MusicRadar

The Sonar interface remains a little dreary and crowded.

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• Review
• Manufacturer's Description

With the Sonar 8 update, Cakewalk has chosen to steer clear of sweeping changes and grand gestures in favour of refinement and polish.

That's not to say that there isn't enough here to warrant the pricetag. Some of the improvements (Instrument Tracks, for example) have been a long time coming, while others (such as those to the audio engine itself) may go unnoticed until you need them.

What's new?

Two of Sonar 8's most significant changes are directly tied to the user interface. The first is the new Loop Explorer 2.0, which gives users a browser through which audio and MIDI clips may be located, previewed and dragged into the arrangement. If your music is built around loops, this will be a time saver.

Another (and, to our minds, far more crucial) addition is the Instrument Track. While we've gotten used to needing a pair of tracks (one for MIDI, one for audio) for each virtual instrument we open, we've wondered why it was necessary. Cubase users got an instrument track some time ago, and we've envied the lack of clutter.

Now Sonar users can open an instrument using a similarly dedicated track. Once you've done this, deleting the instrument results in the track being automatically split into separate audio and MIDI tracks, preserving any MIDI data and audio effects along the way. You can also split the Instrument Track manually – a thoughtful touch.

Sadly, though, Cakewalk Arpeggiator is out for this sort of track because, despite the audio FX Bin being available to Instrument Tracks, you can't use MIDI effects plug-ins with them.

Many of the most significant changes in Sonar 8 are not apparent upon first (or even second) glance. Cakewalk has made a concerted effort to optimise the performance of the audio engine and even the graphics – a welcome improvement after we took them to task about some graphics bugs last time around.

The annoying 'flickering' that once plagued the DAW's visuals (especially when resizing windows) has been rendered a thing of the past. The graphics are snappier and cleaner, launch time has been reduced, and the metering is now more precise.

Many of the most significant changes in Sonar 8 are not apparent upon first (or even second) glance.

Vista users in particular will be pleased that Sonar 8 has been optimised for that particular system. Some improvements are particularly noticeable on 64-bit systems. Latencies on X64 machines are no longer substantially higher than on X86 boxes, as was the case in past versions.

Fortunately, these tweaks don't come at the expense of CPU cycles. If anything, this version seems to use less processing power. This translates into better audio performance, lower latencies and fewer dropouts. We'd grown used to Sonar's audio engine periodically grinding to a halt, but we encountered no such stalls this time around.

That isn't to say the audio is entirely glitch free, however. There are still brief moments of silence while changing loop points on the fly.

Worse still, when we tried to normalise a file while the audio was playing, the resultant clip was ridden with glitches (though fortunately this doesn't occur when normalising offline). Cakewalk is aware of the bug and is' working to sort it out.

On a positive note, we were thrilled to discover that changes made to the audio driver settings no longer require a restart to take effect. Though most users will never actually make such changes mid-flight, it was always a drag for those who needed it.