Greetings,
 
I have a powerful tower machine that I run Sonar Platinum on which I mainly use at home. I now need to visit a friends house to record vocals to then return home to mix. For the remote recording, I will use an i5 laptop to do this. Both machines have Sonar Platinum on them.
 
My question:
 
While I know I can simply copy the entire project file to the laptop and then copy it back to the desktop, is this the "Best" method to use for what I need?
 
What do others do in this situation?
 
Thanks,
 
JB 
 
 

I would just export the Vocal WAV files from the laptop project, and transfer them to the desktop (making sure that the files start at 0:00:000).
Then import them into the desktop project.

you could simply install audacity or reaper to do the recording bits. then copy over the wav files to your sonar station when you get home. the A2D conversion will have the bigget impact on the quality of the recording (beside the mics, vox etc :-) )
 
alternative - buy a copy of the sonar artist so you have the familiar UI.

I take it by your responses that you're not keen on transferring back the entire project file? 
 
I was considering just importing the wav files to the original, I'm going to have to test that a little... 
 
Thanks!
 
JB

OP has the app on both machines.

By my read, the question is whether to bring over the whole project to perform with or a new project with just the one track of the current state of the project.

Benefit of the bounce method...
Project is small and simple.
IO is reduced.
Processor load is reduced because the track is printed.
You may be able to work with lower sample buffer and have reduced risk of dropout.

Complication...
You have to merge the projects when you get home.

Alternative...
Copy the whole project to the laptop and hope latency is sufficiently low.

If you find latency is not sufficiently low, given that you have the whole project, you can make the new smaller project on the spot.

You have to work within your constraints. I would think the smaller project would be simpler.

One thing I didn't initially mention... the smaller project may help the laptop stay cooler and reduce fan noise.

JBelthoff
I take it by your responses that you're not keen on transferring back the entire project file? 

It depends.
If you transfer the whole project from the desktop to the laptop, DON'T TOUCH THE DESKTOP PROJECT, record the vocals to the laptop, and then transfer the project back to the desktop, you'll be fine.
My preference for simply bringing the Vocal WAVs back to the desktop is just that you're only copying a handful of WAV files instead of overwriting the project.
From my experience moving projects (not just daw-related), having too many working files of the same thing can cause mixups.  

I would be happy to move the whole project but this will depend on if the laptop has all the same plugins and sound libraries installed.  I work between surface/laptop/desktop and it is very easy to move project between the laptop and desktop because I keep the plugins in sync.  I have to think more about projects I want to work on using the surface because it does not have everything installed. 

When I do something similar it depends on how fussy the singer is.
 
Do I know if the singer wants drums, click, etc?  If i know the basic stuff, then I just do a mix down, and import that single wav file into the laptop and have them record the vocals to that.  
 
Then move the vocal track back.  This is the easiest way to get super low latency and not have to worry about taxing the system in any way.  

All excellent input!
 
Thanks ALL 

I've always moved the entire project but that only works if you're confident the laptop is fast enough to cope. Using an eSATA SSD makes transfer speeds trivial.