in your playlist
• Includes FTP client to upload music and players directly to your website
• XML generation to embed customized players on many websites (Myspace, etc.)

If it can actually generate custom flash players, ready to upload to a band website, that is going to be huge. I have actually considered buying Flash and learning how to program ActionScript just so I could make my own player that didn’t look so generic.

I want to finish a few projects on my stable 6.2.1 install before I do any upgrading, but it looks like there are many good things to look forward to.

UPDATE: There’s also a little video about the new features.

There have been a couple Sonar 7 leaks and the Cakewalk Marketing department is dutifully squashing all the details. One rumor is that will include Boost 11, the peak limiter plugin in Home Studio 6 XL.