ORIGINAL: aaronk

Thanks, Frank. Actually, my old Proteus sound module was up and running on SONAR the same day I installed the new software. My 1993 edition of Cakewalk installed and works fine in XP. The big news for me was learning that I can easily import my old .wrk's into SONAR.

I was never all that impressed by sound modules, and I'm still unimpressed by most of the sampler and synth programs out there. Maybe I just haven't mastered how to use them effectively. For me, they offer a convenient means to proof-listen scores and not much else. They just don't hold a candle to a real instrument. The one exception for me are the acoustic modeling apps, which let me do on my home PC the sort of projects I used to do (with much more difficulty, including punching cards and carrying around magnetic tapes to load onto a fridge-sized D/A converter) in my music school's computer music lab back in the mid-80's.

How "real" insturments can sound has come a long way since the Proteus. All those old sound moudles used fairly small samples of the sound and used "tricks" to extend them. For example a piano may only have one sample every octave and it get's pitch shifted to make the other notes, what's worse is that it's not even the entire decay of the note, they loop a section reducing the volume each time to fake that. The reason for all the cheating was that you could only have so much memory in a device people could afford and would be smaller then a fridge.

Today programs like Tascam Gigastudio have almost no limits on how many recordings of an instrument can be stored and some have several gig (yes gig) of data for just one ! Imagine having many long high quality samples for each key struck at different levels. Even the sustain pedal makes noise if you want it to just like a real piano being recorded with a microphone. Add to that almost unlimited processing options and it gets interesting. Native Instruments B4 is another good example of how far things have come. They make a Hammond Organ / Leslie emulator that can even fool some folks that have played one for years and can do many other organs as well.

Using the full power of a modern computer with all of it's memory and hard drive storage let's software designers go far beyond what any keyboard or sound module designer dreamed of. Playing one live is still a bit frustrating because of the latency but using them in a sequence is amazing.

All the ideas here are GREAT! I've also found you have to be careful where your audio outputs are routed when changing systems. If I ever use Sonar without my 002 Rack hooked up (just using the onboard soundcard- OUCH!) I have trouble with the routing because the 002R and my onboard card have a different number of audio outputs (and MIDI input channels.)

Peace,

For sure the current sampling programs can sound pretty close to actual instruments. But if I want to write for a piano, I'll hire a pianist -- I bet that'll still sound more like a piano than the best set of samples. Putting aside the question of "why fake a piano instead of using a real one, anyway?", there's still the problem that every key on any piano sounds different not only depending on how it's struck, but also on what other keys are being struck or were just struck, whether the damper pedal is on its way up or down, whether any other instrument in the band is causing sympathetic vibrations, etc. etc.

I enjoy old fashioned analog synths precisely because they can't be made to sound like anything else. A Moog sounds like a Moog, and people who can write for a Moog as a Moog, and not as an imitation trumpet or oboe, have done some great stuff. All I was getting at is that I'm happy as a kid in a candy store to be seeing software instruments -- Tassman in particular, less so Reaktor -- that are deeply interesting sonically in themselves, that are their own instruments, real musical instruments, and not simply efforts to emulate something else. Figuring out what it means to compose idiomatically for them is proving to be a great adventure for me.

I have been using Cakewalk Home Studio 2002 since about 2002 and loaded the SONAR demo, it was a pleasant surprise that my old .wrk files loaded up and played fine
The new user interface will take a lot of getting used to

FWIW, I have had trouble getting some old projects to play properly using soft synths or input-monitored hardware synths until I did this:
 
- If you plan to use a Metronome bus to control the Audio metronome output level, routing and tone/EQ (recommended), create it first.
- Click the Metronome button in the Transport module to open Metronome preferences (the preferences page will draw incorrectly with no menu tree).
- Before touching anything else, enter non-zero values for the two MIDI Velocities (i.e. 127 and 80), and Apply.
- Select the 'Use Audio Metronome' button, assign the output port and set levels as desired, and OK.
- Save the modified project as a CWP.