I've only been with the family for a little over a year, and I've been impressed by the cleanness of the design, the integration of virtual instruments, audio handling, MIDI handling, MIDI plug-ins, and all the nice extras that its good to have around 'just in case'. In some ways, then, this will be a review from someone who's coming to Sonar fresh, rather than being written by someone who's used the software since its earliest, pre-Sonar, incarnations. Look around at the most widely used packages on the PC, and bosh: I'm a Cakewalk user!

However, my latest music computer upgrade was a laptop PC, which turned out to be more powerful than the top Powerbook for around half the price. I must admit that Cakewalk's approach has always interested me, though I never had much hands-on contact with their software and I often wished they'd make the move to my platform. My main computer music history has been very much Macintosh-based.

Besides, doing so may make Sonar more attractive to anyone looking around for a new sequencing environment.Īnd I can sympathise with potential migrators. Some features seem to have been inspired by similar elements in other software, but there's no harm in taking ideas from the good things the competition does. What we get is a collection of facilities that makes working with Sonar faster and more streamlined, and also brings the software up to date with regard to multi-channel audio formats. The answer is quite a bit, although the basic core of the program remains the same. So what can have happened to justify an entire numerical increment? It's less than 12 months since Sonar 3 was let loose on the world, but already version 4 is before us. The latest version of Cakewalk's flagship sequencer brings it into the world of surround sound, makes it easy to work with folder tracks and multiple takes, and adds one of the most comprehensive Freeze functions available on any DAW.

Sonar 4 producer edition free download