should I upgrade? advice would be appreciated.

Hello. I've very much been considering taking advantage of Cake's upgrade offer. I run Sonar 4 now and I'm very pleased with it; haven't really felt the need to jump up to 5. But is this free upgrade to S6 too good to pass up? Essentially I'm just a hobbyist and I suppose I don't need more than what I have. But when I hear about how Sonar 6 will "change the way you use virtual instruments", I get excited on what that could do for me (cuz I use a lot of plugs).

My main aprehension is that I use a Tascam FW-1082 control surface/interface. I love it, but as far as I know, it can't work with signals above 24-bits (which, again, is fine for me). But I have several friends who fully utilize S5's 64-bit capabilities and the difference is astounding. Part of me wants to make that jump. I have friends that can help upgrade my CPU and all that to accomodate.

But I'm not really interested in getting a new control surface just to be able to use 64 bit. Do you suppose it's worth it for me to do this upgrade yet still remain in the 24 bit world? Are the features going to be significantly more than what I have with version 4?

Perhaps there are other 'hobbyists' out there who could share their reasons for taking advantage of this offer. Thanks!

ORIGINAL: HeavyTRAFFIK
Perhaps there are other 'hobbyists' out there who could share their reasons for taking advantage of this offer. Thanks!

If you like good audio, by all means upgrade. No audio interface provides more than 24 bit resolution to Sonar. However when you do complex mixes with busses and such you need more resolution than the raw audio data has to prevent degradation in the mixing process.

In addition, while I did nice recordings with Sonar 4, with version 5.2 Cakewalk made a number of improvements to the audio engine and to the dithering used for export that, indeed, improves the sound.

I think you can upgrade to Sonar 5.2 now and get Sonar 6 for free when it comes out. (double check before believing me on that) I know 5.2 works very well so you can use that and then decide if you like Sonar 6 when its released. If not you can just stick with 5.2 and have truly excellent audio all the way.

I record at 24 bits, mix down with the 64 bit engine, and export with the new Powr dither. The audio improvement from Sonar 4 is very noticible.

--Bill