Third Take

The last Cakewalk deal was too good to pass up, and I finally upgraded to Sonar 8.5. I’ve only spent about two hours with it, but they were happy hours. Part of the setup included migrating my settings from Sonar 6, and, for the most part, they were migrated. I had to disable my motherboard soundcard again, and I don’t think 8.5 is seeing my old drum maps, but everything else seems to be fine.

The new plugins sound amazing. I’ve played with TruePianos, Guitar Rig, and Z3ta+. I didn’t expect to use Guitar Rig, but after hearing it, I’m considering selling my SansAmp PSA-1. I even tried it using “input monitoring” and didn’t have any latency problems. The built-in tuner is very convenient.

For the most part, I haven’t had any trouble finding commands or options in the new version. It seems to be the same Sonar, but better. I couldn’t help but smile when I changed my project temp and it automatically stretched my audio clips! Maybe that feature existed in 6, but I never found it if it did.