Customer Reviews

Cakewalk Sonar Home Studio 4.0

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Great software at a great price! It is as functional as Cakewalk Pro Audio 7 was (I used to use that). The 64 audio track limit is not a problem, I have never even got close to that many audio tracks. There are a lot of free MIDI effects and VST effects and instruments available for free online if you need anything this program doesn't offer....

If you can't get sound look under OPTIONS->AUDIO->ADVANCED and try a different driver (ASIO, MME, etc...). ASIO is best (update soundcard drivers or look for ASIO4ALL). Also don't forget to pick MIDI devices (OPTIONS->MIDI DEVICES) or you'll get no MIDI playback either.....

To clarify complaints by a previous reviewer. If you read the product description nowhere does it promise to be easy to use or that you will be "recording your music and listening to it right away". It says it is entry-level software for musicians. "Musicians"...not casual users looking for a toy to play with. If you read the description of its capabilities and all of those features are going over your head common sense should tell you this may not be the software for you. Cakewalk offers a more entry-level program called "Easy Music Creator"...that may be the product for you. Sonar Home Studio is extremely powerful for what it costs but it has a steep learning curve. It is the first step into serious pro-level recording software.

The complaint about the helpfile is valid. Also, this product can at times have stability and driver issues, especially with built-in soundcards not intended for use with recording software. But all-in-all it is a great product when used with a pro-sumer or professional grade interface.

I bought Sonar Home Studio to essentially expand on the sequencer of Reason 3.0, as well as to use Reason simultaneously with Reaktor 5. I have a lot of synth and effect plugin power, so I was looking for a basic, reasonably full featured, inexpensive sequencer to use with those two programs. Sonar Home Studio has fit that bill almost perfectly. As a previous reviewer noted, this is not a "play and hear immediately" sequencer. It has a truly excellent feature set for the money, and thus has a learning curve that is "somewhat" steep. I found Sonar HS to be refreshingly stable, and had just what I needed. Rewiring Reason into Sonar HS has been a breeze, with very few problems. It should be noted though, that propellerheads rewire update has introduced some problems. If you use Reason with this, save all of your parameters before shutting down Reason, as it sometimes shuts down Sonar along with it, (I suspect that this is an issue with Reason, not Sonar)! Another issue is VSTi plugins. They are run through a wrapper rather than directly. Still, I had no serious problems with my VSTi plugins. The wrapper functioned as promised, the only issues that I had were some strange rendering issues with Reaktor in it's VSTi version, but those problems at all weren't serious, and I found the VSTi versions of that program to actually be more stable! All of the rest of my VSTi's have worked perfectly. When using the wrapper however, do note to set the rendering size large enough to draw the plugins, as the wrapper itself has very little documentation about this. Documentation for the rest of the program was rather sparce, but enough to get one up and running, if one has basic knowledge of digital audio workstations.

This program has some stability issues with EMU's pro series cards as well, such as the 1212m. I wound up ditching their drivers, (which weren't very good anyway), and using ASIO4ALL drivers, which have given me rock solid stability and latencies down to 5 ms without a hiccup. If you don't know what latency is however, I would recommend Easy Music Creator to cut one's chops on. It's dirt cheap, and very educational.

The bottomline:

Sonar Home Studio is an excellent DAW for persons working with softsynths. With the right drivers, it's both stable, and does what it says it will do. I found the workflow to be very good, (but in all fairness, that is somewhat of a personal preference), and I also found that it was very good at syncing everything up, (I tested that extensively), where entry level DAW's frequently have trouble with that sort of thing. All in all, problems were found to be solvable with a little research and patience. If you are a band that is doing hard disk recording however, and are light on high level effects and mastering tools, you may want to go with Sonar 5 studio, which comes with superior effects plugins. If you have a ton of good plugins though, and are looking for a low cost sequencer, Sonar Home Studio may just fill the bill for you, and do it at an excellent price!

All I needed sonar home studio 4 to do was be a slave to my Tascam DP-01 Digital 8-Track Portastudio I wanted my 8-track to start and stop my sonar home studio 4 software.
"it said in the software manual that it could do this".
I email tech support three times over two weeks.
They told me "SONAR Home Studio 4 only has the ability to "send" MIDI Sync".
And they also said "Unfortunately, some of SONAR Studio's documentation was included in Home Studio." and that "You will need SONAR Studio or Producer for full synching". $300.00 -$500.00

Well, I GOT IT TO WORK! (on my own) and it can be a SLAVE! Just like the manual said!

Why did they keep trying to sell me more software and not help me to get it to work right?

So far, I haven't been able to fully use the program. The manual that comes with it is helpful, but it seems like such a waste of time to read. Half of the information in it is obvious and the other half is technical terms and acronyms that I don't understand.

Right away I was able to record and is sounds good. I just can't edit very much yet. I think I will be able to eventually.

I bought this to replace my husbands old cakewalk program for windows 95...From what I know of the program and from what my husband and son ( both of which are musicians) its a great home version and has all the bells and whisles you can need. My husband is still working on tweeking it to suit him but thats a plus ... the abilty to tweek it to your needs.

Cakewalk is not the product to buy. If you run into any problems they will simply not solve them. They don't have the technical knowldege and what really is frustrating is that they will not even refund your money. I know. Pathetic. Don't buy. You will not
enjoy the experience. Tried four times with four different techs to get the problem solved. They could not but would not refund my money. That is dishonest. Don't buy.

Cakewalk will not give you a refund if their software is faulty or does not work correctly. They will ignore consumer inquiries and will not give any assistance other than to tell you the basics, rather than admitting there's a problem with the software. I've NEVER seen anything like it as long as I've been doing music. You'd be much better off going with a Sony product, as they actually stand by their stuff.

This product was advertised as being easy to use for beginners, and promised we would begin recording and listening to our music right away. Instead, Cakewalk Home Studio fails to recognize the sound card in our brand new Dell, and we can't hear a thing.

The system also has the following exasperating flaw: when the Help window is open, it is not possible to return to the main program window by simply clicking the main program button at the bottom of the screen. Instead it is necessary to manually minimize the Help screen first. This is particularly annoying when spending large amounts of time in Help.

We're very disappointed and a little angry. After several hours of effort and numerous updates and downloads, Cakewalk Home Studio has yet to make a sound.