I used Sonar for Mastering on two projects 1 was rock and other was gospel ... both came out stunning and stacked up to the best of what was playing on the radio that year.. Looks like Sonar is  better at that ..than anything else.

I've been using Studio One for mastering in conjunction with Sonar.

Rather than use Studio One throughout (as is its intention), I simply remix the songs in Sonar and export the stereo track to the folder where Studio One is looking for them.

If I happen to rename the exported audio file from Sonar, then Studio One prompts me for the missing file as you might expect.

This approach almost does what Studio One offers "in the box", with all its convenient automated mix import updates, but allowing me to use Sonar as my preferred DAW for recording and mixing.

Of course I'd be happier if I could use Sonar as the mastering tool, complete with the end-to-end integration, and DDP exports etc. but for now this is my workaround.

Bring it on.... :-)

Yeah Craig!

I do most of my mastering in Soanr now and get excellent results, but a few things would complete the package. I haven't checked o it the studio one version, but I will comment with my thoughts...

I too would mostly like the Bakers to focus on the core issues, but it would be great if they could bundle a version of Ozone or such with it... And a song sequencing page as well as true red book burning...

Currently I master each song separately in Sonar, then assemble and burn using CD Architect. As each song has been brought to its individual max, I then lower the gain of the necessary songs within CD Architect to achieve the desired song2song gain...

I've been using the SSL bus channel compressor followed by the Concrete Limiter with a few other similar devices when more compression is required... I do my best to only compress a db or two with any single compressor except for the Concrete where I go for 3 db...

So I'm thinking if they create a page that can multidock and house song sequence as well as the various related manipulation of fields (senior moment can't remember the proper name) for song start and such allowing for indexing and cross fades and the likes...

Bundled with a copy of Ozone and either the ability to run two quad eq's on the mastering track or an 8 point version built into the mastering page?

That would be awesome!

Keni

Of course, one could already master with Sonar easily in terms of doing the actual audio mastering and comping everything together with fades. I actually use Sonar to do all of my crossfades and make my final DDP waves... laying out each song on a separate track so I can easily see the overlap and transitions and then bouncing the wave. You can then separate the final bounced wave where you want each track to begin and then bounce each track again for creating gapless playback CDs or MP3s. It's actually really great for various tricky situations... if say you've already mastered everything, but you want a crossfade between two songs and that creates a new peak above 0. After you've bounced the crossfade (with 32bit floating point bit depth of course) Just separate the offending section (crossfading the beginning and ending with the rest of the song) and stick a limiter on just that section. Bounce again... Fixed! I love how flexible Sonar is for this kind of stuff.
 
One could easily use all of the included software already for the audio side of things, although I don't think you'd get truly top level results. Companies like DMG, iZotope, Fab-Filter, Flux, Sonoris, Acustica Acqua, etc. etc. all make very nice tools that can get you in the realm of professional quality (if you know what you're doing and you have a proper listening environment). I rather not have Cakewalk trying to develop tools that most likely aren't going to really compete on that level anyways... there are already EQs, Comps, limiter, etc. included that are fine. All basic audio tools are already there!
 
But what could Cakewalk include that would be really cool and/or allow someone to stay in Sonar and deliver a master to a manufacturing plant?
 
An ISP (intersample peak) monitor. Currently cakewalk would not detect if they're was (or technically - going to be) an ISP, which is important tool these days in mastering. I'm currently using DMG Dualism but it would be nice to have it built right in to Sonar.
 
A LUFS meter. Essential for people doing broadcast/post work and hopefully the eventual standard for getting levels in a post "volume war" era of audio mastering (if that ever happens). There is already a lot of discussion about Spotify and iTunes radio creating built in volume controls based on a particular readings in LUFS... perhaps we'll really see an end to the volume wars some day when having a loud volume isn't actually louder than everything else?
 
DDP creation. If you really want to do things correctly, almost all manufacturing plants are using DDP files for CD duplication. A dedicated DDP creator would be great. You could even make it an automated process. Whether or not you have each song in different lanes of one track or different songs spread across multiple tracks feeding into a single bus or output - just select everything and click make DDP (or have it in the bounce to track dialog)... Sonar could automatically render the final wave and reference track start times, include all crossfades or add silence if there was a gap between two tracks. Ability to edit all of this, swap out tracks, manage all of the text/metadata or add ISRC codes would be needed as well.
 
Sample Rate Conversion! Yup, cakewalk should license iZotopes SRC (hopefully allowing the variety of custom settings) and allow SRC with a session/project... ie convert a project to a new sample rate. Most Daws can't do this within a session, so it would be pretty amazing. Heck, I would LOVE to be able to pull up a 44.1kHz session and convert it to 88.2 or 96. That would be incredible!!!
 
A proper wave editor. When I double click on an audio clip I don't want to go to a loop construction view... I want to go to Sonar's new audio editor. That has tools for fixing digital errors, clicks, tape hiss, vinyl pops and scratches and maybe even a de-clipper. Powered by iZotope? Even better! Offer a free light version of RX and turn the audio editor view idea into the new iZotope audio editing Region FX. I'm really excited just thinking about the idea... an iZotope RX Region FX... please!
 
There is always more, but off the top of my head these are the things that would make mastering completely in Sonar a go...
 
Take these ideas to the Bakers Craig... make a good presentation... we're counting on you! ;-)

Anderton
Bear in mind this is all blue sky stuff here...you are not getting any secret insights into the Bakery with this thread, just one guy's speculation. 

Didn't one guys speculation ask the forum what they thought about subscription software? Cakewalk seems to have come up with a system that works and is fair, but just sayin' where the travel bus ended up. Sometimes your speculation has a way of ending up as product. Which in this case I could be fine with it.

CAL is being deprecated, and in any case it is linked to MIDI data but I would really like scripting included.

It is loosely part of mastering; you finish a file of sounds that need to be cut up, followed by lots of manual work cutting up sometimes hundreds of sounds. There's lots of small individual processes that need to accomplished one after another, including exporting

I do this in Sound Forge for its "scripting" ability that really speeds up this sort of work. It would be great to never have to leave Sonar. I would love to see these sorts of features rather than more plugins.

tlw
As for noise reduction, I don't much care whether it's a plugin, DSP process or what, so as it's there. For a fully fledged DAW to lack that function is a great big gaping hole in its' capabilities.

I don't know of any DAW that has this built-in (except for Reaper's plug-in, which I haven't tried so don't know how it stacks up against SF or RX), so SONAR's not unique. I assume that's because it's a fairly complicated offline process.

Thatsastrat
 
Didn't one guys speculation ask the forum what they thought about subscription software?

 
Yes, but that was because I was on an anti-subscription crusade and writing articles about it, so I was gathering opinions. This is one of the more intelligent forums on the internet, so it seemed like a good place to research compared to forums where the answer would have been "Subscriptions suck donkey ballz, dude." However I do think my opinions added weight to the "you get to keep what you buy" mentality Cakewalk had about the subject.
 

Sometimes your speculation has a way of ending up as product. Which in this case I could be fine with it.

Well, a LOT of forum comments end up in products, it's not just me. If you look over the bug fix list in the monthly releases, almost all of them were mentioned by users. Doesn't mean Cakewalk wasn't aware of them prior to their being mentioned, but I know for a fact that many bugs have been fixed specifically because users confirmed and provided steps to reproduce.
 
Besides, my gig is to speculate 

So that makes you both the Chief Magic Officer and now, Influential Speculator, too. Work work work, eh?
That you, Craig are on here "getting the street perspective" and adding your weight to those things is quite encouraging. Not that I am discouraged in the least. With you on our team and theirs (CW/Gibson) is great and I am eager to see what's next with Sonar.
Michael