Is Sonar a DAW alternative for larger productions?

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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MrTom
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Is Sonar a DAW alternative for larger productions?

Post by MrTom » Tue Oct 18, 2005 6:45 pm

I just checked the demo of Sonar 4 and I am very impressed. The sound quality and performance is a bit (carefully spoken) better than Live. Including loops is as easy as in live, maybe easier, because of the explorer style browser.

And performance...i am pretty unsatisfied, that Ableton seems to focus on new fancy tools instead of fixing the basic issues (GUI performance , Time stretching).

Usability in Sonar is great after spending a day or 2 to get into all shortcuts.
The look and feel is as beautiful as an unshaved ass, but after 2 hours of colour changing it looks pretty cool now. (I hope they will hire a new designer)

I purchased the Sonar 4 on Ebay and will update to 5, which has the Variphrase technology and some other cool shit. Not sure if I will sell LIVE because I still hope they will fix the issues.

I would be interested in getting some info from previous Sonar users :-)..

Regards,
Tom

rasputin
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Use em both

Post by rasputin » Tue Oct 18, 2005 6:55 pm

They're pretty different beasts. Although I don't play live, you'd be hard pressed to use Sonar in a live environment (for instance, the audio engine will stop when you do any major edit to a track or project; Live will pretty much keep burping out audio regardless.). Sonar allows more precise editing of audio clips and gives you complete control over MIDI, even including an event list. It has a notation and tab feature. You can resize and rescale everything (e.g., in the session view in Live 5, the channel strips are the height they are and that's the height they will always be.) The way effects are handled are completely different. Sonar doesn't do realtime time stretching/compressing. It has a million different views instead of the two main ones in Live.
For instance, I had a project to sonify a little web animation; had to use Sonar in order to view the avi video clip while synchronizing the sounds.
To oversimplify hugely; for me, Live=right brain, Sonar=left brain. Also, no Sonar on Mac. You're right about the design. For instance, everything is customizable in Sonar except the fonts; which are like 1 mm high.

Sonar is pretty stable for me, but I would say, not quite as bulletproof as Live in my setup.

As always, YMMV.

Jed
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Location: New Zealand

Post by Jed » Tue Oct 18, 2005 7:02 pm

For me working in the Lives's Arrange View was a total release after using Sonars Track view for our last album. Way quicker and more intuitive without bloat imho.

Off the top of my head, in Sonar you get 2 tracks per vsti which is cumbersome, and cant record audio without stopping the audio steam and arming the track. Also dragging and dropping drum loops from Live's browser into the arrange view is much better than doing the same in Sonar using the explorer. Try arranging a drum track with lots of fills etc and you will see what I mean.

Also Live previews ALL audio files at the project tempo - Sonar only does this with Acidized Loops.

There were lots of other reasons for my switch for music composition having used Sonar for years. Overall now when I sit down in front of my gear with a blank page I find myself getting productive very quickly wherea before (when using Sonar) I instantly slipped into engineer mode often at the expense of musical inspiration.

Cheers
Jed

MrTom
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Post by MrTom » Tue Oct 18, 2005 7:37 pm

Jed wrote:For me working in the Lives's Arrange View was a total release after using Sonars Track view for our last album. Way quicker and more intuitive without bloat imho.

Off the top of my head, in Sonar you get 2 tracks per vsti which is cumbersome, and cant record audio without stopping the audio steam and arming the track. Also dragging and dropping drum loops from Live's browser into the arrange view is much better than doing the same in Sonar using the explorer. Try arranging a drum track with lots of fills etc and you will see what I mean.

Also Live previews ALL audio files at the project tempo - Sonar only does this with Acidized Loops.

There were lots of other reasons for my switch for music composition having used Sonar for years. Overall now when I sit down in front of my gear with a blank page I find myself getting productive very quickly wherea before (when using Sonar) I instantly slipped into engineer mode often at the expense of musical inspiration.

Cheers
Jed
So you recorded an album just using LIVE ? Interesting.
I am using a lot of multitrack drum loops (seperated hats, kick etc) at home ( and believe me :-)) this is a pain in LIVE.

Don't get me wrong, I like LIVE for the workflow, but after recording 24 tracks the #of Coffee breaks after moving some parts increased. Maybe this is an issue of my PC but I owned Cubase before and 32 tracks were no problem at all. Same for Sonar.

raapie
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..

Post by raapie » Tue Oct 18, 2005 7:44 pm

I bought 2.2 xl a few years back and it crashed a lot and only offered 16 rewire-channels for midi. I didn't understand why anyone would use that application. I still don't. I tried version4, but unstable as well.

and now this:
http://www.cakewalk.com/Products/sonar/collage.htm

I mean: what are they thinking?
Marco Raaphorst

music, sound & story maker

https://melodiefabriek.com

pix
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Post by pix » Tue Oct 18, 2005 7:49 pm

eh!

I've been thinking in porting to Sonar as well. I want to work with my UAD card without any problems and Sonar seems to do it. Also, Live's arrangement view still has some missing features, not to mention the midi and sync problems...

Do you think you can get a similar workflow when capturing audio on the fly?

MrTom
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Re: ..

Post by MrTom » Tue Oct 18, 2005 7:54 pm

raapie wrote:I bought 2.2 xl a few years back and it crashed a lot and only offered 16 rewire-channels for midi. I didn't understand why anyone would use that application. I still don't. I tried version4, but unstable as well.

and now this:
http://www.cakewalk.com/Products/sonar/collage.htm

I mean: what are they thinking?
This screenshot looks horrible...The guy who did it should be groove clipped....

MrTom
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Post by MrTom » Tue Oct 18, 2005 8:12 pm

No, thats pretty lame in Sonar (you cannot enable Recording mode while playing, maybe Project 5 can do it), but this is not so important for me because I am using this feature about 1% at all. There are a lot of things I might miss in LIVE(especially the real time options) and maybe I will keep my license, but currently I realized I need a stable workhorse for larger tracks (most of the "loops" do not have to be time stretched at all :-))...

Jed
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Location: New Zealand

Post by Jed » Tue Oct 18, 2005 8:35 pm

So you recorded an album just using LIVE ? Interesting.
I am using a lot of multitrack drum loops (seperated hats, kick etc) at home ( and believe me :-)) this is a pain in LIVE.

Don't get me wrong, I like LIVE for the workflow, but after recording 24 tracks the #of Coffee breaks after moving some parts increased. Maybe this is an issue of my PC but I owned Cubase before and 32 tracks were no problem at all. Same for Sonar.
Actually the album was recorded in Sonar versions 2.2 and 4 (I didn't write that very clearly) But I see your point about editing the individual drum tracks separately in Live. Are you saying that once you get to around 24 tracks that Live's editing slows right down? (I have found that too)

My (not so technical) musical partner finds Sonar too fiddly to use when tracking me playing the guitar as he keeps moving waveforms around by mistake! With Live, tracking is more straight forward for him so this is also a factor in us using Live (it's all about workflow when those creative juices are running hot).

For our current album we are composing in Live, but may well take the projects over to Sonar for finishing off, although I'm trying to resist this. We tend to get our finshed work mixed and mastered by a guy who uses Pro Tools, and Sonar has the excellent OMF export capability (imports painlessly into Pro Tools).

Live doesn't even have a track to wave file batch saving function, so you have to do render each track separately which is a PAIN.

So swings and roundabout for both approaches

Cheers
Jed

Jed
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Location: New Zealand

Post by Jed » Tue Oct 18, 2005 8:38 pm

MrTom wrote:maybe I will keep my license, but currently I realized I need a stable workhorse for larger tracks (most of the "loops" do not have to be time stretched at all :-))...
I would definately hang on to your Live licence. Live is a fantastic compositional environment and is advancing really quickly.

Cheers
Jed

MrTom
Posts: 116
Joined: Wed Jan 05, 2005 3:55 pm

Post by MrTom » Tue Oct 18, 2005 8:55 pm

Jed wrote:
So you recorded an album just using LIVE ? Interesting.
I am using a lot of multitrack drum loops (seperated hats, kick etc) at home ( and believe me :-)) this is a pain in LIVE.

Don't get me wrong, I like LIVE for the workflow, but after recording 24 tracks the #of Coffee breaks after moving some parts increased. Maybe this is an issue of my PC but I owned Cubase before and 32 tracks were no problem at all. Same for Sonar.
Actually the album was recorded in Sonar versions 2.2 and 4 (I didn't write that very clearly) But I see your point about editing the individual drum tracks separately in Live. Are you saying that once you get to around 24 tracks that Live's editing slows right down? (I have found that too)

My (not so technical) musical partner finds Sonar too fiddly to use when tracking me playing the guitar as he keeps moving waveforms around by mistake! With Live, tracking is more straight forward for him so this is also a factor in us using Live (it's all about workflow when those creative juices are running hot).

For our current album we are composing in Live, but may well take the projects over to Sonar for finishing off, although I'm trying to resist this. We tend to get our finshed work mixed and mastered by a guy who uses Pro Tools, and Sonar has the excellent OMF export capability (imports painlessly into Pro Tools).

Live doesn't even have a track to wave file batch saving function, so you have to do render each track separately which is a PAIN.

So swings and roundabout for both approaches

Cheers
Jed
You nailed it!.. I think, the guitar man is the creative person not the "wave shaper" :-)

...there was one feature I like so much in Live; to select an arbitrary part of music and copy it somewhere. I found out this is possible in other DAWs as well :-)...(eg. in Sonar you can select a subset of clips and copy just a snippet out of all these selected clips....

MrTom
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Joined: Wed Jan 05, 2005 3:55 pm

Post by MrTom » Tue Oct 18, 2005 8:57 pm

Jed wrote:
MrTom wrote:maybe I will keep my license, but currently I realized I need a stable workhorse for larger tracks (most of the "loops" do not have to be time stretched at all :-))...
I would definately hang on to your Live licence. Live is a fantastic compositional environment and is advancing really quickly.

Cheers
Jed
Yeap, I agree...I still like the way LIVE works...

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