I'm new to Sonar, looking to switch to a more full-range DAW, so I'm trying the trial at the moment. I'll be primarily recording rap music, and occasionally the instrumentals I'll be using will be in MP3. It's easy enough to put them into Sonar and map the tempo, but I'm wondering, is there any way to have Sonar NOT create a WAV of the track as well? I try to keep most my projects backed up via cloud and space is important, so if all I have is an MP3, I'd rather just save the space and keep it that way.

Sonar converts to a wave file, as MP3's suck butt for sound quality

MP3's degrade sound quality with the use of data compression. Its in your best interest to mixand record in a wave file format. Preferably in the 32bit floating point and at least 44.1kHz or 48kHz. anything higher than 48kHz for Hip hop/ Rap is a waste of space and resources.. You do not want to be mixing in an MP3 format. The sound quality will suffer.
After you done, you can convert to an MP3 format of 320 bitrate or 256, but i would not go lower than 256 bitrate for any MP3's.

CJ

I think the OP may be asking for the switch that avoids Sonar re-copying any sample files to the project directory (converting to wavs as it goes).  I think the answer is yes to that question, but I forget exactly where that option is - it'll be in the Preferences section somewhere.

btw - welcome to the forums Zero.  Good bunch of people here who will make your journey to Sonar much easier!

Oh, yea, i totally didn't see that angle when reading it

Cj

@CJ Thanks for the info, though it's mostly things I knew. The only thing I'm going to mix in MP3 are the handful of instrumentals that I bought from a friend that he only still had in MP3, so no choice. My question was like Wood said, trying to disable the auto-copy, having a redundant 40MB wav is a waste of space. I've gone through the options and haven't found a way yet to change this option. If anyone does please let me know. And thanks for the welcome, Wood.

CJaysMusic


After you done, you can convert to an MP3 format of 320 bitrate or 256, but i would not go lower than 256 bitrate for any MP3's.

CJ

Hi CJ,
        When uploading to Soundcloud, it is compoudsary to convert to 128 bitrate?
 
BTW, I had used Audacity's mp3 converter and the sound quality sucks big time. I had to fork out 19 bucks for Cakewalk's mp3 converter which finally give my some quality that my music deserves.
 
Choo Shi-Hwei
 
This is my first upload to soundcloud using Cakewalk's MP3 converter
http://soundcloud.com/musichoo/expanded-choo-shi-hweis-remix

ZeroContrast


I'm new to Sonar, looking to switch to a more full-range DAW, so I'm trying the trial at the moment. I'll be primarily recording rap music, and occasionally the instrumentals I'll be using will be in MP3. It's easy enough to put them into Sonar and map the tempo, but I'm wondering, is there any way to have Sonar NOT create a WAV of the track as well? I try to keep most my projects backed up via cloud and space is important, so if all I have is an MP3, I'd rather just save the space and keep it that way.

Welcome to Sonar and to the forum.  Is there any way you can pick up either an additional internal hard drive or an external one?  You can get secondary storage dirt cheap these days, and that would eliminate your space problems for both current projects and backups.  A 1 Terabyte internal drive costs about $85, and a 2 Terabyte drive costs $99, from www.microcenter.com, and there are numerous other sites selling them that cheap, as well.  If you picked up an external drive, a 500 GB drive runs about $50-$60, and a 1 TB drive runs about $99.


Bob Bone

Sorry - forgot to +1 on the concept of keeping things in .wav format until the very last step of converting to MP3.  You lose SOOOO much quality working with MP3 if you use MP3 anywhere in the process except at the end.

Bob Bone

MP3's are used for collaboration and they work fine.

You send an mp3 with your mix sans guitar(or whatever) then they record the guitar part and send you the wav of the guitar and you add it to the mix.

Wma's work better though, when you import an mp3 you need to trim the space off the front or it will cause timing problems, wma's you can just drop in.

@Zero - page 1681 of the user guide covers the Audio Data Preferences.  In there is an option to 'Always Copy Imported Audio Files'.  I believe if you leave that flag null it will leave your source files without copying them.

However, that will lead eventually to issues when you lose them - much better to have everything for your project copied into a single project folder structure.  You can get even an external HDD pretty cheap.