I want to read about how X1 performs, not how it looks. Especially Effects..

I know the GUI is a radical change but that's not the whole reason I will upgrade (actually it's more the price).  Anyway, anyone noticing better CPU performance compared to 8.5? What about Effects? I'm really dying to know if there's anything different that warrants me not having to purchase a new plugIn suite. I was in the market for one ever since I upgraded my computer to 64bit but I was hoping X1 would come with enough to hold me off for a while. How are the effects? Anything new or is it the same Sonitus Plugs as always? Please, do tell.

Thank you,
Rock

Hi,

As far as performance,

This is all subject to systems and setups. But personally I had a project that pushed my Sonar 8.5 to near dropout limits. After reading this thread I decided to see how that same project survived in X1.  A bit of a stress test.

To my SURPRISE The CPU load is down 23% and is running smooth as silk. This is a current song I am working on for my album (Same project worked on last night during download)  Whatever X1 is doing for this project, I am very very pleased. (A bit shocked actually. Im really pushing sonar hard with this project)

Best,

Here's my story. My main music PC died over the summer and that put me out of sorts for a while on the home recording front. I bought myself a laptop (for many reasons) and then decided to upgrade to Sonar 8.5 Studio after the X1 announcement came out.

The laptop (with its mediocre on-board audio hardware) could nonetheless run a song with nine tracks and three soft synths. Barely. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it would skip around a bit, and sometimes I'd get that noisy clicking annoyance which could be cured by either raising (or lowering!---no rhyme or reason to this) the latency.

With some success with a midi-only project, I attempted one of the audio tutorials. It simply would not play at all: sluggish, choppy, and unusable.

ENTER THE DRAGON

So I fire up X1 Studio not twenty minutes ago and load up the big audio tutorial file: 28 tracks, plus about 15 soft synths loaded, some tracks frozen, some not. I had no hopes whatsoever that this monster would play on my laptop.

IT WAS FLAWLESS. X1 played the song, start to finish, without a glitch (and without any further tweaking on my part--8.5 required constant tweaking). Right out of the box. I was stunned and I only mean that in the best possible way.

I'm very eager to continue this exploration now!

Charlie

Yeah, the bar thing is like "cool, it now shows all cores" but it's hard to tell what they are really doing (and of course the first bar is the highest which always concerns me)

The one little cpu bumper I noticed is the "gloss" eq seems to jump the cpu a couple extra notches...which is no big, just letting you know.

Ha ha Subtlearts-that cracks me up man!

I haven't had the time I need with X1 to have tested it properly. However, I have skimmed the surface a little and have to say that so far the Pro Channel sounds fantastic! And if it doesn't take too much CPU power to run, then even better. The only problem was that I got a clicking sound if I switched on the different components while in playback. Sometimes that happened when twisting the knobs too. Probably a fix for that soon.

I have to get used to the GUI and I most definitely learn to set up Windows so I can switch between. The only worry I have is that it took a little while for it to jump to a new window layout when I tested the ones out of the box. But if that is the case (I'm not even sure:p) then it will probably be fixed soon too.

So far, diggin' it.

I haven't tested it that extensively but it only happens when the "gloss" button is pressed. Otherwise instances of pro strip don't really add much (so far........more testing to do!)