Greetings all!  I have researched this thing to death but I thought I'd give everyone here a shot with an answer.  I am in a country/rock band.  We lost our bass player and can't find anyone to play.  We started experimenting with using Sonar as a backing track tool.  I have an OLD system with 256 meg of RAM running Sonar 2.2.  We are using a MOTU 828 interface.  This works great out of an open Sonar project.  I have not tried the playlist tool since we have only tried one tune at a time.
 
Now I'm looking for a new system.  I would like to have a laptop to take to live gigs.  I would also like to use Sonar or Live or something to output up to 8 possible backing tracks which would include bass, background vocals, chorus vocals, keys, some sort of percussion loop/click, and whatever else we come up with.  We typically play 4 sets that last about an hour or more.  Roughly 50 songs at most.
 
Here are my questions:
1.  Can Sonar 8.5 do this?
2.  If so should I use the playlist feature or load each hour long set into its own project?
3.  What type of hard drive and processor should I be looking at for the best performance and reliability? (I know the more RAM I have the better)
 
Those are my main questions at this point.  We would be using the system for backing tracks only.  Our sound guy would like each track on individual channels to aid in live mixing, so probably won't be using plug ins.  I have looked at Logic's Mainstage and like that idea quite a bit, but the Apple stuff is pretty darned expensive.
 
I've really enjoyed this forum so far.  Thanks for your help!
 

Yes, it will work. Just make sure you have a rock-solid laptop and experiment with it extensively before taking it "on the road"...Another option would be a rack-mount PC.

As for Playlist vs. hour long sets...What if you decide to change things around? Whatcha gonn do then?

I use Sonar with playlists as my fall back for providing backing tracks for my live solo act. I've never had to use it 'for real' yet. I have a Roland Sonic Cell for that and I use it only for MIDI files no audio.

I have however under the above limitations rehearsed with it on several occasions and never let me down yet.

Sonar 8.3.1 PE on a Toshiba Satellite T6400 @ 2.00 Ghz, 3 GB RAM with Windows 7 x32. If that's of any use. The only thing I couldn't get working was the Start/Stop via MIDI for some reason.

Thanks Guys.  I see your point papa2005.  Changing the order would be a pain without the playlist feature.  I just want to be sure this idea would work before investing the money.  So, does the playlist close each previous project before opening a new one?  That would be ideal.

From the Help Files:

The Play List view lets you create, edit, and save a play list (or set) of up to 999SONAR projects. Once you’ve created the list, you can play back the entire sequence automatically. You can even program the list to pause between songs for a fixed amount of time or to wait for a keystroke before proceeding.

Play lists can be saved for future use. Play list files have the extension .set.

I've never used it so I don't exactly how it works, but it looks pretty flexible for what you're considering....

You set up a playlist with the songs you wish to play back. It then starts working it's way through the list, loading files up in advance as needed. It's that simple.

As papa2005 has said you can put set time waits in, wait for keypresses or wizz through them how you wish. Best bet is just to have a play around with it and see how it works best for you.

Thanks guys.  I played around a little with the playlist last night.  My  projects were a little too big to make it work so I'm going to eliminate all the extra tracks and get it down to wave files running no plug-ins tonight.  I'm assuming that a newer faster computer with more than 256 meg of RAM will work much better LOL.  I'm planning on at least 4 gig minimum on my next computer.

*LOL* With only 256MB RAM you're lucky you can get SONAR to even open! *LOL*

Just to add my 2 cents in.  I'm in a 2 man band.  We play a lot of different covers and I have backing tracks sequenced for all of the tunes we do just to cover the drum parts and other instruments we aren't playing.  However, I am running MIDI files and never run Sonar live, only in the studio.  Since I use a Motif ES keboard, I dump my MIDI data into the keyboard's sequencer and run it that way.  I did for a while run a laptop with Sonar for backing tracks, but that always made me nervous since you never know when a computer is going to lock up or go crazy on you.  Just a stuck note in Sonar or a stoppage of the audio engine can be quite embarrasing during a gig.  The long and short of it is, you can certainly do what you are asking.  However, I would suggest a dedicated lap top and a rock solid interface that have both been thoroughly tested before you go to a gig. 

msr

Last weekend I used Sonar to provide backing tracks for 10 songs - about 40 minutes.

I needed to use the lyrics view for cues, and although the playlist will open the lyrics view, it gets mixed up with which song is showing the top most lyrics so I found it unuseable.

So plan B was to put them in sequence in one project. I put markers at the start and end of each song, and put text in the lyrics to denote the starts and ends as well, so that I could step through easily from one song to the next.

One thing that was really important to me was that I did not want to be seen messing with a computer, so I used a midi footswitch to transmit start/stop, go to next marker, and go to previous marker, all set up with ACT.

This worked really well, except I needed it to stop automatically at end of each song. AFAIK there is no way to embed transport control events in to the event list, so it needed a work around. I added a new midi track and put pause events at each stop position and sent it to a midi out which was merged back with the footswitch midi using a merge box.

Since there were some unused audio ins and outs, i put them to good use by feeding an aux from the external mixer into Sonar and set up a couple of busses for reverb and echo . These came out separately from the backing tracks and fed two unused inputs in the mixer and were used to effect the live vocals.

This worked really well in rehearsals and I was encouraged enough to add a further midi track to automate changes to my POD settings at the start of each song, and where necessary during a song.

On the night I was able to have complete hands off, closed the lid of the laptop, had an extension screen with the lyrics/cues in a stage monitor type box next to the real stage monitors, and the footswitch in front of it. Tap the 'start' switch, the count in track plays to the stage monitors, POD receives its set up midi commands, song plays and stops at the end. Tap the 'go to next marker' switch, lyrics/cue indicates which song is cued up. Repeat etc, or tap through/back to the start of the song you want to do next.

Whatever you choose to use I recommend that you run it through with all the equipment you intend to use as it is almost certain that something will not be as you expect, and you don't want to be fixing it on the night.

By the way I used an M-audio fw1814 with a buffer of 256. There is no noticeable latency in the reverb/echo effects so long as you set them up as sends ie 100% effect only. Midi merge and midi footswitches are Phillip Rees devices that hadn't seen any use for about 8 years, and I was pleased to put them to good use.

The gig went well and  the audience were not aware of how it was being done.

HTH

Cliff

*edit* the laptop is an old Toshiba Satellite P4 with a 7200 HD fitted, it ran with CPU usage less than 10%, and disk use less than 5%