Third Take

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

Evidently, they’ve been busy at Toontrack. Yesterday they announced a standalone host program for EZ Drummer and Superior. Today they announced a new product called Drumtracker, an audio-to-midi converter so you can do drum hit replacement like Drumagog. After Drumtracker launches in January 2008, Toontrack products will cover every aspect of sample-based drum production.

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Today Toontrack announced “Toontrack Solo” - a host application for their MIDI sample players, EZ Drummer and Superior. With Solo, you’ll no longer be tied to your DAW software trigger your samples. For those who’ve wanted to use EZ Drummer in a live situation, this is huge. 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.

Chrisma on the Cakewalk forums turned me on to these free Modern Plugins, containing everything from compressors and equalizers to more exotic things called black dragons and monsters.

They certainly look nice, and appear to sound pleasant as well. I haven’t tried to use them in a real mix yet, just played around with a few on some scratch tracks. But you can’t beat the price…

This YouTube clip has been making the rounds for a while, but it is such a great demonstration of the misuse of compression on today’s records that it bears watching again. It’s so well done that it’s worth showing to your non-music-producing friends.

The IEEE recently published an article about this as well.

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.)

Acoustic guitar is one of the most difficult instruments to record. I haven’t come close to mastering the art, but I have figured some things out along the way that I think are worth passing on to other home recorders. Some of these are sure to be controversial, and other people may have had great results with other techniques. However, after reading everything I could find and applying it in my own home studio, this is what has worked for me. Read more