Third Take

Cakewalk DAW Labs looks like a good resource for building or buying a new PC. They have links to pre-built PCs that have been “tested and approved by Cakewalk Tech Support” as well as tips for those of us who build our own. The list of supported audio interfaces makes it easy to compare different sounds cards’ capabilities, and identifies which ones have 64-bit drivers available.

Cakewalk just announced a special offer to upgrade to Sonar 7 Producer for $129. The special pricing is good until June 29, 2008. It’s a tempting deal, but I’m going to pass for two reasons. Read more

A lot of home studio recorders seem to mix as they go. After a tracking session, I like to put a rough mix together and hear how the tracks are working. I also think there’s a lot of utility to doing some preliminary mixing before you record additional instruments - especially in the case of drums. Fixing minor timing issues with AudioSnap before recording other instruments can have a huge impact on the overall “tightness” of the track.

However, I often get into a situation where I’m reluctant to change the panning and levels of some elements in my preliminary mix to set up the monitor mix for tracking a new instrument. Muting isn’t a problem, but if I’m recording bass next and the player wants to hear more kick drum, I hate having to upset the drum mix I spent several hours perfecting. As a solution, I’ve begun using Sonar’s excellent routing tools to create something I’m calling the Monitor Bus. Read more

If you want to export MP3s with Sonar, and don’t want to pay $19 for the Cakewalk encoder (or it doesn’t work on your system), there is a free encoder called LAME that can be integrated into Sonar. This tutorial will show you how to configure Sonar to encode MP3s with LAME. Read more

Are you tired of setting up EZ Drummer every time you start a new project? Sonar makes it easy to create a project template that will load your EZ Drummer setup when you create a new project file. This tutorial will show you how to configure EZ Drummer with multi-track output and save it as a Sonar template. Read more

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.

Don’t buy the MP3 Activation…

Thank you for contacting Cakewalk Technical Support.

Mp3 encoding directly out of SONAR is not currently available for the
x64 platform. The activator is not activator the mp3 export options
because it is not compatible with x64. The encoder that SONAR uses is
a third party encoder. It has not yet been updated for x64. Also mp3
encoding on x64 in general appears to be in the beta stage. It is not
known when mp3 encoding will be available for SONAR 6 on the x64
platform. There may be some third party software encoders available
on the web, however we are not aware of any official releases.

MP3 encoding works just fine in my ancient copy of SoundForge XP 4.5 running on x64, but Sonar 6 can’t do it - even if you buy the plugin.

(UPDATE: I wrote a tutorial about Sonar MP3 encoding with LAME.)

I found a great article on parallel compression at a blog called Hometracked. It looks like a great blog and I plan on keeping up with it.

Parallel compression is the process of mixing an uncompressed signal with a compressed copy of it. The article at Hometracked shows how to do this in Sonar and includes audio examples.

I’m still experimenting with this technique, but getting good results.