Sonar 5: Producer Edition

by Cakewalk

Product Features

• Roland V-Vocal vocal processor
• Pentagon I analog synth
• RXP REX Player groove box
• Perfect Space Convolution Reverb
• Lexicon Pantheon Stereo & Surround Reverbs

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• ASIN: B000BL4W9S
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 2, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #28,907 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #92 in Software > Video & Music > Software > Production Stations

Product Description

Striking the perfect balance between passion and precision, Sonar 5 shatters the limitations found in ordinary digital audio workstations. Offering a complete spectrum of creative technologies, Sonar 5 inspires artistic expression. These technologies are fully integrated within a cutting edge engineering and mixing environment to transform musical dreams into professional finished productions. Sonitus Surround Compressor Multi-format surround mixing SurroundBridge Per-channel EQ Assignable FX controls POW-r dithering MPEX 3 time scaling Video thumbnail track PSYN II subtractive synth, Pentagon I vintage analog synth, Roland GrooveSynth, SFZ SoundFont sampler, RXP REX Player groove box Additional instruments include TTS-1, Cyclone, and DreamStation Perfect Space Convolution Reverb Additional effects include Lexicon Pantheon Reverb, Sonitus - fx Suite (10 effects), many more Updated MIDI FX plug-ins Integrated inline audio and MIDI editing, arranging, and mixing all in one view Envelope automation drawing enhanced with tempo-sync patterns, freehand, more Object-oriented clip-based effects and editing including per-clip effects bin, clip-based effect automation, and more BitBridge enables 32-bit VST effects and instruments in Sonar's 64-bit environment Remove DC offset during recording Dynamic Console View with per-channel EQ and assignable FX controls Freeze for tracks, effects, and synths unloads plug-ins, frees RAM, frozen audio is editable, Quick Unfreeze allows for toggling, more SurroundBridge use your favorite stereo effect plug-ins in surround Advanced step recording Edit and print traditional staff notation Video output to 1394 FireWire devices for high quality viewing with lower CPU and disk usage Sync to and send SMPTE/MTC for scoring external video System Requirements - Windows XP, Intel Pentium 4, 1.3 GHz, 128 MB of RAM, 100 MB of Hard Disk Space, 1024 x

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More features, more complicated than its predecessors, November 14, 2005

By 

Kuru (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sonar 5: Producer Edition (CD-ROM)

I've been a fan of Cakewalk sequencers since the early 1990's, when I started out with the early Professional program. That program was a model of intuitive programming -- over many years of use, I seldom so much as peeked at the user manual. Everything in the program simply worked pretty much as you'd expect it to.

Cakewalk's latest offering has taken me into the new century with a quantum leap in features. This program does everything you would expect as well as lots of things you may not have realized you'd like to do. Cakewalk's own site lists the features well enough, so this review will cover things Cakewalk's site doesn't.

First, all the features in the program make for a tightly packed computer screen. I can barely make out all the icons, tabs, etc. on a 17-inch digital monitor; I recommend getting as large a monitor as you can for using this software.

Second, the program is no longer so intuitive to use. It comes with a phonebook-sized manual, which you will likely spend a lot of time with. The manual is not particularly well organized, and explanations sometimes omit useful details (e.g., a picture of the icon you're supposed to press.) Despite the size of the manual, there appear to be a fair number of undocumented features; e.g., the included virtual synths don't appear to have explanatory material. However, there are helpful tutorials to cover basic operation of the program.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent... best DAW for Windows, particularly for the price..., July 23, 2006

By 

zevo - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sonar 5: Producer Edition (CD-ROM)

I come to Sonar from Logic Audio and Cubase SL.
Logic, of course, is now Mac only, and my experience with Cubase SL was absolutely horrible on three otherwise solid machines with 3 audio interfaces and 5 midi interfaces. Nothing worked.
After that, Sonar was like a breath of fresh air.

Here's a list of my favorite things:
Direct support for Acid loops, so quickly putting together a base track takes minutes, and the libraries can be extended inexpensively.

Built in patch, performance and rhythm control for TONS of hardware (Roland XP60, Roland MC307, Roland JV1010, Korg Z1, Yamaha RS7000, and around 100 more) that just worked (I spent over a month trying to scrounge the same thing in Cubase, though Logic audio has these as well.

Solid integration testing of the app with multiple audio/midi interfaces... all of the ones I've tried work perfectly. Logic has this as well.

An unbelievable upgrade path and (in my experience) superior treatment of their customers:
I received an offer for Project5 Version 2 (their loop-based audio application) for $99, Cakewalk z3ta+ for $99 (if you don't know about this synth, check it out), Cakewalk Rapture for $169 (this synth is MAD), Cakewalk Dimension Pro for $99, and a second license for Sonar 5PE for $79!! Mad!!
They also recently released a FREE expansion pack for both Rapture AND Dimension Pro.

Decent set of included instruments and excellent set of included effects. No one but Logic Pro truly excels here, but Sonar pretty close. You should be able to write music from day one, as you have synths, loops, effects, REX files, and REX player, etc. You can, of course, add more to your liking, which most do, but the set you're given isn't IMO prohibitive. The effects are stellar for this price range.

Rewire support. I don't know how I ever lived without this. Sometimes you want to use Project5 or Live and then tack on Sonar later... Rewire gives you that.

It's 64-bit ready... a feature I'm going to start taking advantage of later this week (now that the AMD and Intel chips are dropping price once again).

Direct integration with Sony Sound Forge (if you have it installed). Audio clip edits without leaving the app, auto-updated when you save in Sound Forge. You can switch this to Cool Edit, Audition, Wavelab, etc.

Track folders. They are currently only one level deep, so Cubase wins out here with nested folders of folders, but it's better than none, and a slightly different track arrangement makes it no real issue. Logic has folders, but they are considerably more complicated to use.

Per-clip effects in addition to per track effects, effect sends, and output tracks. Tons of effects processing options.

A truly excellent mixer. Not as good as environment mixers in Logic, but pretty sweet, and fairly configurable.

In the last 7 months, since getting the app, on two machines, I no longer spend time debugging... I just write music. Much better.

Excellent forum, which is where I go for support mostly. I had to call tech support once as well because my spam filter ate my registration code, but they had a new one to me the next day.

No dongle, and no machine-dependent activation, and no random "please insert your CD" nosense.

I'd buy it again in a heartbeat.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Kills creativity due to problems & missing documentation/tech support., January 22, 2006

By 

ZXC (USA/Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sonar 5: Producer Edition (CD-ROM)

I purchased this product (Producer edition actually which is this + some software synths) just 2 weeks back. And it is a nightmare when it comes to work in it. Will annoy you about every 20 mins, and if you try to contact the tech support you will not have a toll free number, and will have to wait loooong time to get someone on phone (what happens after that ? I don't know because I could never get someone to pick up the phone.) So check it out on there web site, and read about there tech support policy yourself.

After spending 500 US$ I learned it hard way though.

1) Not a robust product, and doesn't behave in predictable manner in many cases. Like if you add the Session Drummer to the track, and after working for some time, if you closed and came back to the project it won't always play back the drum track at all !!!. I have to do some opening and closing of the session drummer window thinking may be something will reset it and then sometime (at random) it starts again.

2) The user interface needs several improvements. Intuitiveness is strongly missing. You cant guess things most times, and sometimes there are technical bugs and many other time the documentation is missing. For example when I insert a new audio track (by bounce the track feature, which is converting the midi to sound), the track display is simply grayed out. I keep looking for the waveform to get the sense of where the signals are, but it won't show. Turns out that it doesn't refresh by itself, like how you would expect to drop a file in windows explore and then the file should appear in the folder where you dropped it. Here nothing, After getting frustrated, and trying various menu actions and not getting anything, suddenly by chance I move the window size a little bit & then the wave form display suddenly comes up. Duh!!!. It's a bug.

3) No STARS TO DOCUMENTATION. It has a basic book, which does explain the basic tracking features. BUT THE SYNTHS & EFFECTS MANUALS ARE MISSING. The book is a common one for the Studio & Producer edition and lacks almost all the features exclusive in producer addition. The Cyclone grove sampler is blank when I start it. There is like 5 line description each on a total of about 6 pages of documentation which doesn't not tell how to load sound in the Cyclone and use it. I am still searching for a step by step guide to the RXP, SFZ the sampler, and other things. I cant save the modified patch in the GM MIDI1/2 basic synth TTS 1 by my own name, so basically cant save synth with my own parameters.

4) Many other issues, basically out of the box, many things don't work. Like PerfectSpace effect doesn't work in, it wouldn't show the fancy graph like in the brochure but just a dumb empty screen and no effect on the track. I am still working on that one to find what is really missing.

5) Poor QA/Testing behind the product & Disastrous tech support. I felt really sorry for my 500 US$ when I installed there update the 5.01 from there web site. Turns out that all the 4 projects I created in last 2 weeks won't play. I mean totally frozen, no sound, no movement. I tried to uninstall the update pack, found out that they did not include any uninstaller for the update pack. I wanted to call the tech support, turns out !! no toll free number, and I had to wait long time, until I ran out of patience. I called there sales, where they sure have the toll free, and they pick up the phone immediately. And I explained my problem, they took down my number, and said they will call me back, and it has been a week and no reply. Anyway I had to uninstall the complete software and install the 5.0 again (don't try system restore it will give you more probs).

For a 500 US$ software I would expect a tech support which answer phone and at least be toll free. (based on what I know it costs companies less than 50 cents per 10 mins for toll free line).

Many small things which will come in your way when you do day to day work, and drive you nuts and destroy your creative spirit, and make you fight with the technical problems, and missing manuals. Once a while you can resort to forums for answer, but that is not very productive having to learn so many things about the software, synths, settings, etc etc etc.