I don't have a Mac yet.  I know you can boot either to windows or Mac.  Or you can run windows and Mac at the same time but you give up processing power.  I was talking with an engineer this week that runs windows as a virtual machine with the Mac operating system underneath.  He is running Pro-E very CPU intensive CAD program (under windows) and he gets better results on his MacBook Pro than a dedicated windows PC.  He said its the most stable way to run windows that he's found. He claims he doesn't give up many resources at all running this way.

Anybody running sonar on a Mac under a virtual windows environment like this?  64bit?

What's the best way on a Mac?

VM is not a great environment for running "real-time" (low-latency critical) applications.
VM may be working fine for your friend... but think about the logic.
You're looking for a high-performance system... for running Sonar.
VM is not going to offer the same level of performance as a top-quality dedicated Windows machine.
You probably already know that Cakewalk doesn't officially support BootCamp.

If this machine's primary purpose is to run Sonar, you're taking (or talking about) a very indirect approach.  

As the well known Paul McCartney song goes:


"Listen to what the Man says"!


Jim Roseberry has been building dedicated DAW rigs for a long long time now, and knows exactly what he's talking about.

Thanks Jim.  That's what I was worrying about - the latency issue.  Although my audio tracking doesn't need low latency because my audio device monitors for me.  But when I trigger Superior or soft synths I need at most 10ms latency - any more and it gets really bad. 

No, I didn't know Cakewalk doesn't support Boot Camp.  I thought if a Mac had intel CPUs and was able to run Windows, it is essentially a windows machine?  As well as an OSX machine? 

You can install any windows operating system on an intel Mac to run it natively. The problem is that you will not have access to hardware that is not supported by BootCamp. If BootCamp doesn't install a driver for your volume control on your keyboard you won't be able to control the volume. You will also have to format your hard drive in NTFS format which OS X can read from but cannot write to without additional third party software. There can also be issues with certain video cards which can freeze Windows 8 completely if the wrong version of BootCamp is installed. Of course these issues do not apply when you use VM but Jim Rosenberg gave plenty of reasons why that is not the best solution as well.