Sonar Producer X1 Ram

http://www.cakewalk.com/P...er-System-Requirements

The amount of RAM needed is not determined by the DAW itself, but rather by what you do with it. If you are recording straight audio, e.g. using the computer as a substitute for a tape machine, then memory requirements are quite modest. Under that scenario, the 3.5GB limitation of XP is irrelevant.

But as soon as you add a virtual instrument to the mix, you're now dealing with lots of files. A drum synth might need between half a gigabyte to a couple gigabytes. An ultra-realistic sampled piano might need need 2 or 3 gigabytes. Start stacking sampled instruments up, such as building an entire virtual orchestra, and the RAM requirements can quickly exceed whatever you have.

Memory is still one of the cheapest upgrades you can do for your computer, and there is really no downside to having more than you need. If you're on XP, there is no point in having more than 4GB installed, but if you're running a 64-bit O/S go ahead and load it up with 8-16GB if you can afford it. You might not need all that RAM today, but there's a good chance that you eventually will.

Versions of Sonar before X1 will run with XP  2 GIGs of RAM 7400RPM hard drives quite nicely. Purchasing X1 might be overkill if your not a power user. I've never come close to maxing out my Rig but then I never do more than 16 audio tracks with 2 EFX sends, and a couple of MIDI tracks for keyboards. Like Bitfliper says, it depends on what your planing on getting into.
Good Lord, 16 GIGS of RAM??? and I only have 2????
I think that's for the people who score movies using MIDI. Real audio does not require much RAM, Just  a nice hard drive configuration. The Operating System also plays a minor part as long as the audio interface drivers are bulletproof. Main reason to upgrade to Windows 7 is the extra RAM. But like I say, some of us would never use it and still have a full production happening.

I thought Sonar was just storing midi signals, and then playing back the sounds off a sound module?

Sounds like you've been away for awhile.

We need to make a distinction between software synthesizers, sample players and hybrids of the two.

A soft synth such as, say Pentagon, does not require much RAM because it's using CPU cycles to emulate analog circuitry such as oscillators and filters.

A fully-sampled soft "synth" isn't really a synthesizer at all, but rather a playback device for streaming wave files. Lots of wave files. When I play a sampled piano I see the number of concurrent wave files being played easily exceeding 80 at a time. I might use Sampletank and have four patches going at once, and can easily exceed 100 files playing at once. These are typically 1 to 6MB files. Most people use more than one sampler at a time. Do the arithmetic and you'll see that memory requirements can be quite large.

Samplers such as Kontakt offer a mechanism for using less memory, wherein only the first couple seconds of each file are loaded into RAM, and then - hopefully - the disk drives are able to deliver the rest of the data fast enough. But even with direct streaming you might still see a gigabyte or more of memory in use.

So your choice of software instruments makes a big difference in the amount of RAM you need.