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The Roland V-Vocal plug-in can now convert audio into MIDI data.

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If you have plug-ins that enable sidechaining, you'll be able to access those functions from a mixer channel, and if you don't happen to have any spare, you'll be pleased to know that Sonar 7 comes with three sidechain-ready effects in the forms of the Sonitus:fx gate and compressor, along with the VC-64 Vintage Channel.

Once again, Roland's miraculous pitch manipulation tool, V-Vocal, takes the stage. This time, as version 1.5, it offers the Holy Grail of pitch-to-MIDI conversion. Don't get too excited, though, as this is a strictly offline affair. Nevertheless, with a few tweaks, we were able to create some intriguing lead and pad progressions from both vocal and guitar recordings.

We should also mention that there's now full support for the integration of hardware instruments and effects, including full delay compensation for both. ACT has been expanded upon as well, with support for more devices.

Seventh heaven

There's so much more to Sonar 7, but trust us when we tell you that it's improvements all round. This new version represents a logical evolution from version 6, and the company has done a good job of making a deep program easy to get around.

Sonar 7 has some nifty additions, then, but what really impresses us is the way Cakewalk has refined, reorganised and subtly reworked existing aspects of the program. We did encounter a minor graphics anomaly here and there, but had no stability issues at all. Sonar remains - at least in its Producer Edition guise - perhaps the single most comprehensive Windows production suite money can buy.