The things I do when using Sonar

I am going to list some of things I do when mixing and arranging in Sonar these days. For some of this might seem to over the top or unproductive.
 
So this is the presuming you have all of your tracks recorded and at hand.
 

• Order my tracks by category (i.e. Drums, Instruments, Synths, Vocals).
• Colour code my tracks (with slightly different hues to signify slight differences in the same group). Follow Bus colour allows you to quickly assign tracks to groups and find them easier during mixing and arrangement.
• Use pink noise (C-Weighted, 0dBFS) to level tracks and adjust the faders to suit. Which is when I can only hear the pink noise when the track is soloed. This may not be necessary on every occasion if you have a treated studio. Although I find this is a ready reckonner to balance each track. 
• Group each fader for related tracks together for the same category. Even if this is never automated, it means whenever a track is automated or mistakenly reset - the original volume differences will be maintained.
• For EDM, I use the Kick drum as my target loudness and never compress along with others until the very end of the project.
• Currently I aim for between -18dBFS and -16dBFS for my average mix level. During mixing I keep this between -23 and -20dBFS.
• Low end frequencies are hard too or impossible to produce on small speakers or with certain formats. MP3 and general lossy formats will discard certain frequencies, however always save your master as a WAV/AIFF first. Then from your stereo master produce your lossy formats although I think FLAC or ALAC are better music formats if a little larger.
• Metering is important. Use a RMS meter such as the one in Adaptive Limiter.
• Keep it musical and not everything has to be precise. 

There is tonnes of stuff I do however whether it is right or wrong is another story. I like to experiment plug-ins, mix them up and abuse them. Like use delays as a phaser or chorus effect by using discreet values and touch of feedback and modulation. Reverse MIDI notes and record them with an instrument track. Then bounce the audio and reverse the sound to create ambient effects. 
 
 

Your interest is not my concern . No offence.

I think the thing about room calibration is always an issue. Your integrated digital will balanced from one point of view however once it's analogue and bouncing off walls, a completely different story. At least your addendum was useful not a display of unnecessary apathy ;-).
 

The thing with room acoustics and all of those aspects, you could spend thousands and never be happy. If your music sounds rubbish or the techniques you use aren't up to scratch like improper equalisation, overuse of dynamic compression, excessive bleed from reverb effects etc. It may become more obvious and evidently you still need to learn you craft so to speak.
 
I hate stating the obvious. Firstly even though it is professional software, you don't have to be professional to use it. 
 
My perfect setup would be a SSD driven Intel system (or perhaps AMD Threadripper) as I work mainly in the box. Wouldn't mind an outboard mixer for multiple monitor sets (my current, Genelec or Adam Audio, Neumann). Also they say you should never mix with the same speakers or/and room. However lets presume that's not an option, so I would love a pair of midfields as well to save needing a subwoofer.
 
Again once you have all of that, there is a strong argument you should make money from that. Always wanted to be a mix engineer or similar. Whether freelance or for a commercial studio.

I'm going to get my next track/remaster mastered through Cloudbounce. So keeping all the final stuff off as much as possible. Although I'm going to put through NLS Channel/Buss to emulate a console before I mix it down to stereo.
 

Actually I don't know WTF Cloudbounce does? Is it my mastering options, I don't know. Everything sounds trashed.
 
Are they just determining the average RMS, adding an algorithmic eq curve based on genre and then cranking the crap out of it. My premaster was sitting at -20dB yet still sounded like it was being fed through Waves GTR.
 
But rant over, I am going to try the remaster myself until I can afford to get it done proper. A treated studio and calibration is my problem currently. So I am not going for commercial loud mastering levels for the moment.