Sonar vs Cakewalk by Bandlab

[Tony p]

Hi. I realized I've been using Sonar Professional instead of Cakewalk by Bandlab. I think it was because of a plugin that came with Professional that was not available with Cakewalk. So I've got a few projects and I'm pretty comfortable with using Professional. I'm just curious if there are any other differences between the two?

Thank you

[scook]

There is no reason to choose. Leave SONAR installed and install CbB using BandLab Assistant. CbB installs next to 64bit  SONAR allowing access to both DAWs. In fact, this is BandLab's recommendation for SONAR users. Everything bundled with 64bit SONAR Professional will be available in CbB. Most of the differences are bug fixes and updates since SONAR development stopped in 2017. Those changes are detailed here.

One of the plug-in differences between SONAR Professional and CbB is the fly-out feature in the Quad Curve EQ. Here is an image of the fly out from http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=ProChannel.06.html

Some of the other things missing from SONAR Professional included with CbB are the Drum Replacer, VocalSync, plug-in load balancing, theme editor, MIDI Transform tool, several PC modules, zplane élastique audio stretching and pitch shifting.

[Craig Anderton]

I'm with Steve on this. CbB is a better program than Sonar, and you don't lose access to anything you had before.

[John Vere]

There's no known reason NOT to be using CbB over the old Sonar unless your one of those weirdos who are still using 32 bit OS. 

[Tezza]

2 hours ago, scook said:

One of the plug-in differences between SONAR Professional and CbB is the fly-out feature in the Quad Curve EQ. Here is an image of the fly out from http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=ProChannel.06.html

 

+1 Love this thing!

[William W. Saunders, Jr.]

Your question is kind of like asking if you should fly the Boeing before or after the software fix.  In this case, the fix is already applied in CWBL and it works very very well.

 

Fly on, Brother!

[Bapu]

22 hours ago, Craig Anderton said:

I'm with Steve on this. CbB is a better program than Sonar, and you don't lose access to anything you had before.

As loing as you DON'T uninstall SONAR.

[Bapu]

2 hours ago, BRainbow said:

Your question is kind of like asking if you should fly the Boeing before or after the software fix.  In this case, the fix is already applied in CWBL and it works very very well.

 

Fly on, Brother!

FYI Cakewalk is one word and BandLab is one word. A typical acronym for them would be CB but in this case the product is almost always referred to as  "Cakewalk by BandLab" hence 99.999999999992% of users call it CbB. 🤣👍 

[RBH]

I upgraded from Sonar Pro to CbB,  as said previous - leave Sonar installed and install CbB - you will need to venture into the Cakewalk core directory and possibly copy over instrument definitions and a few other things like sysex files if you have them and be sure to set the VST scan directories the same and let it scan. There's a small ton of minor program updates and stability fixes. It's pretty seamless.

One test I did was to open and save a test file in CbB and then re-open the file in Sonar Pro and I found that going from a "Splat compatible file " back to Sonar Pro worked - it was backward compatible ( minus a few NEW  prochannel modules).  It's been smooth sailing for nearly a year. No question  that's  it's worth the update.  The CbB deletes it's install file after the final install step - so try and capture it to save off the download. There are a few posts that describes this in the forum.

[joserubensdasilvacaetano2@]

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