SONAR and live performance: Challenges, Workarounds, and Unsolved Problems
I am currently a user of SONAR X2, and have been using cakewalk products since Cakewalk 4.5. In recent years, with the advent of great soft synths and real time effects that are far better than anything I can afford in outboard gear, I have started to put SONAR into action as a real real time performance system. Currently, I do sound for the band I am in, and everything is processed live through SONAR at gigs, including mixing, effects, and software synthesis. I have got this to the point of working with adequate stability, and great sound, but more and more, there are certain things that I find very cumbersome about it.
I have not seen a lot about using SONAR in live performances on this forum, so I though I would see if people on the forum might have insight into how I can solve some persistent issues in SONAR, as well as share what I have learned in the process. The ideal situation would be to have a template setup in advance of the performance night, and deploy it with minimal adjustments as things are being setup at the gig. This would require being able to reliably configure MIDI and audio channel routing, control surface mapping, and such.
Sonar has significant limitations with this, which hopefully will be corrected in future versions. Sonar basically does not remember almost anything of this sort reliably, which appears to be a major design oversight at this point. Any change in the system's MIDI configuration whatsoever between sessions means that SONAR completely rearranges what MIDI devices are mapped to given tracks, which can lead to bizarre and hard to solve problems in performances. Incorrect devices become mapped to incorrect instruments, and some tracks get changed to "all inputs omni," which for a performance is the worst possible reconfiguration.
However large you make a track in the session view, it is only possible to see an abbreviated name for the midi input, without hold the mouse over it for a tooltip. Because of all this, before I open SONAR at all, I have to connect each USB MIDI device to the computer, and then when I go into SONAR, I have to check preferences to make sure all the MIDI devices that I need are checked, and then I have to check every single MIDI track to verify that it has the correct midi input. The checking itself probably adds an extra 5 min. setup time minimum, plus it is problematic to have to wait to load the file until every MIDI device is setup.
The only possible workaround for this behavior that I can think of is to have a series of virtual midi ports setup, with some sort of external bridging program to handle taking MIDI from the hardware sources, which would then be one more program to run, and one more source of potential reliability problems. A similar problem exists for configuring control surfaces. SONAR completely forgets what tracks a given control surface is assigned to between sessions. I use multiple control Surfaces, including a Mackie Control, and sliders on keyboards configured as generic control surfaces.
For the Generic control surfaces, my workaround is to put all the associated tracks at the beginning of the file, and to configure some of the generic control surfaces to have empty padding tracks at the beginning (since control surfaces can overlap fine in SONAR). This means that if my first control surface has 10 real sliders, I will configure the control surface in SONAR normally, but if the second one has another ten real sliders, I will configure the control surface as if it has twenty sliders, leaving the first ten empty. This method works for generic control surfaces, but not for the Mackie control, and requires setting up templates very rigidly.
A third smaller point has to do with metering. In sonar, track meters generally meter the output levels from a track, unless they are armed for recording, in which case they meter the input level instead. When recording and mixing a live performance, it would be extremely helpful to have both.
One thing I wonder is whether there is any reasonably priced alternative to SONAR on the market that would handle these issues better, while facilitating recording of audio and MIDI, use of soft synths and audio effects, and for after the performance providing a full production environment.
Anyway, I appreciate any thoughts or ideas people might have on all of this.