I started using Steinberg software since when I got an Atari 1040ST in 1986. I had a whole megabyte of memory and I had built in MIDI ports. (Big deal at the time)
In 1999 was over my love affair with Apple so deiced to use Cubasis on a PC. I bought a midi cable for my PC and it came with Home Studio 8. I had a very minor problem and called the tech support and was blown away with Cakewalk’s service. (I still am till this day, it is second to none!)
I later upgraded to Home Studio XL 2004 but still kept using the Steinberg because I was so used to it. I found myself playing with Cakewalk FX in Cubase. I received an email offer to upgrade to the Sonar 4 and took advantage of it. I bought mainly for the effects and because Sonar it supported OMF files. A few months later I upgraded from Studio 4 to Producer 4 but I still was using Cubase. I liked Sonar but was afraid to jump. I researched and studied Sonar and even read a couple books.
My reluctance to switch was based on my heavy usage of VST instruments. I primarily work on Christian and Southern Gospel Music with a fair amount of orchestration. I would guess 75% of my tracks are sample based with live instruments and vocals. Often projects are sent to Nashville to be mixed. Nuendo is used widely around Nashville so using Cubase worked well. I had been using some form of Steinberg for almost 20 years so it wasn’t an easy decision to switch.
Then Sonar 5 came out with 64 bit processing and native VST so I decided it was go time. I pulled up some tracks I had previously mixed put them in Sonar and I couldn’t believe my ears. There was a sonic difference. I have used Sonar ever since!
I run a commercial studio and I have a project studio in my home as well. I run Sonar in both and I have had no problem when people come in with ProTools projects. I am more than happy put Sonar to the test against the other inferior software. No one has ever said, “Let’s keep it in ProTools.”
I live a couple hours away from Nashville and I am seeing the Digidesign stronghold slowly melting with the myth of the invincible Apple OS. I would love to see this market developed for Cakewalk. The partnership with Roland could be an asset in making this come to fruition. Hardware wise 16 channel AES cards, 192 ADDA converters and even a DSP card for effects are at the top of my wish list! Imagine Sonar power harnessed by Roland. Music City is home to allot of musicians and allot of different genres. With the Cakewalk’s METAlliance partnership and the Nashville influence a couple of those guys have Sonar could make some serious inroads. They are already endorsing AMD!
Sonar is the best choice for me and the music I work on. It might not be the “industry standard” but remember a standard is what others are measured against. Sonar measures up quite handily to say the least.

I started with G-Vox and discoved Sonar on version 2XL been a user ever since.
I'm a tech junkie so I've had Version 4, 5, 6 and now 7PE.
I would like to see some headway with the 64 bit rewire support in version 8.

I have used Sonar since Cakewalk 6 in 1997.

DAWs are necessarily like politicians. Sooner or later, I dislike all of them.

Cakewalk is no exception. I just dislike it less than Tracktion, CuBase, Acid, FL Studio etc.

I can rattle off the shortcomings of everything. FL Studio's recording interface isn't as accessible, Tracktion's MIDI editing isn't strong. Everybody besides Cakewalk is stuck with 32-bit application code.

I can also rattle off the advantages of other DAWs. FL Studio still has the best step sequencer. ACID has the best code for stretching audio witout distortion. Tracktion is the most user-friendly. Ableton is better for live improv.

At the end of the day, Cakewalk is the best of a very frustrating class of products.

Hi everyone. This is a great thread and an amazing way for everyone to compare different products and companies.

I made the switch from Cubase to Sonar 7 Producer Edition after having a terrible experience with latency on Cubase. I had the newest version of Cubase (about 2 months ago) and immediately uninstalled it from my hardrive when the damn thing kept giving me unnecessary latency issues.

I have an Intel quad-processor with 4 gigs of ram so there was absolutely no reason for me to have any sort of latency whatsoever. But as soon as I installed and recorded with Sonar everything worked out great!

Thank you so much for such a wonderful DAW!!!

I was an analog studio engineer in the seventies and eighties. When I came to digital recording in 2001 someone pointed me at n-Tracks (http://www.fasoft.com) and I've stuck with it since. It's been a rocky journey - I've not found the product very stable - but we've recorded two albums of my music and a lot of other projects besides. I'm currently on the 24bit n-Tracks version with an M-Audio Delta 2496 card on XP.

But I'm now looking at moving away from n-Tracks - I need something a bit more robust, and something that will leverage the investment I've made in VSTs over the last seven years. In particular I have ongoing problems keeping recordings synchronised - the least change seems to require buffer settings and drivers to be set up all over again. All I want to do is make music!

It's a shame n-Tracks doesn't qualify for a competitive upgrade - if it did I'd go for Sonar 7. But I'm weighing up Pro-Tools M-Powered against Sonar HS. Any additional commentary on that match-up would be welcome.

It seems that almost everyone here has had some experience with Cubase like I've had and some of you have even upgraded to Cubase 4 before turning to Sonar! Amazing! I actually like Cubase SX. Like I said before, on this forum subject, I bought Sonar 7 because I didn't want to risk upgrading to Cubase 4. I think Cubase 4 has become too complicated. Too many features added too soon to not have many bugs! Steinberg had a good thing going with SX. They could have made it better before changing to version 4. If I have anything to do with Cubase it will be my SX 3 for now.

I switched from Pro Tools after having purchased both Sonar and Pro Tools running on two different brand new Dell Computers. I had two former students one was a Pro Tools man another Sonar Man.. I had them both demo what they were doing and how they accomplished their best tracks... SONAR won me over hands down.. Unlimited tracks and the interface were the main reasons.. no dongle and stability.

I am now running Sonar 7 and have also the 64 bit version installed on my dual core laptop with 4 gigs of Ram.

My third CD Chase the Sunset was recorded entirely on Sonar and reached the top 50 Smooth Jazz Charts.. Received airplay all over the US and other countries. It was released a year ago and I tend to go back and listen for clarity and the general quality of the sound. I have to admit that when I A/B against other CD's by major artist in my genre my CD is as clean as any I've compared... and I A/B against the best - Dave Koz, Rick Braun, Peter White, Four Play, Norman Brown...

My mixing is still a little bit under the top major level but the quality of sound that I get out of SONAR is as good as any Pro Tools HD project I've heard. My CD is available on Itunes - Rhapsody and through CD baby... Some songs are available for free download at www.billmcgeemusic.com.

SONAR is here to stay.... Bill McGee - Jazz Trumpeter and Multi-Instrumentalist.

I've been using Cubase since the Atari days and in recent years thought that the costs and functionality of Cubase were going in a different direction to my own home-producer aspirations. Out of all the DAWs, Live and Sonar seemed the most forward-thinking and streamlined, but time-saving features like ACT sold Sonar to me. I've been out of practice for a year but a new studio room and new PC left me thinking there were only two major steps to take; new monitors and new software. I just bought Sonar...the speakers will probably have to wait until next year.

Another thing that impressed me about Sonar is that I really can get 2ms latency with my soundcard, and I never got less than 9 with Cubase. This just shows me how efficient it is, and I can't wait to try maxing out my quad core.

I am joining the Sonar set after years of using Cubase.

Making music is just a hobby for me though and I don't have any real aspiration for it to be anything more.
I never minded Cubase but there was something about it that sucked the fun out of making music.
I have also use Live but don't really like making music the way the developers had decided I should make it, with everything else being a chore. It is still fun for live stuff though.

Having used the demo of Sonar over the last week I have found that I am having fun again, it is all very intuitive (for the most part) and I hope will allow me to finish a track or two in the future.

My first proper recording software was Cakewalk Pro Audio 8. A friend of mine turned me unto it, and I liked it right away. To keep up with the times I later got the SONAR 6 that I used for a short while. Now I use SONAR 7 Producer Edition and truly feel its the best recording tool I have ever used. Have tried Cubase and similar software, but haven`t really gotten into `em. I`m a "Cakewalk guy" so to speak, so the way S7PE works and looks fits me like a glove!

Jeez... I started in electronic music in the mid 80s at the New Mexico State University electronic music lab. They had an old original Moog, a Synthi, and a lot of other wonderful old relics. I first started doing computer music later on with an Amiga and various rather crude trakker programs. I wandered through various midi sequencers and finally got a copy of Cakewalk Sonar 4. It had a lot of problems, but I finally had something I could use to write music. A lot of my complaints about 4.0 have been addressed with 6.0, among them:

• No way to set default file paths (infuriating!)
  
• Setting up midi too cumbersome
  
• Lots of crashing
  
• Too difficult to set up soft synths
  
• Hunting around looking for instrument definition files.
  
• Horrible documentation that assumed too much knowledge on the reader's part and was written in too much lingo and jargon. It was documentation written by geeks for other geeks. The book that comes with 6.0 goes a long way to address this serious fault (I have a master's in technical writing so this really bugs me).
  

So I guess I've been doing all this for a while. I'll be interested to see 8.0, but I can't afford to upgrade just yet.

Andacar

I actually started with Cakewalk in the early 90s, back when it was pure midi/win 3.1. I Got hooked on Logic Audio afterwards, up to the point where big bad Apple Corps bought it and turned it in to a PC-nogo. I've been using the last PC-Version 5.5.1 up to now, but it lacks all the goodies that you expect nowadays and is not working well on my Vista64 Dual-whatnot PC . After trying out Music Studio 2008 and NOT liking the experience, I've been looking for the right DAW to back. I flirted with buying Samplitude but since it's from the same guys, I've lost the trust. Sonar 8 Producer promises all that I ever need (And is way cheaper than Logic ever was) especially the instruments and the vocal-thingy. I'm waiting for my supplier to get the first copies so I can buy it (Sorry folks, I'm scottish) cheaper from them as my birthday present to me

I switched from Cubase 4 (LE). Cubase was very easy to use and everything, but unfortunately it seemed kind of bloated and it didn't run very well whatsoever.

A positive for Cubase was it worked better natively with my Presonus Firestudio Project. However Sonar 8 seems to work better with it out of box than Sonar 7, and there are still some things I can try to get it working better.

Sonar is much faster and smoother than Cubase, I like the fact that you get a bunch of useful plugins! (Session Drummer 2 FTW!)

Another thing that was horrible about Cubase was that Steinberg takes years to release patches...

Hi everyone,

I'm not really a musician. I dabble a little bit on keyboard, but I've always been on the tech side of things. I was the kid that ran sound and lights for my friends' garage band. That led me to electronics and a career in computers--mostly in main frame test and debug. Now I've come full-circle and computers have led me back to music.

In the late '80s, I did some CD pre-mastering using SAW Classic and Wavelab. To give you a little perspective, the first CDR drive I used cost $1700--it was a 2X!

Fast forward to 2006: I bought a copy of Cubase Home to play around with and I decided to take a recording class at the local community college to learn more about Cubase. The class was using Sonar 6 PE and I bought Sonar 6 XL so I could do some work at home. I eventually upgraded to 7 PE when Brandon came to the area for the '07 tour. I'm looking forward to checking out Sonar 8 next week in San Diego.

For now, I'm mostly using Sonar to do remixes of stuff I recorded on my old Grundig back in the '70s.

Take care,
Jan

Around Y2k I bought GuitarTracksPro(2 or 3, can't remember). I loved that program, and it was all I needed for what I was doing, which was basically 4 tracking ideas for songs that my band could listen too. If we wanted to record for real, we paid our money and went to a local studio. When my laptop finally took its last breath last summer (07), and I had to go buy a new one, Vista had come out, and all PC computers at that time were coming with Vista. I couldn't find an XP computer anywhere, and I was being told I could not load XP on a new system as the hardware was not backwards compatible. I bought a Vista system at gunpoint, only to find that GuitarTracksPro would not work. I had to buy a new DAW. Guess what? Sonar was the only Vista ready choice at that time. That was fine with me, since I was used to the Cakewalk interface. I wanted to buy ProTools at the time, but here is why I did not.

1. Didn't want to drop $2,000 on an Apple, when I could get the same power in a PC for half of that or less.
2. Didn't like the choices in hardware (M box or nothing). Sonar let me shop Presonus, MOTU, Lexicon and others, who offer better choices.
3. Vista support (which has not gone so well I must admit.. me hates the Vista!)
4. Seemed to me that Sonar 7 had more to offer than ProTools LE. To me it was a case of "full software" vs a litght version for similar investment. ProTools HD is out of reach for me, and would be pointless anyway at my usage level.
5. Cubase did not seem to be an option at all at that time, since it did not support Vista, and I already decided not to go Apple.

I love Sonar, and will continue to use it for the reasons that many other people have listed.. custom layouts, no dongle (dongle's suck!) plug ins, softsynths, and I just like the workflow of it. In hindsite though, my Vista experiment has failed, and this OS drives me nuts. Too many wierd problems to chase down, and it just does not work as advertiesed. Nothing makes me more angry than to spend money to get a bunch of abilites and features that sound great, but don't actually work. I guess I am going to have to retrofit XP.