I simply can not understand why it always comes down to PC VS Mac ....
That's not the freaking Issue . It's a side issue smoke screen / diversion ...
After years of banging my head on the windows brick wall trying to get a machine that is twice as powerful and half as expensive as my 2 long in the tooth  Macs to run audio I'm done  ....
It is really simple folks ..
CORE AUDIO Rocks Period end of story .... that's the dirty little secret ...if there ever was one .
 
Kenny
 

sharke
I frequent a few music production subReddits and one of the most common questions newbies ask is "which is the right DAW for me?" Sometimes they list a few DAW's they've been pondering over and invariably people chime in with their suggestions.

Nobody ever mentions Sonar. I throw it into the mix and the response is usually "oh I've heard of that, is it any good?" or "never heard of that one, will check it out."

Bear in mind that Reddit has a notoriously young user base. What I get from this is that Sonar is not doing so well in terms of visibility among the young crowd and Cakewalk really need to fix this problem as part of their long term strategy, and I'm sure they are talking about it. That's going to mean catering a little more for the electronic/EDM crowd than they are now, by borrowing/expanding upon some of the features that other DAW's have implemented for that crowd. Things like the global modulation sources of Bitwig, or the drum rack of Ableton, more features geared toward pattern based arrangement and better automation capabilities. Sonar has a solid user base of older muso's who use the program almost as a tape machine to record more traditional forms of music, but it's not really doing as well as it should among younger users who, regardless of the genre they play, are incorporating synth and EDM type elements into their modern productions.

Well said.

kennywtelejazz
I simply can not understand why it always comes down to PC VS Mac ....
That's not the freaking Issue . It's a side issue smoke screen / diversion ...
After years of banging my head on the windows brick wall trying to get a machine that is twice as powerful and half as expensive as my 2 long in the tooth  Macs to run audio I'm done  ....
It is really simple folks ..
CORE AUDIO Rocks Period end of story .... that's the dirty little secret ...if there ever was one .
 
Kenny
 

Yep. MS have caught up quite a bit, but having nothing resembling OS X's Core Audio/MIDI is the big weakness where PCs are concerned.

To repeat something I said a while ago, the computers you see on stages nearly all have the big glowing white logo on the back, and there's a reason for that.

Despite a laptop or desktop PC having a much better bang per buck factor, there is something you can be certain of with a Mac that you can't be with Windows PCs.

You can take a brand new one off the shelf, personalise the (free) OS and install a DAW, be it Logic, Mainstage, Ableton, whatever, and know that you will get solid and very low round-trip latency audio while at the same time using a native MIDI network over wi-fi, a bunch of Bluetooth stuff and maybe even download a film to watch later at the same time or use the HDMI output to send your backdrop video to a projector.

No fiddling around with power settings required, no BIOS configuration to sweat over, no worries about whether the firewire chip is TI or not (or just use a TB->firewire adaptor on a modern Mac) or whether all the USB sockets actually provide the current the USB spec says they should. DPC latency, the bugbear of Windows DAWs, simply isn't an issue at all on Macs.

And until you can buy a sensibly priced, off the shelf laptop (or even desktop) Windows PC that can do all of that, or unless Apple makes the biggest mistake in DAW history and ditches CoreAudio/MIDI, Macs are going to hold an advantage in the DAW marketplace. An advantage created by Apple having total control over the both the components used and the operating system, as well as maintaining the focus on professional audio/video. It's a closed system in terms of hardware, sure, but this is one of those times where being a closed system means it can have a real edge.

PCs have their advantages, largely in terms of bang per buck and the huge range of available software. Another, as far as I'm concerned, is PCs can run Sonar which I prefer to Logic Pro. While there are a few things Logic has I'd like to see in Sonar, the way Logic does some things is far less user-friendly than Sonar and some things Sonar has had for as long as I can remember simply aren't possible in Logic, at least not easily.

Like how Sonar can assign a MIDI track to a specific hardware MIDI port as well as channel. With Logic all incoming MIDI devices are summed before they hit the sequencer into a single incoming MIDI port, so you only have 16 MIDI channels to play with, not 16 per connected device. Or the mess that is Logic's MIDI environment, which underlies the whole thing but if you need to do something in it is a badly documented confusing nightmare with a near vertical learning curve. Or track routing, or Logic's inferior way of handling loop recording and comping. Or Logic's inferior use of processing threads, especially when monitoring through the DAW (though to be fair Apple seem to have been giving that some attention at last). And the higher-end versions of Sonar have a far better plugin suite than Logic alone provides.

Me, I'm hoping for a Mac Sonar that runs as fluidly and solidly as Logic. Not using bootcamp and running Windows, but natively on OS X/MacOS. If Gibson are prepared to provide the necessary funding and get the marketing and publicity right the future could be very good for Sonar.

A free cut-down introductory version of Sonar for example, PC and Mac compatible, given away with Tascam interfaces or even every Gibson guitar as a tempter to the retail versions. Getting Live Lite packaged with all sorts of things worked well as a strategy for Ableton and provides a route into the "just starting" market. And once someone is familiar with one piece of complicated software they'll be less likely to switch to another and start trying to learn that, it's much easier to get the fuller paid-for version or next release of what you already know.

That's one way software becomes "industry standard" - not only by being good at what it does, but by becoming what people are used to and familiar with so changing to something else becomes a hurdle they'd rather not face.

Logic X was rife with bugs and crashes when it came out. It's better now, thankfully. And CoreAudio is a good protocol but no guarantee for well working stuff. An entire series of Macs has had hardware issues with USB audio, El Capitan has caused trouble for plenty of people with lots of software packages, and I've personally had to rescue friends with a MOTU card and an MBox that mysteriously stopped working.

All computers suck. Stop pretending yours doesn't because you paid more.

Tim Flannagin

abacab
"It was twenty years ago today..."
 
Cakewalk is still my standard :-)

Pretty much sums up my experience. I've been using Cakewalk since the Twelve Tone Systems / Windows 3.1 days. That said, I don't really care who's standard it is. It's my standard and that's all that matters to me.

Thanks for the reply. I lost track of the fact that your restoration work was done nearly 20 years ago. So, asking about the restoration plugins or apps you used was inappropriate. Things have changed a lot in the last 20 years:-)
 
Bill

I had a chuckle at this video: https://youtu.be/VfUGYLvsqtg
 
The fact that Dave Pensado is excited about 32bit/64bit wrappers in Pro Tools, in 2016, made me laugh. And reminded me just how far ahead Sonar has always been.

I was in a big budget PT studio a few months back and the engineer proudly proclaimed that they had offline bouncing now...

How do the ASIO drivers I use with SONAR on my PC for connecting to the audio interface compare to Apple's Core Audio and MIDI interfaces? I know one of the limitations of the Firewire and USB interfaces I use is that only one interface can be connected to SONAR at a time using ASIO. That limitation may go away if I were using one of the new much more expensive AVB Ethernet interfaces.
 
With respect to SONAR vs other DAW's I have no experience; but in reading reviews and following SONAR for over a decade, I've come to believe that Cakewalk has kept SONAR at or near the front of the pack on Windows taking full advantage of Windows improvements more quickly that competitors. Also, I think SONAR offers the most flexible workflow with the least restrictions. I also think that Cakewalk has been really innovative, with ARA and ProChannel being excellent examples of technologies that aren't available for other DAWs to my knowledge.
 
I also like Cakewalk's practice of bundling 3rd-Party plugins to provide core functionality rather than investing development resources into me too plugins that don't really add anything. However, I think Cakewalk could further improve SONAR by adding plugin functionality that is bundled with other DAWs but isn't available in SONAR. I read a lot of recording and mixing tutorials and learn about plugins that are included with other DAWs such as Cubase and Logic that aren't available with SONAR. One example I just ran across looking for ideas for processing acoustic guitar DI inputs is Logic's Match EQ which can apparently model one signal (in my case an acoustic guitar DI) to match the audio signature of a reference signal (in my case a target acoustic guitar recording). I know that there are workarounds available in SONAR, but the added functionality would be nice.
 
Bill

OSX CoreAudio does some cool stuff, but it does come with significant overhead compared to ASIO.  The advantage is you can do some cool routing with multiple interfaces and even your onboard mic and headphone jack, where ASIO is more of the "one at a time" approach.  The big drawback to CoreAudio (and my information is a few years old so they may have updated some of this) is that performance goes to crap when using smaller sample sizes where Windows with ASIO drivers is more consistent performance regardless of samples.
 
This info is a few years old but will give you an idea:
 
http://www.dawbench.com/win7-v-osx-4.htm
 
 
 
 

denverdrummer
OSX CoreAudio does some cool stuff, but it does come with significant overhead compared to ASIO.  The advantage is you can do some cool routing with multiple interfaces and even your onboard mic and headphone jack, where ASIO is more of the "one at a time" approach.  The big drawback to CoreAudio (and my information is a few years old so they may have updated some of this) is that performance goes to crap when using smaller sample sizes where Windows with ASIO drivers is more consistent performance regardless of samples.
 
This info is a few years old but will give you an idea:
 
http://www.dawbench.com/win7-v-osx-4.htm
 
 Thanks. That's very useful.
 
Bill