Cakewalk SONAR X1 Producer

If you're a musician with a PC, you've probably heard of Cakewalk, the venerable recording software company that helped put PC-based recording on the map, back when Macs ruled music studios. Roland acquired Cakewalk in 2008, but SONAR X1 Producer ($499 direct) shows Cakewalk has no intention of slowing down. At a usual street price of $399?$100 less than Steinberg Cubase 6.5 ($499, 4 stars), and $300 less than Avid Pro Tools 10 ($699, 4 stars), both of which usually sell right at MSRP?SONAR X1 is a solid value, especially thanks to its upgraded ProChannel channel strip and gorgeous Skylight interface. But there are plenty of rough edges to steer around. While it's a powerful program that's easy to like, Cakewalk still has a lot of work to do.

Setup and Configuration
A brief recap: Cakewalk's venerable sequencer has been around for 25 years, and was originally a solid competitor to Voyetra Sequencer Plus Gold for DOS?this a couple years before the first Adlib and Soundblaster sound cards appeared. Later, Cakewalk brought it into Windows 3.1, followed by Windows 95/98/ME versions that added digital audio recording. Then, back in 2001, Cakewalk began with a clean sheet of paper to produce SONAR, a more advanced DAW that looked a lot like the old Cakewalk but had a brand new recording engine. This, Cakewalk has steadily refined, with new SONAR versions appearing almost every year. SONAR X1 is the ninth major version of the program just in the past 10 years alone.

For this review, I tested Cakewalk SONAR X1d Producer?the latest build available?on four computers: a pair of quad-core Toshiba Qosmio 17.3-inch laptop and 18.4-inch laptops, and two custom-built, Core i7-based desktop PCs?a Sandy Bridge machine with 8GB of RAM, and an Ivy Bridge machine with 16GB RAM and a 240GB SSD system drive. All were running Windows 7 SP1, and all four machines ran the program flawlessly. I tested it with an M-Audio Fast Track ($149.99, 4 stars) and a Tascam US-122L. I even ran SONAR X1 for a while in Boot Camp on a 15-inch MacBook Pro under Windows 7 SP1 with no trouble.

One of the best things about SONAR is its lack of copy protection. Cakewalk lays down some rules?mainly, that you can't sell or transfer the software, which is something you can do with a few of its USB dongle-based competitors. But the lack of a dongle means you can use the software on a laptop?or even Ultrabook?without fear of breaking the dongle off or losing it, or otherwise having to put up with ridiculous authorization schemes. There's no challenge and response system, either; just install and go.

One persistent quirk remains, though: audio interface configuration. One of the things that always bothered me about SONAR was having to test WDM, ASIO, and even MME drivers, which continues to this day. It makes getting an audio interface to work exponentially more difficult, as everyone across the Internet seemed to be using different parameters; you ask in one forum, and half the people say to use ASIO and the other half say to use WDM. (A few even recommend MME, which is awful for latency.) On some machines, I had no trouble getting the two ?interfaces working, but on others?particularly the laptops?I heard pops and clicks constantly, with the audio engine working fine for two minutes and then just quitting. It would take hours of troubleshooting, reconfiguring, reinstalling, and rebooting, and then mysteriously, it would just work. I'll be the first to admit that this isn't necessarily Cakewalk's fault, but sometimes too much choice adds confusion.

User Interface
With that, let's get down to business with SONAR X1 Producer. The highlight of the show is Skylight, the name Cakewalk gave SONAR's brand new user interface. It's a gem, too, as it combines some of the best elements from Logic, Pro Tools, and Cubase, and puts them together in a refreshingly simple layout devoid of SONAR 8.5's cluttered, icon-heavy look. The new Control Bar at the top looks much more professional, and contains oversized track control buttons and easy access to the metronome, recording resolution, tempo, and meter. You can expand the control bar to add sections for loop recording, editing, and other features, and you can set the bar to float as well as stay affixed to the top. You can even drag and drop the various Control Bar sections around. ?The revised Synth Rack bundles all of the instrument plug-ins for your project in one window.

The new MultiDock is particularly flexible. You can arrange just about any combination of the track view, track inspector, score view, piano roll, and event list, and lock it so that everything is on one screen, similar to the way Logic Pro works on the Mac. You can still cue up extra screen sets as needed, but I found myself using the main screen alone more times than not, which really helped speed up workflow.

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