Customer Reviews

Focal Easy Guide to Cakewalk Sonar: For new users and professionals (The Focal Easy Guide)

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The book is aimed at new users to Cakewalk Sonar, and it does meet the needs of it's target audience. However, the book has significant flaws that makes it harder to read than it needs to be.

To begin with, whoever edited this book needs to turn in their license. Run-on sentences abound, as with this example (from page 5):

"Many options are obtained by right-clicking on specific areas, such as Clip, and in general SONAR should be quite intuitive to anyone who is familiar with the Windows environment but if you're entirely new to all of this then don't be put off by the learning curve just make sure you can handle your computer before adding digital sound technology to the pot!"

No kidding, that's a paragraph from the book.

There are a multitude of pictures illustrating various bits of the software, and usually the pictures are near the text that talks about them. Sometimes it's a bit of a guessing game which text goes with which picture though, as there are no captions whatsoever. And, in many cases, the pictures are relatively tiny, making them hard to view. This is annoying when the picture is showing some complex part of the software: the various elements wind up quite tiny.

SONAR uses many little buttons to control various features, and pictures of those buttons are imbedded in the text, which is good. However, as with the example pictures, the imbedded pictures are often smaller than the buttons appear on the screen. Also, some of the button pictures have low contrast, making them hard to see on the page. In a few inconsistent places the button pictures are magnified, making reading much easier. I wish this practice had been followed throughout the book. There are occasional cases where the picture was orphaned away from it's text onto the next page.

The font used in the book is a thin sans serif font, making the book harder to read unless you have good light.

Another annoyance: at no point in the book does the author actually say what version of SONAR he's talking about. It's only by looking at a picture in the "Setting Up" chapter do we find out that the book is about SONAR 4, and that's only because the author included the splash screen from the Installer program. Dumb luck.

If you can get past all of that, the technical content is actually pretty useful for the beginning SONAR 4 user.

I had higher hopes. I own other books from Elsevier's Focal Press line on the subject of digital sound recording and mastering, and they are stunningly useful and well edited. Unfortunately, the care taken in producing those other works didn't carry over to this one.

This book is a good source of information. But, I recommend using this book in conjunction with the Cakewalk's SONAR Manual.