thoughts

It has been clearly promoted by Cakewalk the desire to change Sonar from a strictly studio/production tool to a hybrid production - performance tool. As I have seen in some ads, the general direction Cakewalk wishes to go is to make Sonar an appealing solution for the performing electronic musician. I don't know whether the above desire has led Cakewalk to add new features like the Matrix view (see Ableton Live's Session View) and now the FX Chains of Expanded with custom controls (see Ableton Live's custom effect racks).
 
 If that is the case, I am sorry to say but I realy believe Cakewalk must study more what actually makes an application the preferred tool for a performing electronic musician.
 
1. Usually performers do NOT have the patience Sonar users have. If you think a potential user will have to go through all the fuss for some simple things Sonar requires think again - probably the potential user will just uninstall and delete Sonar related files. Case in point: importing mp3s in Sonar...Doable? Yes. As easy as in Ableton Live? try it and draw your own conclusions. Do serious DAWs need mp3 import? NO. Do serious performance tools need mp3 import out of the box? Well, what do you think?
 
2. General stability of the application...Case in point: Try VERY hard to crash Ableton Live...If you ever succeed, the damn program crashes and guess what? Music keeps on playing, for ever....allowing the performer to switch to his whatever back up plan (another computer, a CD player or whatever) - NO silence for the audience.
 
3.Drop outs - no comment
 
4. Clever UI to take advantage of screen space since the electronic musician-performer most likely wont be using a laptop with 34538x56658 pixel resolution 60 inch screen. Not that I find Live's UI appealing, but it does take advantage of screen space - no photorealistic faders and knobs, no shadows, no hardware-like GUIs nada, JUST DATA presented to the performer. 
 
5. Whatever the feature, it works both ways. Case in point: drag and drop support from browser. Drag ANYTHING from Live's browser into the app, drag ANYTHING from the app to the browser.
 
6. Ability to move projects from one computer from the other without having to know all the tiny litle files needed. Try "Collect all and save" in Live for a project and then move it to another computer running Live. To be sincere I havent tried that with Sonar but why do I sense there will be settings missing?
 
I have NEVER used Ableton Live for production - its arrangement view (the equivalent to most DAWs linear timeline presentation of tracks), to me, sucks big time . In the same way, I would never use Sonar for a gig.
 
My final thoughts: its not bad for a product to try to get a bigger market share...Its very bad for a product to try to get a market share when the designers really havent figured out what that market share takes for granted and what it needs.
 
Greetings!

i have watched for a decade as every daw copied every other daw when new features appeared.  that is all  thats happening.  each has its strength and weakness, each borrows from the other when cool new features are developed.

thoughts

Use Ableton live for "live" use.

Use SONAR for "recording" use.

Questions?

Cause it has that capability. It might not be the very best, but it will work. Ableton is not the best DAW, but it works. Every package has it's own strengths and weaknesses.

Zo


Is live show mean : boum boum techno shiiiitt only with cell triggering and glitch effects ? 
No !!!

Yes sonar can be used for live , but not the way ableton live is used ....

Actually it can do everything you've said up there, cell triggering & glitch effects no problem.


But, no real way to improvise > record > re-sample in real-time in the matrix. I can't be bothered going into it, but its very much a v1.0 product compared to Live 8.

X1 is perfect for electronic music production. Check out: http://www.cakewalk.com/Products/SONAR/Two-Worlds-Collide/

Honestly it would take a lifetime for you to exhaust the sound possibility’s that are included in the producer edition.

"6. Ability to move projects from one computer from the other without having to know all the tiny litle files needed. Try "Collect all and save" in Live for a project and then move it to another computer running Live. To be sincere I havent tried that with Sonar but why do I sense there will be settings missing?"

It's super easy to do this.  I always use per project folders.  If that's not good enough, you can also create a bundle file.   Either way files are in one place.

A gapless audio engine would be nice though.