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1. 

   Rogue Process
   

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   So yeah, over the past while, my Macbook Pro has been giving me nothing but grief. As a result, I'm hopefully selling the Macbook once I get the screen repaired, and going back over to my old Windows box which my friend has had sitting in his cupboard. It's not a fantastic machine, but will do the job for what I need.

   But, as I've been on OSX for the past 3 years, I've kind of been oblivious to developments in audio software on the Windows side of things. Are there any particularly good bits of audio software I should pick up? I know Image Line are making some quite cool plugins these days but I'm really unsure. Any recommendations?

   Any tips would be appreciated :)

   Posted 1 year ago #
2. 

   metaball
   

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   i'm tempted to snag one of these new fandangled multicore machines. i'm still using a system i put together about 8 years ago. 2gb ram, 2gig cpu, XP, Sonar 3, Creamware Project & 2 B ADA8000's. it still serves me well but is getting a bit laggy as of late. for me it's all about using it as a capture & mix device. i'm doing all my noise making outboard.

   Posted 1 year ago #
3. 

   Rogue Process
   

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   @ Metaball - I plan to be doing a lot of my stuff outboard as well. My current hope is that the sale of the Macbook will net me enough to buy a Korg Z1, and if I can come across a little more money, I might sell my JP8000 to put towards a 1st-generation Roland V-Synth.
   How does Sonar 3 hold up as a DAW? I've been quite tempted to go back to Sonar as my main workhorse DAW as I really liked the way it dealt with outboard MIDI gear, latency compensation and the like. Can it handle multiple takes/comping well enough to, say, stitch together some vocal takes, or guitar playing?

   Posted 1 year ago #
4. 

   metaball
   

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   Sonar 3 does everything i need it to do which is why i havent felt compelled to "upgrade". damn near all the Brainwashaudio stuff was captured & mixed on Sonar, multiple guitar, drum, bass, synth, vocal tracks with stacked fx & automated panning & volume changes, ect. it's certainly not the weakest link in my signal chain.

   i'd love to have 8gb of ram, 1TB HD & a muliticore cpu which you can score for about $600 these days. i'm just kinda sketchy on the jumping to 64 bit thing, losing all my old software & having to start from the ground up again on Win 7. Sonar was one of the first programs to jump to 64 bit so they were ahead of the curve. i think most the programs out there are pretty solid by now, just a matter of preferences.

   Posted 1 year ago #
5. 

   apertureburn
   

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   :D

   on pc i used sonar since version 1 (upgrading to 3, 7, then 8 and 8.5) and never went fully sonar 64 bit (even though i was on vista x64 then win 7 x64) because too many plugins didnt work properly even with bit-bridge or whatever it was called doing the handling. interface gui would go transparent (even with aero turned off) or just become unresponsive, i couldnt configure the vst settings to "time synced effect", etc. this wasnt a problem with sonar, it was with the plugs not being native 64 bit. luckily the 32 bit version of sonar and all my plugs worked fine on 64bit windows.

   after moving from pc to mac again (i started music on mac years ago) and getting well into logic, i can honestly say i dont think either platform is better or worse than the other and either one is fine for making music.

   Posted 1 year ago #
6. 

   metaball
   

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   ::this wasnt a problem with sonar, it was with the plugs not being native 64 bit. luckily the 32 bit version of sonar and all my plugs worked fine on 64bit windows.::

   so i should plan on abandoning all legacy software & start fresh with new stuff if i make the jump to 64bit?

   Posted 1 year ago #
7. 

   apertureburn
   

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   :D

   not necessarily, i just wouldn't plan on having all your 32-bit plugs working perfectly under sonar 64-bit with bit-bridge. or you can use 32-bit sonar on your 64-bit os (sonar will be limited to 2gb of ram but if you have more it will be used by other/system resources), this worked well for me.

   also, you can use sonar's 64-bit audio mix engine in the 32-bit version sonar.

   Posted 1 year ago #
8. 

   Rogue Process
   

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   I'm gonna be going back to Sonar 4! LOL this is gonna be awesome :D

   @ Apertureburn - Yeah, Logic's a great program, but I have a ton of gripes with the way it handles external MIDI, and I'm just not an OSX/mac lover in general. I'd rather just have a crap old beige box :P

   Seriously though, I have fond memories of Sonar's MIDI handling being rock solid when coupled with my Firepod, and I really liked the way you could just input your ASIO latency, and Sonar would automatically delay-compensate all your MIDI channels. That shit was awesome. I dunno, Sonar just really 'clicked' for me.

   Posted 1 year ago #
9. 

   apertureburn
   

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   :D

   yeah it really doesnt matter what you use, sonar is great on PC though. i didnt have any problem running sonar 3 (god that was a while ago though) external midi to a korg ms2000r which was the last piece of synth hardware i had before going completely soft-synth.

   Posted 1 year ago #
10. 

    YADE
    

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    well SONAR imho is a fantastic DAW if you are more into recording....for MIDI it does not really fit too well I think...also the UI is imho not really good....we use SONAR parallel to Pyramix on our recording machine...my audio engineer is totally happy with it....I tried it several times and found it just very complicated to include a nice midi track with some automation curves in it...

    if you are used to Logic you might go well with Cubase 5...sounds nice and offers a lot of possibilites (like for instance the expression tracks for orchestral things)...I personally use Ableton Live for it just fits my needs best...but Ableton does miss some needed features if you want to work with orchestral libraries...

    one thing I would like to say when using a PC....check that your MB-chipset is compatible to your audio interfaces and DSP cards....mine for instance got terribly unstable when I installed my Powercore....and it now needs around 6-7 tries every time to boot it up correctly....mostly you find this info on the vendors' websites.....

    Posted 1 year ago #
11. 

    Rogue Process
    

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    @ YADE - One of the main reasons I like Sonar is for how it handles MIDI, lol! Mind you, I'm not sure what it's like in more recent versions like 7 or 8, but I tried those versions briefly and they seemed to add a ton of unnecessary bloat, so I've not really delved too deep into them. But yeah, in Sonar 4, MIDI is IIRC extremely tight, and more fancy stuff like automation was never a problem.
    Not a fan of Cubase at all. Tried it when I was still at college, vowed never to go back to it.
    Hopefully, if I can get back my old PC, it still has a really good PCI Firewire card installed for my Firepod, and I never ran into any stability issues whatsoever. I'm fairly sure the motherboard wasn't too bad a model either so I should be okay if I'm gonna go ahead and get a DSP card of some sort. But cheers for the headsup eitherway :)

    Posted 1 year ago #
12. 

    YADE
    

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    @RP: I do not "not like" the way it handles MIDI but more the way to for instance enter or modify it....also the handling of the monitor for my purposes was very unsatisfying, because the channel strips are huge imho...

    mine was also no problem until i bought this Powercore thing :-)..now it's the pain...but still easier than reinstall all the plugs and stuff on a new machine :-)

    Posted 1 year ago #
13. 

    apertureburn
    

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    :D

    seems YADE and i have had completely opposite experiences :)

    i look at sonar (it used to be called cakewalk back when it was an exclusively MIDI program in the late 80's/early 90's) and say "that's a program that has been doing midi really well for a very long time".

    as for editing or entering data just double click a midi passage and up comes a really intuitive piano roll, or just bring up the midi event editor if that's your thing.

    and for automation, i would just use a separate midi track pointed either to the plugin or external midi channel and edit it independently. to me this makes more sense than trying to lump all data together on one track like how logic and others do by default. i find it more visible and easier to access when its separated.

    and cubase was a COMPLETE enigma to me years ago when i tried it, i would opt for almost anything else on either platform :)

    @ rogue process: in the end, its all just suggestions based on individual experiences which differ widely (don't even get me started on sound "quality" and how subjective that is)and that is why we have so many options. i think that's a good thing. besides it all comes down to what is generated anyhow. so if you were satisfied with the features, and you were familiar with sonar 3, then its probably wise to use it again.

    Posted 1 year ago #
14. 

    Rogue Process
    

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    Well, made the switch! Was a lot easier to do than I thought to be honest. My step-parents had a Core Duo Mac Mini kicking about that was no use to them, so I nicked it off them this weekend and performed a little bit of formatting trickery, and I have a really neat, compact Windows box that my Firepod and Sonar run flawlessly on.
    Still got the Macbook Pro kicking about so I'm going to be migrating all my project files off it over the coming days.
    All around good times!

    Posted 1 year ago #

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