ADDICTIVE DRUMS SONAR WINDOWS
The end result is a busy GUI and you first need to get a grip on Sonar’s Skylight interface, which is a system of collapsing, floating or docking the various windows to shove aside information you don’t need in your face at the moment. To be fair, a lot of film composers and the like use those esoteric MIDI functions daily even if, to the rest of us, the menus are like Einstein’s doodling. There’s always somebody who claims a certain function is the lynch-pin of their entire workflow, no matter how obscure, and demand it be put back. Maybe Cakewalk’s developers would like to clean up the GUI much more than they have, removing what some people would consider obsolete functions, but that’s a recipe for forum outrage. With Sonar X3 we have a DAW that’s truly powerful, being absolutely chockers with features and plug-ins, but the legacy of that extensive history is also lots of functions that can be overwhelming to new users, particularly when it comes to MIDI menus (before recording and editing audio was so easily achieved, sequencers like Cakewalk offered all kinds of complicated MIDI processes to trump the competition). No surprise, reviewers like myself tend to ignore some of the established features, because they’ve been examined time and again over the years. If you include the original Cakewalk incarnation of this long-standing DAW, Sonar has been around something like 25 years. It’s time to have a closer look.īefore we start, let’s briefly check out the pedigree. Every new Sonar release has a few gremlins, albeit quickly addressed by the Cakewalk team, and that initial version is never a perfect thing. Okay, so now the new year has well and truly ticked over and Sonar X3d – four patches removed from the original – is available. However, we’ve all learned that to get the best picture of what the latest Sonar can do, it’s wise to wait awhile for a few patches to hit the street.
ADDICTIVE DRUMS SONAR UPDATE
That’s pretty clever, since it avoids the angst of its user-base speculating on when the next update will arrive – they only need debate what goodies it will include. Cakewalk is renowned for releasing a new version of the DAW, almost regular as clockwork, around October every year. I say this at the beginning of every Sonar review – and I’m going to say it again (and again next year, and again…).