Sonar X1b Skylight interface (click for larger image)
After an abortive release of Sonar X1 in December 2010, Cakewalk has re-released the program as Sonar X1b. Continue reading
iLok dongle
Companies live in fear spending their time looking for pirates. Write good software, price it reasonably and you will sell enough to make a profit.
The last niche of the software market that hasn’t grown up is the music business. The business practices are twenty years old.
Many companies in audio and recording require a dongle to use their software. Dongles disappeared from the face of the earth in the rest of the computer business around 1990. Continue reading
eVGA GTX 460 video card, quieter than fanless video card
My home studio workstation got remarkably quieter when I added a new video card that should have made it worse.
The Nvidia GTX 460 card, last year’s fast card, has an average sound profile of 50 dB but reduced the computer’s noise level by 7 dB to 34 dB.
That was the quieter than the computer with a fanless ATI 4350 card. It doesn’t make sense but the results were stunning.
This astounded me and the folks at silentpcreview who review computers and components for audio recording.
It’s been a two year project to build the ultimate home recording workstation or DAW (digital audio workstation).
After selecting everything from the hard drives, fans and video cards for their low sound output, I still couldn’t get the noise threshold below 41 dB. Continue reading
Sonar X1 Skylight interface (photo gearwire)
Update - after a 6-month debacle of trials and tribulation with Sonar, the misery has ended. Sonar X1c is the flashy new DAW Cakewalk should have waited to ship.
X1Cakewalk’s Sonar X1 digital audio recording software (DAW) was released in December to initial enthusiasm amongst Cakewalk’s customers and then bitter disappointment as the program literally would not work as advertised. Continue reading
This is my Sonar X1 Diary until I quit in January and went back to Sonar Producer 8.5.3.
I probably wasted 2-3 weeks of time in the process and didn’t learn anything other than an old lesson: don’t believe software developers that a first release isn’t beta and don’t install beta software when you need to get work done.
Update – Sonar X1b now ready for prime time
The diary is edited from my comments on the Cakewalk Sonar User Forum and old include my words to avoid copyright issues or breach of confidentiality. It tracks day-to-day comments up to version X1A with the ASIO patch.
Cakewalk announced they hope to fix most of the bugs by March 2010 in release X1b.
I am having a great time with X1. The first download didn’t work so I did it again. Big deal. The install was smoother than 8 and the authorization process a breeze. Continue reading
There are seven videos in the Master Class.
Session Drummer is included with Sonar X1.
Pretty awesome, especially when X1 starts working reliably.
People who use Sonar Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) in business are losing money when the product is buggy.
Cakewalk supports Sonar as if customers are not in the business of recording music.
Update – Sonar X1b now ready for prime time
I respectfully submit that Cakewalk needs to develop a tiered support level to keep it’s customers happy and to pay for the support businesses expect.
This is not a problem with Cakewalk’s employees: it’s a failure of management to put the proper customer service systems in place.
Forget how buggy Sonar X1 is. The support of the Online Forum and email support doesn’t cut it when time = money in business. Continue reading
We’ve been working on our Christmas present to you for over two weeks. Now it’s ready for you to listen and enjoy.
The band mates who performed on the song are Denis Larocque (guitar), Ronnie “Bunnie” MacLean (drums), and Tom LeClair (bass) and myself (guitar, vocals). Full credits and special thanks are covered after the page break.
You can share the song with this link. You can also download it for free by clicking on the download button on the Reverbnation site.
Many people are more than blue at Christmas. We’re encouraging a voluntary donation to the Schizophrenia Society of PEI, P.O. Box 25020,Charlottetown P.E.I. C1A 9N.
Or you can donate online in Canada or the United States. Any proceeds from sales of the song will be donated to either group depending on their origin.
As a matching donation, NJN Network is donating $0.10 for each time you listen to the song.
We had a good time recording this song and hope everyone has a Merry Christmas.
Sonar Sonar X1 ProChannel, easy to use, powerful track and channel processing
Part seven of the Blue Christmas Diaries.
They say pioneers get all the arrows, in the back. The last three days of mixing down our rough recorded tracks of Blue Christmas has been like that but we’re still alive.
Update – Sonar X1b now ready for prime time
Since drums and bass are the foundation, I started sifting through bass player Tom LeClair’s takes for the best one on Sunday.
They say don’t sweat the details which would be good advice to take. Actually most of what Tom recorded could have been THE take so I obsessed over the little stuff.
Studio Economik sent me a K+H O800 sub-woofer that arrived on Friday so that was part of Sunday- hooking it up and balancing the room. What a difference that made. I tried some of my older mixes and could spot the bass weakness in the mix right away. I’ll miss that when it goes back in a few weeks.
Most of Sunday was spent playing with the bass track and the two track rhythm section, Bunnie’s hi-hat and snare. Timing seemed to be off a notch which turned out to be the internal latency when you play backing tracks and then record live. It’s about a beat and a bit off.
Using the Nudge feature in Sonar X1, Ronnie MacLean and I agreed on where the beat should land Monday afternoon. Continue reading
Recording the Blue Christmas vocals (photo by Stephen Pate)
Sixth in the series of Blue Christmas Diaries. This journal helps me to stay true to the goal of recording and releasing a version of Elvis Presley’s Blue Christmas. The Diary is about having fun with music, computers, home studio gear and bad jokes. (links to the other stories are scattered throughout)
Update – Sonar X1b now ready for prime time
Once Sonar X1 was up and running on Friday morning, we were able to lay down the vocals that day. Saturday the rhythm guitar tracks were recorded and the mixing started. Sonar obliged with a few hiccups but they didn’t stop us.
It felt exhilarating on Friday morning to take out the vocal mic, set up my singing position and get started actually singing Blue Christmas. Continue reading
Sonar X1 two days of crash on the tracks but now it's great
Tuesday night I was pretty flushed with getting the guys tracks down for our release of Blue Christmas so I did the unthinkable – upgraded Sonar 8.5.3 DAW software to the new Sonar X1.
Update – Sonar X1b now ready for prime time
If anything could sabotage the project, new recording software is about best way to go about it. From my point of view, what could be worse than the trouble I went through trying to get a backing track last week?
What could be worse was two days of misery trying to get the new software working. But I did it and that suffering is behind me. Sonar X1 is a champ.
Maybe it’s me or maybe it’s Sonar but it that always been a flaky tool. Recording audio is like supporting an inverted pyramid of sound drivers and audio files being processed through the bottle neck called a CPU – central processing unit. People using other programs will tell you their software is better than Sonar. I don’t believe it: the internet is full of support forums with cries of despair. Continue reading
