Just Edited/Mastered a 65-Minute Live Recording in Platinum at 96/24

First thing I've done in Platinum with this kind of length and data density. It was Frankie Moreno's Thursday night set at the Gibson tent at CES in Las Vegas. What a fun band!! If you're ever in Las Vegas, either by accident or design, by all means check 'em out.
 
Worked perfectly, no glitches, no issues. SONAR automatically created a .w64 file, presumably because it was over 2 GB. Exported the high res file as well as a 44/16 one for doing CDs. Used the Fraunhofer ProCodec to do an MP3. That's a great plug-in if you do enough conversions to justify the $$. Or should I say $$$$.
 
The star of the mastering on the track was the QuadCurve EQ - there was very little bass in the front of house feed because so much was going into the audience from the Cerwin-Vega subs. That, some Concrete Limiter and A-Type Console emulation did the job on the track, along with PC4K Bus Compressor on the master output and some stereo imaging tricks to widen the sound somewhat. Of course, there was some editing involved as well.
 
If you have any questions about the process, let me know.
 
Pretty cool. Maybe I should make a DSD master. We have the technology   

BluerecordingStudios
Two questions: Did you discovered better sound than from previous versions of Sonar?

 
If there is better sound, I wouldn't have been able to tell. The last 96/24 projects I did were acoustical classical music. I tracked the music in a Pro Tools studio, but then exported the files and used SONAR for the editing and mixing because it sounded better. This project was a hard rock band with a feed off the front of house mixer.
 
I'm of the belief that the sound quality occurs in the converters. Once the encoded audio gets into a double-precision 64-bit engine, not a lot can go wrong with it. 
 

Why don't you use Sonar's mp3 function?

The Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro Codec costs almost as much as Platinum, and is a thing of beauty. You can encode into multiple streams simultaneously like AAC, MP3, various lossless algorithms, etc., but even more importantly, you can play through it in real time to audition different conversion processes and rates, and A/B with the source material, as well as listen only to the difference between the source and encoded material. It also compensates automatically for the fact that conversions can often result in signals that go over 0. It's the ne plus ultra of data compression products AFAIC; there's no comparison to any other MP3 conversion utility I've seen in any other program, including high-level digital audio editors. It's the Platinum of MP3 converters

Sylvan
Nice. Will we get to hear any clips from your final master?

 Gee, I don't know...that gets into rights 'n' legal stuff, and there are some cover songs so that gets even more legal. I'll ask the band if I can post some of the original material.

Just an analog stereo feed from the FOH mixer into a TASCAM US-4x4 interface feeding an HP laptop. Creating the W64 file seamlessly was a nice touch, obviously SONAR couldn't know when the recording started that it was going to be that big.

Anderton
Pretty cool. Maybe I should make a DSD master. We have the technology   

Shinya-san might dig it :)

Question for you Craig....
I noticed that you said it saved the cakewalk  file as a .w64 file.....Is this the new normal cakewalk saved project file extension or like you said, is this due to it being over 2gigs?????
Normally, cakewalk saves project files as .cwp, does it still do this or is this the new project file going forward with the new Sonar??
thanks and looking forward to buying my copy...:)
 
 

So, you're advocating 96/24, eh?