Had Sonoma Riffworks i really love that program even now

I just bought it and am loving it, too (I have Sonar 6.2 also). Riffworks is a different way of thinking about composing, and can't compete overall with Sonar. But for throwing ideas together, it's incredible. And it rewires, presumably into Sonar, so.. . . .

Cakewalk user since DOS days. Ended up with Home Studio 2004. With Gigastudio Orchestra I started to have problems when editing MIDI, increasingly I had stucked notes driving me nuts. Cakewalk Tech -service tried but could not help. Started to blame Home Studio for the problems and changed to Sonar 6.21.
For a while all was fine. It starts again now, the dreaded stuck notes are here again.
Was I wrong to buy Sonar 6?
I found that Cakewalk -Sonar is not optimized ( or recommended) for Gigastudio, neither is it optimized for GVI,( you can not use program change commands with GVI???!!)

Frustrated.

I switched ....... from Texture to Cakewalk 4.0 for DOS. Upgrades have gotten me to S6p.

Had Cubasis in 2002 that came with an older Soundblaster card. There was something aoub the "look" of Cakewalk Sonar 3 that drew me in. I read some great reviews and decided to buy it. It is a muvh easier unit to work with, and again. the look-the layout, whatever is more inviting. Im at Sonar 6 now and enjoy it more than ever. People tell me about how great ProTools is, but it is so popular, it puts me in mind of Microsoft.
Im on board for the long haul with this kick ass software. Period.

As I've been a user of Acid Pro since version 2.0 (way back in the days of Sonic Foundry) I've been growing with the program in the pursuit if a Recording Arts degree. While Acid pro slowly exposed me to some of the industry's music production techniques, Acid allowed me to focus solely on music production.

In 2005 I graduated with my first AA in Humanities (Graphic Arts major), I immediately transfered to Los Medanos College in Pittsburg, CA to pursue a Recording Arts AA.

I learned all the essentials, from the fundamentals of sound and music, basic music theory, music business and the very wide range of jobs related to the industry (and what they're all about, and how they're all connected, especially in CA & NY) well amongst all that I also was growing rapidly beyond Acid's functionality, so I expanded to Sonar (one of my instructors at the school is a user of Sonar). The bulk of the Recording Arts classes revolved around the history and relevance to a lot of the software available now, understanding the fundamentals of pre-production, production, and post-produciton, and getting hands on experience with analog and digital gear to put the fundamentals to practice. I thank Rick Shiner for everyone he's taught me as I've come a long way from that highschool kid using Acid... Though I can't attribute Sonar to my first commercial release, the constraints I faced in Acid Pro 6 made me seek out Sonar to augment my production pipeline. While I'm using 5 Producer Edition, I'm currently looking to upgrade to 6 after I've built my new computer system.

What were my constraints? Well I'm still getting used to working in Sonar, as I work mostly with midi and virtual instruments and effects I was able to produce this album entirely with Acid Pro 6: Maestro's Project
To put this as vividly as possible, please listen to the 2nd track on the album - March of St. Michaels.

This orchestral piece Nick composed here at my house consisted of 4 midi performances that he arranged and edited. These performances were played like a pianist would, controlling several instruments at once. I added 8 midi tracks for the various percussion instruments. The end of the arrangement phase all the midi data controlled over 15 instrument sections and over 70 simultaneous audio tracks! The thing that Acid lacked was a virtual instrument freezing function or "bouncing to audio". I manually rendered each individual track and did my post-production from there. However, after I was done with the mix and was about to hop on to the next track in the album to prepare the master, he decided to change the arrangement. I luckily kept the midi tracks in a folder track and simply reconnected the VST's to the buses they needed to be in, and re-arranged; mixed down again, and mastered. 2 days later he had me come back to the arrangement and he performed a variation of the Cellos as he had a fight with an old band mate of his claiming copyright infringement (which held no truth). So, he performed the new part, dropped the vst's back in place and deleted the old audio replaced by the new midi data, re-rendered the Cellos' new tracks, and re-mixed the song, bounced my final stereo track, brought back up my album sequence project in my other acid project and worked on making the final master copy to be ready for pressing.

Thank you for putting up with me if you read through all of that babble, but I must say having the freeze function would have saved me a precious hour. While Acid remains a DAW that I use a lot, I'm quickly coming to grips with Sonar's more advanced functions for audio routing. I won't be giving up Acid anytime soon but Sonar is already a great asset in my home studio that has allowed me to augment my production pipeline. Anything that lets me save time working on audio to focus on the music is worth it!

I started with Guitar Tracks Pro and really liked it. Then I ran into a brick wall with my head and got talked into switching to Pro Tools LE. Once the doctors said there was no brain damage (something about have to have one, to damage it), I just purchased Sonar Producer. What I like about Cakewalk products mainly is, being able to use acidized loops. Pro Tools you can not. But once getting Sonar Producer, it was wow... I am home again. I had latency issues with Pro Tools, never did resolve it. With Sonar, I have none.. which makes it easier for recording a track while listening to pre recorded tracks... I think Cakewalk has better Tech Support also, although with Sonar have not had to use it yet, but Digidesign tech support was terrible. No.. terrible would mean there was some.. so change that to missing in action.

Started with Porta-Studios and went to 16 track analog. This was synced with Atari/Cubase for MIDI. Worked good but was looking for non destructive recording and non linear editing for audio like I had for MIDI.

Tried the Cubase Audio stuff for a while but it was buggy and crashed far too often. The learning curve was steep and with my Cubase MIDI experience I felt that it shouldn't have been so difficult. Dongles Suck!

Took a chance on Home Studio XL 2004 and never looked back. I had a few problems at first and your tech support made the right suggestions and the problems were fixed. Upgraded to Sonar 4 Studio after the Web Trial and just ordered Sonar 6PE.

The web trial is a real plus, especially of your system is marginal and you want to test drive before you buy!

Jeff

(Edit) I was a member of this forum a couple of years ago but misplaced my password and my e-mail address changed, so back to the beginning!

I switched from a Mackie HDR2496 and D8B combo to S5PE while transitioning into 6PE. I've used earlier versions of Sonar but only for MIDI sequencing. Version 5 was the first time I began mixing with Sonar but continued to track with my Mackie gear. As I got comfortable mixing with Sonar I started tracking with it. With version 6 I made the complete move and sold all my Mackie gear. I've never looked back since.

Best things Sonar brought to the table...

Unlimited track count.
Supoprt for sample rates above 48kHz which Mackie could not.
Tons of great 3rd party plug ins to use. Vintage Channel Rocks too!
64-bit mx engine.
Track Icons
Custom Colors Schemes
Great support and forum. (Mackie has a good forum too)

One thing I really miss from my D8B is mix snapshots. I really liked being able to save a snapshot of a mix before tweaking it in the next session. Then I could easily A/B the old mix to the new version. To me this is the best way to tell if you are improving or ruining your mix. If you guys ever get around to adding this feature many users would be gratefull.

I appreciate the excellent support and great user forum provided here. On many occasions I've had a problem that was quickly solved by doing a quick search in the Forums. I've had direct assistance from Noel with V6 and a couple good sessions with phone support. All great reasons to recommend to someone in the market for a new DAW.

Looking forward to V7!

Eric

I've been with Logic on the PC since, well since it came to the PC, and I was one of the disgruntled when Apple took Logic 'to the other side'. Funnily although I own a modern intel mac, I don't want to have to switch to the Mac for core music production duties. I've been constantly on the look out for a way out on the PC.

Cubase and Nuendo, although they have great VST and VSTi support, and decent audio engine performance, they've repeatedly scared me off due to the tragically bad midi timing that existed all the way back to Cubase on the Atari (I still have the working ST520 with Cubase in the loft, complete with it's Parkinsons-afflicted midi). It doesn't seem to matter how many versions those guys release, they haven't fixed the fact that neither sequencer plays in time.

Sonar on the other hand seems as rock solid as Logic in that regard and that's the reason I was happy to consider Sonar as my future DAW on the PC platform. Unfortunately after having a number of goes at Sonar from Version 3 up to the present, I can't get my flow with it purely because of the static nature of the application. I don't want to bog down this post with the details, I have posted separately under a 'Sonar and the stopping' thread, but basically I find the core nature of Sonar difficult to work with because of too much unnecessary stopping of the sequencer.

If this and a number of other minor issues were improved, Sonar would eat every other daw for breakfast. Until then, I'm chugging away with Logic 5.51, missing out on wonderful track freezing, audio console presets, dragging and dropping of plugins, multiple take audio lanes, Audiosnap, the great Mute tool, etc etc, but it's just barely worth it to be able to 'keep the music running' :(

I cut my teeth (and sometimes fingers) on giant, heavy reel-to-reel multitracks. I originally purchased Cakewalk (for DOS!) rather than other software because it was the only one I knew of without some kind of dumb hardware lock. I've upgraded every few years, and now use Sonar 6, Producer Edition. I recently recorded my daughter's viol de gamba quartet (kids today, and their crazy music) and was amazed at how smoothly everything went. I used Shure KSM32 mics into a MOTU Traveler into a notebook running Sonar in Vista. We did three or four takes of each piece and then I mixed it down using light multi-band compression and a touch of reverb. It sounds great!