Bristol_Jonesey

From the Help menu, click documentation And if you don't like wading through menus, the Assist Menu provides many options Also - Cakewalk Next is NOT Sonar. If you follow the manual for Next you'll get hopelessly confused.

What audio interface & driver? (please don't say ASIO4ALL)

There is no better. It's all down to personal preference. Would you prefer to mix your drums inside SD5 or in Sonar? Bear in mind you can add any 3rd party vst for your Fx in Sonar - can you do the same in SD5? I'm not familiar with SD5 so these considerations might well be irrelevant, but can you: Adjust the pan of each kit piece? Adjust the level of each? Tweak the midi velocities of each? Add Fx to each piece? Make use of sub-busses to group pieces together, e.g. all toms, cymbals etc? If the answer to any of these is no, then surely you're best off with doing it all inside Sonar. But I would modify the way you insert it. Choose the insert Synth option as in option 1, but instead of a single Stereo Output, select all Mono outputs. (If SD5 exposes a stereo pair for Room or Overheads etc you'll need to change the mono tracks for these back to Stereo) This is exactly how I do it for BFD3 and it works perfectly

Use a combination of 2 of the methods suggested above Use volume automation to roughly even out the levels. Yes it's time consuming, but so what? Use a compressor to even the levels out even more. If you use the inbuilt Sonitus compressor (It might show up as Core compressor, depending on the version you're running) this will show you graphically what's happening. I would suggest a slow attack to retain the transients (a flute doesn't have a pronounced attack) Set a fairly soft knee Use a ratio of about 3:1, but you can experiment with this Set the threshold so that you're getting 2-3dB of gain reduction Use the makeup gain to restore the vevrall level

5...4...3...2...1....

Yes

This is the icon for Offset Mode

This is exactly what I'm seeing Will

As long as you let Sonar know where your templates are stored, they'll show up every time And it doesn't make sense to split the location between built in and custom templates Pick one location and stick to it

For me, this is not an issue on my system. I can drag clips up/down with impunity and do not need any sort of precision in order to lock the horizontal position. This is of course with Shift held down.

I thought shift only applied when dragging up/down so that the clip ends up in a different track. I just tried this and it does preserve the start time of the dragged clip. Is this what you mean?

This appears to be a display issue. He says it's showing as G# not Ab. In reality it's the same note.

You're out of luck. The best you can do is change the track header This will also change the colours of the events in the tracks

The choice of dithering algorithm can make a HUGE difference to the quality of a dithered track.

Your midi notes are displaying as red. What did you expect to see?