When you get a chance tell us a little more about the romplers and soft synths you're currently using or are soon to be using. I know romplers these days have some powerful processing on board, you may not even need a new daw? Or did we already discuss that part and I came into the thread late?

Let me throw something else into the discussion. Yes, all DAWs have a learning curve. But another consideration is once you know your way around a program, how fluid is it for you in terms of doing actual work? A lot of that depends on the type of work you do. If you mix a lot of different elements (loops, hard disk audio, MIDI, matrix view, etc.) Sonar is quite adept at switching among different modes of operation. That's one of the main reasons it's my primary DAW.

OTOH if you come from a tape and mixer background, Pro Tools is great because those basic functions are the core of the program. Digital Performer has what's probably the best-sounding collection of guitar processors...so much depends on how you plan to use the DAW.

I have scaled the learning curve for pretty much every DAW out there, so I knew their strengths and limitations. Sonar was the best match for the type of projects I do, but that's as subjective a choice as preferring the scale length of one guitar over another.

To answer ASG (2 replies before this), i do not have any romplers at the moment and am dying to have the privilege of getting hold of one, which is part of the reason i want to leave my current DAW. I don't want to have to fork-out for third party stuff and go through the bother of installing and downloading gigabytes of data when i am on a very limited internet data plan.

Having come from synth workstations where we took such things for granted, it seems like i am in the dark-age in comparison, but at the moment i have been improvising and using a few half-arsed (compressed OGG-VORBIS) loops which came included in my current DAW, and filling in the rest with softsynths at the moment. Seeing as i do make dance-music i have been able to get away with this scenario for a few months, but the time is fast approaching when i will need a good rompler with a good variety of sounds to make some POP-music tracks. 

Currently the softsynths i am using are  'Renegade' from G-Sonique; 'Gemini 2.0 from Audio-Oxygen'; P8 SuperWave; Trance-Pro; Nk 1001...i do have a few other very high-quality softsynths but there's no point listing them all here. Im using good quality software reverbs like (Lexicon) and good software compressors and eqs for tracking duties, and then resorting to Izotope Ozone 5 and some high-end third-party buss compressors for mastering duties. For vocals i use the USB BlueMic YETI; all running on an i7 Laptop with 8 gig ram and inbuilt soundcard (realtek and WaveRT driver) which happens to perform beautifully and gives superb low-latency performance under heavy loads.

At this stage i am still torn between Sonar X2 and Studio One because a simple but proficient interface workflow is most important to me among other things. Looks like it's time for me to download the X2 demo and find out for myself.

Thanks to everyone who took a sincere interest to help me and good luck with your music.

Any subsequent comments about Studio One are still welcome, i'm always glad to hear what other people think. Cheers.



PS: With dreams being free, how good would it be if the Studio One developers and Sonar X2 developers joined forces and simply combined everything that is good about the two and discarded the rest in terms of superfluous or cumbersome methodologies and focused on designing a 'Super-DAW' with the speed and stability of Studio One combined with the features and plugins of both all centered around a slick classy interface combining the most elegant parts from both.   

godparticle


To answer ASG (2 replies before this), i do not have any romplers at the moment and am dying to have the privilege of getting hold of one, which is part of the reason i want to leave my current DAW. I don't want to have to fork-out for third party stuff and go through the bother of installing and downloading gigabytes of data when i am on a very limited internet data plan.

Having come from synth workstations where we took such things for granted, it seems like i am in the dark-age in comparison, but at the moment i have been improvising and using a few half-arsed (compressed OGG-VORBIS) loops which came included in my current DAW, and filling in the rest with softsynths at the moment. Seeing as i do make dance-music i have been able to get away with this scenario for a few months, but the time is fast approaching when i will need a good rompler with a good variety of sounds to make some POP-music tracks. 

Currently the softsynths i am using are  'Renegade' from G-Sonique; 'Gemini 2.0 from Audio-Oxygen'; P8 SuperWave; Trance-Pro; Nk 1001...i do have a few other very high-quality softsynths but there's no point listing them all here. Im using good quality software reverbs like (Lexicon) and good software compressors and eqs for tracking duties, and then resorting to Izotope Ozone 5 and some high-end third-party buss compressors for mastering duties. For vocals i use the USB BlueMic YETI; all running on an i7 Laptop with 8 gig ram and inbuilt soundcard (realtek and WaveRT driver) which happens to perform beautifully and gives superb low-latency performance under heavy loads.

At this stage i am still torn between Sonar X2 and Studio One because a simple but proficient interface workflow is most important to me among other things. Looks like it's time for me to download the X2 demo and find out for myself.

Thanks to everyone who took a sincere interest to help me and good luck with your music.

Any subsequent comments about Studio One are still welcome, i'm always glad to hear what other people think. Cheers.



PS: With dreams being free, how good would it be if the Studio One developers and Sonar X2 developers joined forces and simply combined everything that is good about the two and discarded the rest in terms of superfluous or cumbersome methodologies and focused on designing a 'Super-DAW' with the speed and stability of Studio One combined with the features and plugins of both all centered around a slick classy interface combining the most elegant parts from both.   

Hi-


I am probably bias so I won't give you my opinion :)


But here are some free Get Started videos that show you some of the basics


http://www.cakewalk.com/C...ONARU.aspx/Get-Started


As mentioned too, this month we are offering a free Groove 3 video pass with the purchase of SONAR X2 Producer, which should certainly help you get top notch training once you have SONAR X2. 


Thanks,

Andrew

The reason that super daw is never gonna happen is because then we'd have all we need and would never need to buy another one of their products anymore :). Well you oughta check out the Yamaha mm6 (which I use) and the korg R3. That's about as cheap as you can get for top notch synth leads. They both have a decent amount of filtering and fx capability. And you can deal some real damage strapping ozone 5 (which I also have) on one of those bad boys. Check em out on YouTube!

I have to disagree with a few people here that Sonar is difficult for a newbie, After wasting a few years fluting around with Cubase, Reason and Ableton and never really getting a handle on what I was doing I tried Sonar 8.5 a couple of years ago and found it to be the most intuitive DAW I have used.

I have upgraded to X2 and while the transition was difficult at first I now love the workflow of the program, The Sonar University/Cake TV are a great learning resource too. 

I just need to ask one more thing. Is the demo version of sonar the latest X2 version with windows 8 compatibility, or is it just the initial demo that was made available before the X2 update. cheers.

Not sure but if it does turn out that windows 8 requires the update, its on the homepage for free

I'd say download the demo anyway.  If you look under Help -> About Sonar, and it says it's the X2a Build then it's fully compatible with Windows 8.  If it doesn't say X2a, it'll probably run anyway ...

Cheers,

Simon

p.s. Without re-visiting the previous thread, please let me know what happens with the soundcard; I'm interested to know :)

IIRC the demo was based on build 308 - the original X2 with the quick fix. It does run on Win8 just like the original X2. The X2a patch just added more Win8 specific stuff.