But combined with all the other samples included in the package, and all of the other synths, that’s a surprising amount of built in sounds for a program that’s primarily a digital audio workstation.
Plenty Of Plug-Ins As Well
While Sonar works with both VST and DX format plug-ins from third party vendors, there are quite a number of plug-ins that ship with the program as well.
New plug-in effects built into Sonar Producer Edition include a nifty simulated Tube Lever to warm-up tracks, Transient Shaper for more radical sound alterations, and a Light Edition of Native Instruments’ long-running Guitar Rig amp modeling software. Plus updates to Sonar's proprietary VC-64 compressor (introduced in Sonar 6) and Roland V-Vocal pitch correction software (first found in Sonar 5). The latter is an extremely serviceable competitor to the better-known Antares Auto-Tune plug-in, and integrates seamlessly with Sonar’s track architecture.
Sonar includes multiple reverb plug-ins, including Pantheon by industry standard Lexicon, and the innovative Perfect Space by Voxengo, which has models of rooms ranging from concert halls, to spaces that would be physically impossible to record in—including seemingly crazy environments such as the inside of a maraca.
One new addition to Sonar that I was particularly happy to see was the ability to lock clips together so that they can be easily moved around the timeline as one. Having become addicted to this feature working with video clips in Adobe’s Premiere Pro, it’s great to now have it with audio clips as well inside Sonar. (Perhaps a future edition of Sonar will also allow for multiple complete audio timelines to be nested as well as Premiere Pro allows.)
Got RAM If You Want It
Sonar was one of the first applications to take advantage of Windows 64-bit computing, back around 2005. Since then, 64-bit architecture is slowly becoming the norm in computing, and that will really start to grow when the next version of Windows rolls out this year or next. 64-bit frees the bottleneck that memory operates under. When the standards for 32-bit computing were originally set, four gigs of RAM was thought gynormous, back when Bill Gates’ apocryphal "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need" quote was making the rounds in the early 1980s. And the ability to double or triple that four gig memory maximum will allow for many more tracks and software synthesizers than are currently possible in 32-bit mode.
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