Joe_A

Voda La Void

Cactus Music
All your audio would never be lost. It's in the audio folder and can be played with any DAW or Wave editor. A wav file is a standard file...The only thing you loose when you switch DAW's is your set up with what ever plug ins you used on tracks....

But..how does this work in practice?  I'm imagining going into my new DAW, say S1, and then importing .wav files - the tracks - one after the other.  Which ones do I import?  There's a lot of audio files related to a given project, but the DAW is only playing certain ones.  And how do I know the position of all the wave files along the time line?  Even if I record a 4 minute song in one take (mostly never), I still trim the silence...  
 
I'm genuinely curious how to approach this because it all sounds like a bunch of work that leads to a headache, and I'm not sure how many hours I could actually spend doing this.  I would love to believe that it's actually really simple, just do x, y and z.  

Unless others advise a better situation, knowing Sonar better than I do which is very likely...only the wave files or other audio file type (But wave files here for sure.) can be imported into a new DAW. Nothing else. If you mixed and created mp3s you can import those too.

Yes, I agree.  But actually *doing* it sounds like a nightmare.  Hours and hours per project..I would lose years of my life trying to do this if it really works as tediously as it sounds.  

We are sort of off topic but in a way that is why we are all saing we are going to stay with Sonar and that it will work for a long time. 
OK I understand there are people who never finish projects. ANd this creates this problem. The danger of thinking you can take 10+ years to finish something when it comes to using a DAW as apposed to using a tape recorder. Things change and eventually your projects will be left in the dust. 
So if you insist on never finishing songs then it's up to you to maintain the version of the DAW that they will play on. This is really only going to take you so far. So,,, before it happens -- finish it or at least re work it into a format that will stand the test of time. 
 
Me becuase of the way I work my audio files are easily sorted out. I name them before I record. I also don't do comping or much punching in. 
But if your audio folders are a mess you can do a few things to fix this. 
Don't bother with clean audio folder , it seems to not work as expected. 
Just use Save As and it will leave unused audio behind. You can also take a messy track with a hundered clips and bounce it to a nice new track and then delete the messy one. In other words you'll need to either finnish that song or do some work to make it future proof. 
 
And for many a huge part of our work is midi. Midi is super easy to save,,, just use "save as" and choose Mid 1. 
 
Oh you might what to assign different channels to each instrument. 
 

Cactus Music
We are sort of off topic but in a way that is why we are all saing we are going to stay with Sonar and that it will work for a long time. 
OK I understand there are people who never finish projects. ANd this creates this problem. The danger of thinking you can take 10+ years to finish something when it comes to using a DAW as apposed to using a tape recorder. Things change and eventually your projects will be left in the dust. 
So if you insist on never finishing songs then it's up to you to maintain the version of the DAW that they will play on. This is really only going to take you so far. So,,, before it happens -- finish it or at least re work it into a format that will stand the test of time. 
 
 

Actually...these are all finished projects, but using programmed drums, so now that I have a live drum set up I want to go back and put real drums in.  It's a lot of work, but also should be a lot of fun, and it matters to me.  I also want to mix in Mixbus because I'm impressed with the quality and approach.  So..just trying to find the best solution to get from one to the other.    
 
So yeah, I'm sticking with Sonar.  X1 apparently, on a Win 10 machine, isolated from the interwebs if necessary.     

Knowing how to use more than one tools is like reasonable.
 
I still prefer the 8.5.3 interface. More, done quicker, without having to constantly change "smart" tools. And fewer menus, menus, menus,...
 
Got SPLAT installed with "lifetime updates."  And use it after editing is finished.
 
So, as long as it works and is useful, it will be used. And then i will move to reaper cuz i use macros. And Sonar's script features are like stoopid, and less fun than they could be. But i do have dozens of CAL scripts i use for fun. Reaper can read two languages. And the interface is completely changeable.