Cakewalk makes solid, reliable and powerful music software, mainly for Windows. This page will (eventually) have information about their flagship DAW (Sonar), and their extremely interesting soft synths Dimension, Rapture, Z3TA, Pentagon, sfz and other products.
For the time being, besides their own website, another strongly recommended one is Simon Cann’s site for great info about all these things. (In particular, one of my two or three favorite books on music software is “Cakewalk Synthesizers: From Presets to Power User” by Simon Cann.)
(I combined the Sonar fan page with this one since I needed another page specifically for the Zebra synth.)
Sonar
I don’t use Cakewalk Sonar very much, compared to Ableton Live…it’s not my preferred workflow. But that’s not to say it isn’ t an excellent piece of software. And for micro tinkering with MIDI it’s essential.
Due to budgetary reasons, I’ve only been upgrading it about every other version. As of this date (Jan ‘10) I’m still using “Studio” version 7. To be honest, for my needs it’s already got much more power and functionality than I really need. So maybe it’s a little unfair for me to critique it when the current version is 8. But this season I needed to make some more responsible decisions about what to spend money on and u-he’s Zebra got the nod instead.
Here’s a quick list about some of the things I like and don’t like about it
Good things
+ Pretty nice GUI
+ Plenty of MIDI functionality
Not so good things
- NO HEXADECIMAL!! I understand that it’s tough to get your mind around hexadecimal notation when first getting into computer music, but you really do need to do it at some point. it makes handling of program changes and MIDI controllers too weird
- Somewhat equally complex to do simple functions particularly the drum editor
- Soft synth handling and VST a little baroque
For someone used to using Live for most of his production, Sonar is a bit cumbersome. But there are plenty of keystroke shortcuts and such, and if I used it on a more regular basis I might get more adept.
Page#77 / last modified 20100107
