Hi Spider-

-Although I can physically play all the parts to an arrangement, I prefer notate all of my music with the draw tool in the piano roll. The draw tool is cubersome, it dosn't always place the notes where I precisely want them. Switching the prefs with right click to 'select' or 'delete' notes is a hassle to me as well.

You can configure the PRV Tools to do whatever you want (Tools > PRV Configuration), and turn on/off/configure Snap To Grid to place notes precisely where you want them.

-Is there no wav file editing in S7P? I click on an audio file and would like to clip off the end to make it fit in the arrangement window but I don't see even minor audio file editing. Does this happen elsewhere, or not at all?

There's not a dedicated .wav file editor in S7PE, but if you zoom in on the track you should be able to do everything you need to do with slip editing, envelopes, etc. You can also add .wav editing tools to the Tools menu.

-Building on audio file editing: I have Sound Forge installed. In the Tools bar drop down, I can see Sound Forge. I select Sound Forge and nothing happens to open the app. Is there a setting to correct this?

You have to have an audio clip selected first.

Lastly, all of the 'automatic' sounds programmed into some of the synths and the Session Drummer 2 may be useful to some, but I don't care for them. Writing music for me is more about creating every note, not having automation.

Same here -- what is your question? SONAR doesn't limit you to programmed sounds or loops.

-Susan

Have you worked through the tutorials in the help file / manual yet?

Also, have you watched the many videos available from this link posted as a sticky in the forum?

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.asp?m=925376

Also, Spider_Pig...if you continue to have questions or problems, please post a new topic in order to keep this thread on-topic.

edit: Spider_Pig / topic redirect.

I was involved with recording and performing well before MIDI.
I did a Roland endorsement (after doing the same with Korg previously.) When John Damon (sales rep) went to Roland, I went with him. I started working with Tom Beckman, CEO of Roland USA. This was still pre-MIDI. I started using a cut down B-3 built by the late Bill Beer of Los Angeles' Keyboard Products. He had put together custom organs for the Beach Boys, Santana, Three Dog Night and many others. I came to him with an idea of using the cut down B-3 to key external keyboards. Keep in mind that this was pre-MIDI. He looked at me, as if I was crazy, and immediately went to the drawing board. He constructed a reed set-up capable of keying up to 15 synthesizers simultaneously. I know, it sounds rather common now, but it was earth-shattering innovative in the 70's. Played Vegas, Reno and Tahoe during that time and recorded on Ovation Records, Chicago. It was around that time that Ikataroo Kakehashi, CEO of Roland International started flying into Vegas and meeting me for breakfast after shows to pick my brain. He was very interested in how I was orchestrating the keyboards and using them. He would sit there literally drawing figures on napkins in the coffee shop. Pretty soon, he started returning with various keyboards, effect pedals etc for me to try and critique. He was always interested in seeing how I would use the stuff.
When I introduced the first Roland Chorus unit in the U.S. at the Guitar Center in San Diego, I ran my vocal mike through it and they were taken back. They were only thinking of it as a guitar effect at that time. It's funny now, as it is all so commonplace. It was a lot of fun being involved with the r & d part of new instruments and the beginning of MIDI. Ok, Ok, I'm a bit older than most of ya, but I figure that someday I may be the world's only 90 yr old rock 'n roll man.
Anyways, I started out in the 80's on the Atari 1040ST which was great with its built in MIDI interface using Hybrid Arts SMPTE-Track and all the accessories. Why??? It was simple; Billy Arnell and Stephan Daystrom. Stefan, of course, was a major programmer of the program and Billy used the darn program in more ways than you could think up. Billy knew this program backwards and forwards. They were on the phone with me constantly getting me off to the right direction. I don't think they ever really knew my background, which was better, because they helped me simply because I was some dude who needed help. That, my friends, is worth its weight in gold.

That's why I think forums like this and the great people on it, plus the support from Cakewalk are invaluable.

My second jump after the Atari started losing its support was to move to the PC (after a short time with a Mac). I had tried Logic on the Atari, but was happy where I was with SMPTE Track. When it was time to move, I jumped to the PC which looked to me to a solid choice.

Used Steinberg for some time but wasn't as comfortable with the interface. My last jump was to Cakewalk up through version 9.
I tried Sonar 1, but the computer I was using just didn't measure up.

In the interim, my dad got Parkinson's Disease and I packed up the whole career and came home to care for him. There are still a few people in the industry that wondered what the heck happened to me. Voila, the disappearing act!
Now, I'm just a part of rare record collectors collections around the world. Alas.

I couldn't be without music somehow, so I built a studio not too far from my home in the Lehigh Valley. Eventhough, It was initially an analog audio, I always had in the back of my mind that there had to be a computer somewhere in the middle of everything.

So, I decided to tackle building one a computer specifically for the studio. The unit employs the AMD 64 processor with a couple of gigs of ram and a 160gb drive. That is where I am now. (Of course, I am thinking about the next one I want to build..he heh).

A couple of months ago, I stopped into Dave Phillips Music in Allentown, PA and saw Sonar 6 Studio Edition on the shelf. I decided to give it a shot. Wow...it knocked my socks off. It took me a few weeks to decide to upgrade to Sonar 7 Producer.
And as the story goes..... Heeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrr I AM having a blast!
I can't believe how smoothly the audio works in this program (I knew their MIDI part would shine, but I didn't expect the audio to fly too!). I am a convinced Sonar 7 Producer user. Kudos to the whole Cakewalk staff and the many users who tweaked it.

My mortality finally stared my in the face one morning as I was having a cup of coffee. Though I've had many things published from music for kids shows, documentaries, variety shows and, of course, my own recordings...Well, it's simple. I've written literally thousands of songs. I realized that if I don't record as many now as I can, they may disappear with me when my time is up. So I am enbarking on a projec to record as many of my tunes as I can...while I can. Don't get me wrong...I'm still healthy, and I'm not a grandfather, yet.
But I figure, that someday...somewhere...future generations will have received a lot of frisbees full of original material, or they just may say, "You know what, that son-of-a-gun was a pretty creative sort, ya know?"

There is a problem, though. As fast as I record songs, I keep writing them. My mind is flying a mile a minute. You songwriters out there, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's a great life being creative, but it can drive you up the wall sometimes.
There's simply not enough hours in the day.
Thank you all for you help... yesterday and tomorrow.

Okie Duke (studioguy1)

Fascinating post, Duke. Thanks for taking time to share that.

I particulary enjoyed reading about the pre-MIDI work. My old Arp Odessy keyboard had a 'CV' jack on it which I believe allowed it to connect to another Odyssey. I never got the chance to try it out before I sold it.

My first MIDI/digital keyboard was a Korg Poly-800. It was a real thrill to play that keyboard and trigger sounds from another one. I got to do some recording in local studios around Lakeland, Floriday in the early 80's and later in Indianapolis. We ended up once at a guy's house who was recording on Mac. I don't know what software he had. That planted the seed for me to find a way to do my own recording work. I worked with a 4 track tape machine; then worked in home studio engineering and recording backing tracks on a Tascam 1/2" 8-track and Fostex 1/2" 16-track. Somewhere along the line I bought Cakewalk for DOS, 2.0 and I've been a customer ever since.

Hi Guys

used 4 track in the old days and always went to a studio to master - the guy there used cakewalk which always seemed so complicated for us old analog guys !

Finally dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st when my teenage son's pc was on its last legs - and i purchased a new one
someone told me i could put a soundcard into it and use it a daw ! The only DAW i had heard of was a Deputy as a kid!

After months it seemed i pucked up courage to buy a emu 0404 which came with sonar le and a bundle of goodies... i was attracted to Cakewalk over cubase as i had heard that cubase was a bit flaky - i was converted - i have just purchased sonar 7 a big old beast and i feel my education as started once more....! Thanks Sonar for bringing the future into my lounge...

I started off with a Boss BR900CD recorder. I really like it but after about a year or so I wanted to do more, be more in control of my tone and to be able to make my recordings more professionial. I had heard that Roland was part of Cakewalk so I bought Sonar 7 Studio. I'm really thrilled with the package, I bought the Sonar 7 Power book and that's a big help. All in all I'm very happy with the product.

I switched to Sonar 6 PE for two main reasons:

1) Cubase SX was consistently unstable for a plethora of random reasons. The nails in the coffin were bizarre things happening (or not happening) during exports. Often tracks would export as silence or with clicks in them and the hole just never seemed to end.

2) Sonar is the only PC program that supports the Tascam FW1884 controller in native mode.

My experience of Sonar has ultimately been one of respect for its stability when performing fundamental editing and mixing tasks. We've been using for 2 years now to create and mix the soundtrack for a feature length film and whilst we've had hair tearaing moments when bouncing and exporting this large project, westill have everything as it should be and have found the interface to be reliable for the most part.

Problems have arisen when using VST plugins with random crashes but these ca usually be eliminated. One mysterious issue is that sometimes tracks and/or track folders of audio would simply disappear with no logical explanation as to why and this would be the one reason why i would consider using another program for the next project of this scale.

I also find the interface to be a bit sluggish. Whilst this may be due to lack of hardware reaources (in tandem with the sheer size of the project), I have found other programs (Sequoia and Nuendo) to peform better in this respect whilst seeking, editing and reviewing the project, locking well to the video track and allowing me to scrub and seek without the momentary lockups that do occur with Sonar. I've found this sort of bahaviour to hinder cretivity when working on sound design using instruments, VST's and MIDI.

All in all relaiable for for getting the bulk of an 'audio' job done but I'll be looking further afield in future for program/platform to work with sound designing.

I used to use Record Producer by Voyetra, but since getting my tax refund I upgraded my system and in that process I had to decide on a product to use with my new computer, an HP Pavilion Entertainment PC running Vista on a Turion 64x2. Since it did not appear that Record Producer would run in Vista (at least it did not list itself as Vista compatable) I had to find new software. Having the cash I made the decision to upgrade from the low end programs where I had been working and move into a high end professional product that had more options and more power, and the option the I found on the shelf at MicroCenter was Sonar 7 Studio Edition. I've upgraded from that to the Producer Edition due to the special offer that was recently available in order to maximize the options available to me, and most especially to add V-Vocals (I'm the vocalist for the band I'm playing with currently).

My intent was to have the capability to record my band with all the options available when we went into a studio, and to have that capability in a portable, laptop based setup. To that end I also purchased the PreSonus FireStudio Project interface. This was all done quite recently and I have to admit to being quite new at it all, so there is a rather steep learning curve that I'm dealing with, which is why I've now joined this forum. Luckily I have a friend who works as a sound engineer, so he may be able to help me out when my ignorance gets me in trouble with the software and hardware.

Unfortunately a high end professional program seems to require more knowledge and understanding than a low end program and I find Sonar to be less intuative than my previous software. That seems to be the price one pays for power, and Sonar 7 is a very powerful program with many tools that can be used once one understands them. With so much power and so many options, no simple user manual can cover it all. I'm looking forward to educating myself. Right now I'm frustrated as heck, but I'm sure that as I pick up more knowledge and understanding Sonar 7 will prove to be everything I require and much, much more.

Dave (Fum to my friends)

Hi. I began using SONAR 5 recently after years of recording on Cubase. I didn't personally ever own Cubase but I used it a lot in studios and some of my friends had it too. Basically I got SONAR because:

1. It wasn't Cubase (which I was tired of looking at)
2. SONAR was offered as part of a package by the company I bought my computer from (Turnkey, UK)
3. It was much cheaper than ProTools (which offered no significant benefits for me over other recording software)

Right away I found SONAR more user-friendly than Cubase, but of course this is just a personal preference. Furthermore, whatever I record into digital audio, whether I use Cubase, Sonar or ProTools, the sound will be identical.

I don't use midi very much so my SONAR set-up mainly records 'moving air' making it a pure audio recorder but with none of the problems associated with tape machines. Digital editing is a blast, and people frequently say 'Wow, we could never have done that on a 24-track tape machine!' I just nod and say 'Yeah, it's f***ing great isn't it!'

Now I've upgraded to 7 the only downside is my own limited knowledge of computer systems and software capability. I'm always learning and these forums are excellent for finding out things which baffle a tech-noob (if that's the right phrase) like me. I love it.

Regards
Duncan X