As we noted before, the amount of recording power that individuals can access via their computers gets more powerful every year. New advances in processor speeds and memory capacities — and more on the latter in just a bit — beget more and more powerful software.
You can see this trend in action when examining what was possible on a computer over the last quarter of a century. When the Boston-based firm of Cakewalk began in 1987, their first products concentrated on recording MIDI data from hardware synthesizers. Then when processor and hard drive speeds became fast enough to allow for recording digital audio, that medium was added to the mix as well.
Return To The Roots
And in one sense, the latest version of their flagship Sonar digital audio workstation (DAW) for Windows is a return to their roots — though updated for the 21st century, of course. There’s a great emphasis in the latest version of Sonar on its variety of built-in software synthesizers, a few of which are new and the rest included from previous editions of Sonar.
Included with the Producer Edition of Sonar are a surprisingly diverse amount of soft synths, including full versions of Cakewalk’s Dimension Pro, and Z3TA+ synths, a stripped down “light edition” version of Cakewalk’s Rapture, and Roland’s TTS-1 and Groove Synth. Plus TruePianos Amber, which as its name implies is a piano emulator, and a variety of drum machines and rhythm loop players. (One of which, Beatscape is new to Sonar 8.)
We reviewed the fun analog-style Z3TA+ software synth back for Blogcritics back in 2005, and the Dimension Pro synthesizer, also designed by ace synth designer Rene Ceballos, comes with an enormous range of samples, and much of the material sounds fantastic. However, one minor criticism: Cakewalk notes in their packaging that it also includes examples from the Hollywood Edge sound effects sample library. This actually consists of very small sample (pardon the pun) of Hollywood Edge’s catalog, and primarily consists of gunshots, cannons, rain, thunder and insect and frog effects. While Sonar works extremely well in adjunct with a video editing program for recording voice-overs, background music and effects tracks, these meager Hollywood Edge samples alone aren’t going to turn you into the next Ben Burtt or Walter Murch.
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