Ah, ok, good idea. just listen to the cd rather than make a track.
Makes sense. 
I thought I would put mine side by side with the CD's wave and A/B switch between them but it does bring up recorded and input and output level issues.
Thanks

M_Glenn_M


I guess I'm just old, but do not buy songs online. And I don't own an ipod or mobile player.
I have those old round things called CDs.
I play em from my computer or my stereo system in the living room or the car.
The process I need is getting a CD playing in my computer into sonar.

Yup--just look up on www.youtube.com how to rip songs from a CD and away you go...

I'm assuming your Sonar computer has a CD/DVD drive:

- Put in your CD that you want to rip your reference track from.
- Open your Sonar project that you want to insert the ref track into.
- Go to File/Import/Audio CD


You will get a dialogue box asking you to select your CD/DVD drive and the tracks you want to import. Press OK.
Jobs done, the tracks you want from your CD will be in your Sonar project! You can then mute/unmute them as suggested above.

I've been using reference tracks as well. For the time being I picked about 20 songs from my iTunes library that I thought approximated some of the styles of the range of songs I'm working on. 

I used the Burn To CD feature from iTunes to get those to a CD. I used Nero, but it could have been any of those type of apps, to convert the tracks on the CD to wave files.

I keep the reference wave files in a handy location on my hard drive. 

When working on a song in Sonar I can literally just drag the icon from one of those wave files into my track view area and the audio file is imported into the song. I can then do as others have mentioned and A/B compare and mute as I go.  I think it's very helpful.

millzy


I'm assuming your Sonar computer has a CD/DVD drive:

- Put in your CD that you want to rip your reference track from.
- Open your Sonar project that you want to insert the ref track into.
- Go to File/Import/Audio CD


You will get a dialogue box asking you to select your CD/DVD drive and the tracks you want to import. Press OK.
Jobs done, the tracks you want from your CD will be in your Sonar project! You can then mute/unmute them as suggested above.

Even better.

millzy


I'm assuming your Sonar computer has a CD/DVD drive:

- Put in your CD that you want to rip your reference track from.
- Open your Sonar project that you want to insert the ref track into.
- Go to File/Import/Audio CD


You will get a dialogue box asking you to select your CD/DVD drive and the tracks you want to import. Press OK.
Jobs done, the tracks you want from your CD will be in your Sonar project! You can then mute/unmute them as suggested above.

Thought I'd chime in with a point here that I believe may have been overlooked.   I think millzy's advice might be the best route to take to get a direct comparison.  If you play the CD through your computer's CD/Multimedia player and have a separate audio card with desktop speakers and an audio interface with monitors for working with Sonar, then playing the CD will come out your desktop speakers.  I would think for a better comparison, you would initially want to hear both your current project and your reference through your monitors, and be able to match levels within Sonar. 

Some commercial CD's are copy protected and cannot be directly copied. Ripping is not a great idea either as the process will degrade the sound quality. 

I think Audacity can do what Wave Lab can do and copy the WAVE file directly off the CD.. any CD ,,, even copy protected ones. If Sonar can do that that's the way to go. 

One disappointment is you certainly can't drag and drop the files from the CD... 

So far the files on the CDs are not waves but cda. 
I did try to drag and drop to audacity with no luck.
The Millzy direct import method works like a charm.
Thanks Millzy, thanks Sonar.

So far I brought in a few clips from an old JJ Kale (surprisingly low levels), Eric Clapton's Pilgrim (lots of dynamics but clipped a bit), John Mayer (same).
Some tracks were quite compressed according to the wave forms.
It varied a lot.  
I normally use my monitors and sound card thru my mixer for playback anyway so the levels are identical to the CD. Nice for comparisons.
I assumed the old JJ Cale was pre-loudness wars.
A very interesting exercise.
I'm interested in lots of genres so I'll need to make a set for each genre.
(Jazz, several kinds of blues, soul, older rock, southern rock, reggae, folk, Latin) 

millzy


I'm assuming your Sonar computer has a CD/DVD drive:

- Put in your CD that you want to rip your reference track from.
- Open your Sonar project that you want to insert the ref track into.
- Go to File/Import/Audio CD


You will get a dialogue box asking you to select your CD/DVD drive and the tracks you want to import. Press OK.
Jobs done, the tracks you want from your CD will be in your Sonar project! You can then mute/unmute them as suggested above.

Cool - I learned a new trick here!


Most of my stuff is in iTunes and not on CD, but if I burn a CD's song count of reference songs from iTunes onto a CD I'll be trying this method you suggest!  Seems like it will be a nice additional approach.