His wider point, though, is dead right. Pretty much none of the items listed are essential to making great records, including brickwall limiters.
 

dubdisciple
I hated Premiere at first.  It did feel clunky at first, but as i got used to it became far more useful to me than Vegas.  Not a knock on Vegas because I love Vegas and think in some ways it is a better choice for certain types of users.  You will find Vegas endorsed by a lot of audio people because it is 1)  (for the beginner) easier to learn.  2) Looks more like audio programs they are used to and even edits in a more similar manner.  For those coming from a purely film/video editing background using something like Avid or Lightworks, Vegas seems downright weird to work with.  Programs like Final Cut and Premiere have a workflow that borrows some elements from older and well entrenched programs like Avid and modernize them for people who are more likely to work with a mouse than keyboard shortcuts and massive and expensive control surfaces.
 
The single best thing abut Premiere for me is the integration with the other programs. Being able to edit my images on timeline in photoshop, jumpo in and out of After Effects and audition  and dedicated color correcting software like Speedgrade without having to render saves me more than enough time to make Vegas a fondly remembered but impractical afterthought for what I do.  In any case, if you already own premiere, I can see no major advantage to spending hundreds more on a program with such similar functionality.

Thanks for the reply. The folks who endorsed it to me were video folks, and I definitely went into it with the "SONAR" mindset. To be honest, the integration aspect was the reason I bought the creative suite, but my focus with it was more Photoshop, Flash, and Dreamweaver. It was comical the day I read a forum post where someone said "I use Audition for my default wave editor." I had never even opened it before then!
 
Video is not a big focus for me (yet), but when that time comes I will delve more into Premiere. Thanks again for the feedback.

mettelus
(not sure if this is a true hijack or not...) Side question for the folks who use Vegas... I have never done video, but have had Adobe Premiere for years as part of the Creative Suite and only really jumped into it once to chop up Karl's 9 hour SWA video into the 50 chapters (my attention span is too short to sit through more than 2 chapters at once). I found Premiere sort of clunky, and not overly intuitive, but had a few folks swear up and down by it. Since I already have it (and have no high expectations with video), is Premiere worth the time taking to learn?
 
I see Vegas endorsed a lot in the forums, so this has always made me wonder, but I honestly have no clue how they are different.

I've only dabbled with Adobe Premiere myself trying to help friends with Adobe CS5 get it up and running and didn't put in enough time to really take a shine to it. Of course that's most likely because I got passed the learning curve and got quite proficient in Vegas and couldn't find my way around the UI.
However I can tell it's no toy by any means and there are plenty of very happy users who do shine brightly to it and really made some great and interesting videos. It's also very popular and highly endorsed with tons of articles you can get a comprehensive handle on it at www.creativecow.com  to jumpstart your learning curve if and when you find the muse. But be careful, NLE's can be highly addicting!

BOY-O-BOY ARE WE EVER SPOILED!
And to think I've never even tried the Nomad Blue Tube Plugins yet. I don't know maybe I'm just satisfied with one of my favorite brick wall limiters with Sonitus compressor/limiter not to mention all many the other Sonitus plugins and presets, and what could be more obvious than the Concrete Limiter?
 
I could never understand the complaints Session Drummer 3 gets, anybody here ever have to mic up a real drum set with each piece on it's own channel and  spend hours and hours and maybe even day or so trying to get it tuned, mixed and hoping to getting sound half as good as the Andy Johns kit? Or the Gretch, Yamaha Birch, or Bonzo kit to name a few for that matter? By comparison it takes very little tweaking, but it will take some tweaking to get SD3 to sound any way I want it to, and I mean exactly how I want it to. I love it when people say; "Man Steev, how'd you get that killer drum sound?" and I say; "Oh I can't take all the credit for that, Andy Johns helped out considerably." LOL
We got EQs, reverbs, compressors, noise gates, and oh yeah, even a dedicated percussion channel strip with a ton of presets to get us started carving out that cup of drool sound we've been looking for, and all we got to do is a little bit of work for it, and we'll get there.
 Addictive Drums sound great too, but that proprietary mapping kills the whole thang for me. I've been sequencing and programming drums since the 80's in the GM rhythm spec and when I hit keys on my MIDI keyboard controller I expect the right drums or cymbals to be where I expect them to be. I don't play well with loop libraries myself, but anyone who does got one killer kit.
 And I really like Dimension Pro as much as any other sampler. If a patch doesn't sound just right, I'll tweak it until it does. Same with Rapture, Lounge Lizard, Z3ta, True Pianos, etc, and so on. They can all be tweaked, internally or with audio and MIDI plugins.
 If anyone can tell me of a more complete and feature rich DAW than SONAR Producer X3 Please LET ME KNOW, I want it, and if I find one I'll let you know

dubdisciple

Kev999
I'm just saying that the bundle of effects and virtual instruments falls short in a few areas, e.g.:

Brickwall limiter
Drums
Orchestral instruments
Hammond organ
Electric piano

Maybe not every user would consider these things important. It depends on your specific needs.

...the brickwall Limiter in the Nomad Bundle...Addictive Drums...the lounge lizard module...

I wasn't aware of Nomad, Addictive Drums or Lounge Lizard. So there's 3 more bases covered in X3, which obviously goes some way towards undermining my argument. But the Sonar bundle is still weak in some areas and I'm sure that I'm not the only user who relies on a few third-party plugins.

Steev
 
 Addictive Drums sound great too, but that proprietary mapping kills the whole thang for me.

Addictive Drums will map to general midi just fine - go to the beats page of AD, lower right, there's a selector for mapping.  General Midi is there.
 
There's another way to get there too, but I can't remember it at the moment.

kev

Kev999
 
 
I wasn't aware of Nomad, Addictive Drums or Lounge Lizard. So there's 3 more bases covered in X3, which obviously goes some way towards undermining my argument. But the Sonar bundle is still weak in some areas and I'm sure that I'm not the only user who relies on a few third-party plugins.

I don't think you would get an argument on the fact that Sonar has weaknesses but the question was not  whether Sonar was perfect, but whether it could make an album. The simple answer to that is yes.  Even the weaknesses you allude to are more along the lines of relative than absolute.  If, for instance one prefers Fab Filter for EQ, it does not mean the Quadcurve is not more than capable. Bottom line is that too many albums have been completed with far less despite any shortcomings.  I'm not saying one should use only Cakewalk synths and effects.  That's a different question all together.  Even in Sonar webinars I have seen Cake staff use other plugins.

ProTools has a very nice workflow for audio especially (or so most people feel). Back when PCs were a LOT less powerful, their expansion cards allowed people to use a ton of plugins while native systems were stuck with a few, or low quality ones. These days, that isn't such an issue, but ProTools is by now the de facto standard for larger recording studios. Many production style studios use Cubase, Logic and yes, Sonar. Reaper is gaining some popularity, and if I'm not mistaken Colby Caillat's hit of 2012(?) "Call Me Maybe" was done entirely in Reason.

In other words, your own skill in composition, production and mixing are much more likely to hamper you than any inherent lack of sound quality on Sonar's part.

jscomposer
 
Thanks for the report. That really blows, I was hoping Cake would have improved on the video. All of my cues get sent from PT11. Scoring to pic is all done in Cubase 7, which I have shamefully grown to love (sorry Cake!). Does X3d even detect the frame rate and format when imported??

I havent had any issues ever with X3c and frame rate drops etc but you have to manually set it rather than any kind of detection, same goes with the format.

I Usually get clients to hard code the frame rate anyway just to be on the safe side.

brian brock

Steev
 
 Addictive Drums sound great too, but that proprietary mapping kills the whole thang for me.

Addictive Drums will map to general midi just fine - go to the beats page of AD, lower right, there's a selector for mapping.  General Midi is there.
 
There's another way to get there too, but I can't remember it at the moment.

THANK YOU Brian! I shall indeed investigate, now that I have some time to breath a little easier. I'm Excited!!