Product Reviews

Sonar 4 was our top recommendation for audio recording and mixing on the PC in What's New, Shopper February 2005. Ableton Live may be a better choice for electronic music production and PC-based composition, but for recording pre-written songs, perhaps with a live band, Sonar is the natural choice with its superior handling of multiple takes, fine-level audio editing, flexible mix architecture and superb collection of effects.

That's not to say Sonar isn't well equipped for PC-based composition, too. It can loop and slice samples automatically, unleashing the potential in sample libraries and allowing you to create all sorts of unusual electronic noises. This is a great start, but Sonar 5 introduces lots of new tools and toys for electronic music production.

Top billing goes to Pentagon I, a virtual analogue synth that sounds as huge and intimidating as its control panel looks. It isn't the easiest introduction to subtractive synthesis, but nerds will love it. Psyn II, another virtual analogue synth, is marginally more approachable and sounds sufficiently different to justify its inclusion. Roland Groovesynth specialises in retro hip hop sounds, while RXP and Cyclone provide two different approaches to drum sampling. The high-quality General MIDI synth from version 4 is also included.

LIVE AID

Sonar is a superb self-contained production environment, but those working with live recordings aren't left out. V-Vocal is a sound processor, which, at its simplest, performs AutoTune-style automatic pitch correction, giving vocals that boy-band pop sheen or the Cher Do You Believe? effect. It's easier to use than AutoTune, though, and its scope for radically

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altering performances is far greater. You can draw in entirely new melodies, change the timing and draw volume curves and even formant curves, altering the apparent size of the singer from pixie to giant without changing the pitch.

Pitch and formant effects work only on vocal and other monophonic recordings, but you can adjust the timing and volume of any sound, providing another way to mangle samples. The only downside is that clips with V-Vocal processing can't be split or faded in and out, which is a little strange.

Sonar's effects library was strong, but the new Perfect Space reverb plug-in raises it well above the standard of its competitors. It uses a technique called convolution to apply reverberation from impulses recorded in real acoustic spaces and from premium hardware effect processors. It's extremely processor-intensive, especially at low latency settings, but the results are convincing; it really seems to place sound in a church, a cave or inside a piano, rather than just applying a church effect.

Other new features include the ability to apply effects to a clip rather than an entire mixer channel, which is great for those with experimental mixing techniques. These can be applied non-destructively to allow further tweaking, or destructively to conserve processing power. However, applying effects non-destructively uses processing power constantly rather than just while the clip is playing. As a result, duplicating a clip with effects too many times will cause playback to grind to a halt.

Real-time performance gets a boost from 64-bit Windows support, giving a claimed 20 to 30 per cent performance increase. Sixty-four-bit sound card drivers are rare, as are 64-bit copies of Windows, but it's good to see Cakewalk embracing this new technology. Mixes are performed with 64-bit audio streams (regardless of the Windows version), giving superb audio fidelity, though the 32-bit mixing in rival programs is by no means coarse.

Sonar 5's new features boost its prowess for electronic production and radical manipulation, and while Ableton Live has some superb tricks and Cubase SX's interface is more elegant, Sonar offers the most versatile toolbox for music producers of all persuasions. It's also one of the easiest to use.