• SONAR
  • So is there a way to migrate Sonar projects over to Studio One? (p.3)
2017/11/24 07:19:51
Kylotan
You can have templates for a whole song, and you can have FX chains which are like a preset of several effects rolled into one, but there's no template for single/multiple tracks and everything in them. Whether you will want to replace them with song templates or FX chains depends a bit on your existing usage.
2017/11/24 08:05:53
gmp
I have lots of Acronis images of my C drive, so if I need t go back in time to the way my computer was a year ago, I can easily do that. I also downloaded to my HD every Plat version and everything I installed from Command Center, so if my computer dies, I can reinstall on a new computer. 
 
Personally I'll likely wait about a year to see if anyone resurrects Cakewalk. I've used their products exclusively since 1992 and have well over 4000 songs. Back before 1995 I was using a tape machine and SMPTE. All audio was recorded to tape and all midi was with Cakewalk. I still have a 266 Win 98 PC that has the SMPTE and very rarely I need to work on one of those ancient projects and convert it to Platinum. So as long as the old computer still works, we can keep our old songs. 
 
I dread having to learn a new DAW program, but if I do have to make a transition, I'll just start each new song with the new program and not try to migrate any songs unless I have to. Of course if all a song is a bunch of unmixed audio and midi with few FX that will be easy to migrate and then finish in a new program
 
I'm just hoping and praying that someone picks up the ball and resurrects Cakewalk.
2017/11/24 17:16:30
gmp
DUPLICATE POST - PLEASE DELETE

I have lots of Acronis images of my C drive, so if I need to go back in time to the way my computer was a year ago for instance, I can easily do that. I also downloaded to my HD every Plat version and everything I installed from Command Center, so if my computer dies, I can reinstall on a new computer

Personally I'll likely wait about a year to see if anyone resurrects Cakewalk. I've used their products exclusively since 1992 and have well over 4000 songs. Back before 1996 I was using a tape machine and SMPTE. All audio was recorded to tape and all midi was with Cakewalk. I still have a 266 Win 98 PC that has the SMPTE and very rarely I need to work on one of those ancient projects and convert it to Platinum. So as long as the old computers still work, we can keep our old songs

I dread having to learn a new DAW program, but if I do have to make a transition, I'll just start each new song with the new program and not try to migrate any songs unless I have to. Of course if all a song is a bunch of unmixed audio and midi with few FX that will be easy to migrate and then finish in a new program

I'm just hoping and praying that someone picks up the ball and resurrects Cakewalk.
2017/11/25 13:59:45
werewindle
If you are looking to see what VST's Studio One has installed or rejected they can be found in the folder 
"C:\Users\"User name"\AppData\Roaming\PreSonus\Studio One 3\x64\" as opposed to the registry.
The files are in XML format and can be read by Notepad etc.
2017/11/25 15:43:07
jimkleban
It seems to me that any DAW company that was truly interested in supporting the CAKEWALK community, would write a one time program that would:
 
1) Take  audio and MIDI tracks from CAKE and create the same tracks into their DAW.
2) Insert the same VST plugins from CAKE into these new tracks (require the user to install the same plugins into the new DAW ahead of time).
3) Convert any VSTi tracks from CAKE to their equivalent and load said VSTi into new DAW project.
4) Recreate any bus routings with PLUGINs inserted into the new buss track.
5) Probably the most important to me, convert SONARs TEMPO map into the new DAW project.
 
I am not a programmer but this doesn't seem like that big of deal to me to create and would require CAKEWALK to share the proprietary file format with these developers to make this happen.
 
Even if I only could get Items 1, 2 and 5 automatically converted, it would save me a ton of time compared to manually moving the audio, midi tracks and then recreating tempo maps.
 
Any new DAW that develops this feature will get my dollars since they pretty much all do the same thing from my point of view.
 
Just my 2 cents
2017/11/25 16:15:22
jude77
Kylotan
I edited my post above, but the forum has completely deleted it instead. So here it is again:
 
I moved over to Studio One a year or so ago, and with recent events, I feel I'm one of the lucky ones.
 
Sadly there is no explicit migration process, so it's hard work. Here's what worked well enough for me, on the songs I needed to move over:
  1. Take screenshots of Track and/or Console view to make sure you know which tracks and instruments you need to re-create in the destination project, what tempo you want, etc. If you're doing this for a lot of songs, you probably want to spend an hour or so in Studio One making a big song template with all the tracks and instruments you are likely to want, so you don't have to do this manually each time. It's easier to delete unwanted tracks after using a comprehensive template than it is to have to add them over and over again for each song.
  2. Use the preset capabilities built in to individual plugins to ensure that your settings are saved outside of all the DAWs, and then you can load that custom preset in the effect or instrument once it's inserted into Studio One.
  3. S1 doesn't have track templates but it does have FX Chains, so if you have tracks or track templates with a lot of FX involved, consider making and saving FX Chains to speed up the process of setting up these tracks. If you created new per-effect presets as mentioned above this can go pretty quickly.
  4. MIDI clips can be dragged from Sonar to the Windows Desktop and then dragged right into an instrument track in Studio One. Save time on projects with lots of clips by combining all the clips in a track before doing this.
  5. Audio clips can be exported via File > Export > Audio. Make sure you do Select All beforehand, or explicitly select the region you care about. Choose 'Tracks' in the export dialog, and make sure your Mix Enables checkboxes do what you want. If you're confident you can recreate the FX chain in Studio 1, you can clear Track FX. If you're not confident, perhaps because you use Sonar-specific stuff like Pro Channel, you might want to leave it selected and print the effects into the exported audio. (While you're there, consider exporting buses and/or the entire mix too, if you can spare the disk space.) Again, audio files can be dragged into an audio track in Studio One. (It will usually prompt you to copy them into the song's media directory later. DO NOT DELETE THE TRACKS EXPORTED FROM SONAR UNTIL YOU ARE 100% CONFIDENT THAT STUDIO ONE HAS A NEW COPY UNDER THE SONG DIRECTORY. USE THE MENU OPTION SONG>COPY EXTERNAL FILES IF NECESSARY.) You're almost certainly going to need to bounce down any Region FX or Clip FX, but the latter at least can be re-applied quite easily in S1.
Another helpful thing to know is that you can usually have S1 and Sonar running at the same time, which makes it easier to compare the layouts, and even the tone upon playback. You may need to switch driver models from ASIO to something else, at least in one of the DAWs.


Great stuff here.  Thank you SOOOOOOOOO much!
2017/11/25 16:40:18
aghschwabe
I don't really think so, but I'm still working on it. I started a big long-term project two months ago and I need stability so I've just switched over to Studio One 3 (I can mourn Cakewalk AND be productive). The 1/2 price offer from PreSonus made it a no-brainer. I went with the full-pro version for $250. I'm discovering it may be a a bargain at twice the price.
 
That said, I've been madly porting over my long-term project files (which are all audio). This pretty straightforward. Export your project to an OMF, save the OMF in its own folder and select the "Reference Audio Externally" (so it saves wave files and the OMF index, rather than everything contained within the OMF, which doesn't seem to work as well). Importing the OMF is still awkward since there aren't my presents, plugins or volume curves, but it works ok. It actually works better going from S1 to SONAR (tried it for the heck of it). 
 
MIDI projects are another story. It's clear there's no easy way (at all) to port a SPlat .cwp file to a PreSonus .song file. Nothing does that and I doubt anyone will code anything that will - there are so many variables that I doubt it's worth the effort.

The reality is this: Cakewalk is at end of life, and my job isn't. So having made the switch I'm going to live a dual life. The learning curve is shallow and short for Sonarians - besides, all the concepts are the same. Mostly it's learning new nomenclature and where the buttons and menu items are.
 
SONAR is now my archive/retrieval system. If there's anything there I REALLY need, I'll kludge together a hacked MIDI 1 file and suffer through a rebuild to have a native project in S1.
 
So ultimately, unless some kind angel writes a script or app to port cwp over to song files, we're kind of stuck. I'm not happy about it, but I can live with it. And again, OMF is a half-reasonable solution but really you end up with audio files and a reassembly job in S1 because SONAR's OMF export isn't very good (OMF has its limits and is out of development too).
 
That's my experience/direction so far.
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