Bristol_Jonesey

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

1. Use volume automation to roughly even out the levels. Yes it's time consuming, but so what?
2. 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....

4 hours ago, Josh B. said:

If so, then does that mean Cakewalk is loading/saving those 350 take lane copies each time the file is loaded or saved?

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

10 hours ago, dougalex said:

FYI... The Constrained Dragging feature works fine here. I tested with both left and right shift key.

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?

4 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

Are you drawing the notes in and having them end up in the wrong place?

Or do you have a clip that you are editing?

If you are editing a clip, are the notes in it different than what you see in PRV?  

Are you using the song key map to tell it to change from the key that it was already in?  

Or something else? 

 

More specific details are necessary to find out if what you are seeing is normal or not, and if not, how you might correct it. 

 

This appears to be a display issue. He says it's showing as G# not Ab.

In reality it's the same note.

2 minutes ago, Lukasz said:

I wanted to change colors of the interface black and red text of fonts

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

4 hours ago, Bass Guitar said:

I use Nero and I feed it 48/. 24 wave files no problem.  It has a good Dithering system built in. 
There’s a lot of information about dithering and after reading a lot of it I decided that it is not very important to my type of music production. 
People obsess about this stuff when in the end there’s more important stuff to worry about like the music itself. 
Who cares if you recorded at 192/ 32 if it’s not a good song. 

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

1 hour ago, Lukasz said:

It looks like this 

Your midi notes are displaying as red.

What did you expect to see?

Preferences > Customization > Colors

Select the area you want to change from Color Category dropdown.

58 minutes ago, Bass Guitar said:

Yes but Sonar in my case is using 32 floating point so I can’t see a case where dithering would apply. 
Most cases where I would be importing audio files they are always lower bit rates. 
 

I think you're conflating 2 different uses of bit depth.

The depth of an audio file is not related to the depth Sonar uses for internal calculations.

BFD have got a great Black Friday sale going on

Buy 3 expansion packs and get 2 free

The price of all packs are also heavily discounted and you can use the discount and the buy 3 get 2 free offer at the same time

I just bought 5 for £52. These would normally cost over £240

11 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

 

Assuming you have not updated Sonar itself at all and it's still running the exact same version as then, then without knowing how Sonar is determining what to show, my best guess is that (if you haven't disabled these)  a Windows update or driver update has changed something in what's reported to Sonar for the capabilities of the system, and Sonar is then adapting the keyboard to these. 

But that's a whole bunch of suppositions, so....  

Yes mate, there have been several Windows updates to this Win 11 laptop since my first post, so it could well be that.

I'll try my studio rig later on which is still on Win 10

On 9/4/2025 at 6:51 AM, Bristol_Jonesey said:

I've got a touchscreen on my laptop.

This is what I get. And nothing is draggable or expandable 😄😄😄😄😄

I think something is broken

 

I haven't changed a thing on my system since my original post, now the virtual keyboard looks like this.

At least this is useable

It's at the far left of the PRV screen. Just drag it out to the right.

People are still using it

2 hours ago, Bass Guitar said:

You can have used Sonar for years ( this is my 20th) and learn something new everyday! 
I guess that’s how long it would take to memorize the 2,000 pages of the user manual 

Interesting trivia. The Studio Instrument collection and Session Drummer 2 were introduced to Sonar 6 users in 2006. 

Hmmm. Agreed on Session Drummer, but according to my spreadsheet, Studio Instruments came along with X1, not before.

6 hours ago, bertox said:

"Cheap storage"... yea sure.  Right. 🙃

1TB Crucial SDD - £64.00

Seems cheap to me

Are you editing automation nodes from the Automation Lane or directly in the Track?

It's not at all clear from your video what it is you're adjusting in order to change the volume

Presumably you're talking about Track 23? The one with record enabled? If you're mixing, switch that OFF

The red highlighted waveform seems to be overwriting something on that track. Is this what you're expecting?