EDIT : Deleted

Are you serious, someone deleted my post cause i cant see it now, i used almost 1 hour to make it ??
Was there any reason for it.... ?

 
jan - the "someone" who deleted your posts was Akismet, the automated spam filter.  it deleted them because of all of the links you had in your posts thinking they were spam.  I've restored them from the recycle bin.  
 

Cool thanks, now i have triple posts, gahh
Now i need to edit away the others..
 

TheMaartian
You don't say what kind of music you're mixing, but if it's the typical guitar, bass, keys, drums and other acoustics, 

Yes, those typical instruments

np - if it happens again, just PM a host and they can restore them for you without you having to rewrite them all over again!

What comes with SONAR will handle any real needs except for multiband maximization. This recommendation:
 
2. W1 Limiter W1 Limiter is a clone of Waves L1, with identical output
 
Will take care of that for free. A high quality maximizer, like the Waves L3 MultiMaximizer, will cost you a lot more. 
 
However the LP-64 multiband compressor is excellent. It just won't do the brickwall-type limiting.

twaddle
I think what John was alluding to and what you must surely have missed was the fact that the Op was asking for Economy plugs and you're suggesting the most overpriced bundles on the market, not to mention ilok. If waves are economy what the hell do you call expensive pro plugs?
 
Waves, (as you pointed out) are ridiculously priced.
 
I would suggest the OP steers well clear of waves and takes the advice of Bristol_Jonesey and pwalpwal and gets to know how to get the best from what he has because what he has can do a pretty good job and the are oodles a tutorials from cakewalk about mixing and mastering.
 
Maybe if he feels he wants to spend some more money for that extra polish something like Izotopes Ozone would be worth looking at as an all in one solution.
 
Steve

I would NEVER have mentioned those bundles if I didn't have one available for under $100; that's about $15/plugin, a freakin' bargain in my book, for a professional plugin.
 
And I HATE iLoks. Waves no longer requires an iLok as of v9 (the current version); I don't know when they switched. You d/l the Waves license center and installer, run the license center to install the license on your PC, run the installer and tick the plugin for which you have a license and run it. That simple. SONAR sees the Wave shell, and I have no problem running their plugins in SONAR.
 
The only time I buy Waves is on some kind of Stupid Sale and then I buy the license at Audio Deluxe, which saves quite a bit more. To put a number on it, if it's a plugin I can use, or want to play with, and I can get it for 20% or less of List, I consider it.
 
And I'll repeat: the CLA plugins are EASY to use to get a decent mix with. I was making the assumption that the OP was new at this like I am ("...what a learning curve this is!"). Same for me. Learning SONAR and mixing at the same time does indeed present a bit of a steep learning curve.
 
I'm not a professional, nor have I any plans to become one. I am not delivering finished audio to a paying client; I'm doing it for myself.
 
I think the CLA plugins are a great bridge to learning what goes where, when and how much. Once I get a decent sound mix, I can use Mix Recall to build additional FX chains with discrete, existing plugins and see how close to or better than the CLA mix I can get.
 
So, for me, an excellent learning tool. I've wasted WAY more than $100, so that was in no way about me getting rid of the stupidly purchased second license. It was about offering someone who appeared to be in a situation similar to my own a good learning tool set for a good price.
 
I have a right to use SONAR any way I choose. I am surprised, and disappointed, at the way this thread has progressed.
 
My last post in this thread.

The common public perception is that Waves plug-ins are expensive. This stems from the days when they hardly ever offered sales. But I guess the interpretation of the OP depends on what someone thinks is meant by "economy." $100 is a great deal for a Waves bundle, but that's half the price of what X3 Studio was...so it's all relative. 
 
BTW you also addressed another misconception - the iLok. I think Waves' new licensing method is a HUGE improvement over the iLok. I also think it has much greater ease of use.

On another topic, and I know many people will disagree with this, to me mixing and mastering are almost all about EQ, with dynamics and a nice reverb thrown in for good measure. For something like delay, pretty much any plug-in will do. In fact for room ambience, sometimes I get better results from four delays set for short, prime number delays than the room sound in a reverb plug-in.
 
It's the playing and the songwriting that determine the emotional impact on the listener. Plug-ins can enhance the listener's experience, but they can also diminish a sound's impact. 
 
Sound on Sound magazine does a series called "Mix Rescue" where they go to someone's house and work on a mix. Usually the first thing they do is bypass all the plug-ins to hear the natural sound of the tracks. More than once, the person went to get them tea or whatever, came back to the studio, listened to the song, and said "Wow, what did you do - that sounds so much better!" The answer was that they had bypassed all the plug-ins 
 

TheMaartian
 
 
 
 
I have a right to use SONAR any way I choose. I am surprised, and disappointed, at the way this thread has progressed.
 
My last post in this thread.

Sorry it wasn't a fun thread, but it should be...   anyways I do appreciate the info VERY MUCH, despite any negative comments. I'm a noob, and want to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible. I know it may be perceived as lazy, but a million bright fellows have already done this, so I'm hoping to cut a few corners with your knowledge in hand. why reinvent the wheel? And $100 isn't by any means out of the question for a quality set of plugins!  Thanks for the offer, will read up on it and get back to you soon as possible. In the mean time, slightly overwhelmed with info here. 
Also, to the others, I appreciate VERY MUCH the comments, but for some reason I don't believe that the modest plugins I have are necessarily the right way to go...  even on a budget. They may be, but... I just don't know right now... There are a buzzillion products out there, and some are definitely just plain better than others. They sound better, they're easier to use, etc. You can have an eq that's so complicated, even though it sounds good, and is economical, that it's just not worth the effort and time. I'm hoping to narrow down the field so I don't have to waste time sorting out what's worthy and what's not. What if something even like the T-RackS White 2A Leveling Amplifier is the simplest, most musical compressor that one can get for use on most all tracks, and may be had on sale for $69 ? (This is just for argument's sake, by the way)...  By economical I don't necessarily mean free. The Waves CLA2A is like $250...  to me that there ain't economical. I want to be able to get something decent and not be surprised later on that something of comparable value was much better. If I wind up getting 5 plugins that I use all the time, that work great, sound musical, and have to pay a coupla hundred or so for the set, that seems like a good investment to me. Sorry, perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier. 
 
Anyhow, maybe I should've asked everyone for their favorite economical plugins in each category?