Built-In Mastering System

A Mastering "area" would definitely be beneficial, even if for no other reason than allow a mixing Engineer to see if there may be any potential problems in Mastering later. I currently use Wavelab for my Mastering purposes, which is a whole animal when it comes to Mastering, but at times, I want to produce a quick estimated demo for bands without having to export the mix to Wavelab and Master a demo for playing in a car.
 
The only 'real' issue I have with Mastering in Sonar is that Sonar doesn't have ample metering for this. You would need Algorithmix's DR meter, or the one from Brainworx to even approximate loudness, or, go in for Waves WLM or Flux's metering solution(s). An integrated burner with Meta-Data would be awesome, too.
 
I've suggested that Sonar could make a more Pro-Line Sonar, that would rival Pro-Tools HD and/or Nuendo. It could be called Sonar-Professional, or Sonar-Industry, which the name would exude the perception of "this is the package the studios buy".
 
There's an enigmatic perception in the audio industry that the more expensive something is, the better is is. A $10,000 power cable is amazing, and you can TOTALLY hear the difference (no, not really (read my signature))! BUT, that marketing happens to work. However, it doesn't have to be that ridiculous.
 
Sonar X3-Industry, for example, at $1195 street price, includes all the features Cakewalk and users would love to add, including a DDP+ Mastering suite, and change the game....no...change the NAME of the game!

Studio One is one of the few major DAWs I've actually never seen in action, so excuse me if what I'm saying is exactly what it already does, but...
I would like to be able to press a button after I feel happy with my main mix, that automatically bounces my project, just gives me a large single track view of it and loads up a bunch of good meters and perhaps a user-definable set of mastering plugs (defaulting to the Sonar offerings). Too often I find myself doing this manually. It would also help to be able to "group" projects/songs for this purpose, similar to what Ableton does, to open a couple of bounces in a single project for cd building or comparative leveling.

These are all things that are already possible but are done very frequently by hand. It would require some rethinking about project organisation and would need some major new feature programming on Cake's part, but those are mainly concerning automating existing processes. Would love this.

Anderton
....... 
That said, Sonar is not that far away from being a mastering program...doesn't seem like it's out of the question for a future version.

Looking forward to that!

Jlien X
Since the OP mentioned Studio One as an example, I must point out that there's one area Sonar is definitely inferior to it, and it's a core feature all users (not just Producer users) will benefit from. It's.....timestretching. After you recorded all your audio parts, you realize you want to change the tempo of the entire song and want all audio clips to timestretch (follow the change) at once. In Studio One, all you need to do is enter a new tempo in the tempo field on the control bar.

So, Cakewalk, if you're reading this, postpone the idea of adding a mastering system until X5 or later.

I don't recall time stretching being in the survey, so it might have to wait until X5, or a time stretching thread.

 
A similar workflow:
 
1. Bounce your mix to a track in your project, and save your project. The mix will now be saved in your project's audio folder (assuming you save a project into its own folder).
2. Close the project, and open a new template project that has all the desired mastering plug-ins and screen layout you want.
3. Drag the mixed file from the project audio file (access it via the browser) into your mastering template.




You described exactly how I "master".  

Anderton
That said, Sonar is not that far away from being a mastering program...doesn't seem like it's out of the question for a future version.

Will it master notation?

I have been mastering with Sonar forever.  I sometime use Ozone within Sonar.  If projects are not large, I don't even export them to another project- just use the master bus.  If it's a group of songs, I will bring them all up in a new project to compare them side-by-side.
 
The most important thing is th quality of the plugs.  Better metering would be nice.
Global time stretching is overdue!

trnfoot
I am glad you chimed in with that BlixYZ. Short of running out of processing power, why do people bounce to stereo before mastering in Sonar? Surely it makes more sense to use something like Ozone on the Master bus and keep the flexibility of being able to change anything in the mix. Is there an advantage of bouncing to stereo, or is that just a habit we have inherited from analogue days?

Excellent question. If you want to do more "global" operations, like add a fade out, cut out some measures, repeat something toward the beginning at the end, time-stretch or pitch-stretch, it's easier to do with a stereo file.
 
However, one tip I give to people who like "slammed" masters is to mix with a limiter in the master bus, but remove it before bouncing to stereo and sending me the two-track to master. That way they mix with slamming in mind.

Well, although the addition of a built-in mastering system to the Producer version could be a good idea to differentiate it clearly from the Studio version, I don't think it's going to increase sales very much. If it’s something easy to develop and test, it’s OK, but if it’s a hard and time-consuming work, which may cause the program to be unstable again, I'd prefer to see Cake putting their time and energy into adding or improving features many of their existing and potential customers have been asking for. The two of major things requested during the X1-X2 period were stability and color customization. X3 offered them, and we’re seeing more and more new users these days. What are major requests to Sonar now? I’ve never heard anyone commenting “I don’t want Sonar because it doesn’t have a built-in mastering system.” The requests or complaints I see in this forum or other forums are about the staff view (I rarely use it so I don't know what it's missing, though), Take Lanes, uncustomizable Control Bar, etc., and these features are not limited to Producer, so I hope Cake will prioritize these for all of us.
 
As for time-stretching, unfortunately Audio Snap isn't included in the base version, which I use. I ran a test of time-stretching the same audio clip (that I recorded myself) in both S1 Producer and X2 Essential (using its time-stretching feature -- i.e. groove clip) before and the results in quality were significantly different. Sonar added lots of artifacts, while S1 produced a very clean result, and the feature is included in all versions, including Studio One Free. I have a project in S1 in which I hugely time-stretched an audio clip (made its length more than double, by, of course, just dragging the edge of the clip) and I could still hear no artifacts. Also, I still think it's nice to be able to easily change the song tempo with this audio quality, because, for example, I can change the tempo of the song for a singer to sing comfortably at the best tempo after recording all guitar parts and realizing the tempo of the project was a little too fast for the song, which actually happened last year. There’s no need to bounce or export tracks, all it takes is a single entry of a new tempo. It’s just more flexible. Anyway, when Sonar improves its time-stretching, I’m sure I’m going to see many posters exclaiming like "The new time-stretching feature ROCKS!!!” with delight. Sorry to sound like an unhappy user here, but the truth is I love X3 and it’s my primary daw. It’s just that I find time-stretching and track layers in S1 better than those in Sonar. That’s why I want these two improved before I see a built-in mastering system.

jmasno5Yes, I know that Mastering should be left to people that do it for a living but I'm just having fun. 

But then, where do little mastering engineers come from?

Well I, for one, totally misunderstood what you originally meant. My apologies, Mr. Expander.