Cakewalk SONAR 8.5 Producer Digital Audio Software

With version 8.5, SONAR continues to innovate on all fronts. Updated beat creating and arrangement tools, drum instruments loaded with stellar kits, enhanced audio quantizing, updated multi-stage effect plug-ins and more combine together to make SONAR the most complete, most professional, and best sounding DAW on any platform. Some key features include:

Roland V-Vocal Editor - Lets you achieve perfect vocals tracks and is integrated right inside SONAR. It includes pitch correction, phrasing, dynamics, vibrato, and Pitch to MIDI conversion.

VX-64 Vocal Strip - A seven-stage processor designed for sculpting incredible sounding vocal tracks. Each of the VX-64's stages have been fine-tuned to be vocal-specific, taking the work out of loading an entire chain of vocal processors. The VX-64 features a new Cakewalk technology that employs phase-coherent, multi-band saturation to avoid unwanted distortion; unique filtering to avoid artifacts at extreme high and low frequencies; and an auto-leveling circuit that prevents the tube saturation from sounding too harsh when high gain transients are processed by it.

VX-64 also employs a new de-essing algorithm designed with Cakewalk's LP-64 linear phase effect filtering technology to remove sibilance without creating any frequency smearing. The VX-64 includes 64 go-to presets and click & drag reordering of processing stage routing, making it fast and easy to get high quality vocals in seconds.

Processing stages include:

Session Drummer 3 - Session Drummer has been a mainstay in SONAR for easy and fast creation of realistic sounding drum tracks. Now, Session Drummer 3 hits the stage with an all new look, sporting a sleek photorealistic 3D drum kit, along with routing improvements, plus 12 new kits and over 700 new patterns for additional high quality drums sounds and grooves.

Features:

Content:

Matrix View lets you enter the world of non-linear music composition and experience a whole new approach to creating music in any genre. The Matrix view allows you to load audio or MIDI tracks, loops, and one-shots to improvise compositions on the fly. Instantly create remixes, sketch out different arrangements for any song, and even perform live with just your MIDI keyboard or pad controller.

Guitar Rig 3 LE allows you to plug-in to the award-winning guitar amp modeler from Native Instruments. It includes 3 amps & cabinets, 11 effects, tuner, metronome, and over 50 presets.

Step Sequencer 2.0 lets you create drum tracks, beats, bass, and synth lines with a click of the mouse. Save time with a convenient auto-populate feature for common rhythmic patterns. Don't settle for robotic, step-sequenced parts—the exclusive Per-step Probability feature lets you add automatic variations. Make your sequences even more exciting with nuances like flam, swing, and time-offset.

Arpeggiator - Use the new per-track Arpeggiator to create new sections for your songs, breathe life into stale chord progressions, and discover new musical lines and hooks. With one key click you can experience sweeping staccato parts, chord strums, and lightning-fast runs to add new layers of sound to your productions.

Rapture LE is a special version of the award- winning Rapture synthesizer. It includes over 200 programs & hundreds of oscillator shapes. Quickly load production-ready patches from growling leads to bumpin' basses and spacious pads - ideal for today's pop, dance, and electronic music.

TruePianos Amber is a VSTi that provides realistic piano sounds, superb playability, and acoustic-style responsiveness. Get brilliant sounds with low CPU usage for optimal performance.

Dimension Pro — your go-to instrument allows you to add both real and synthesized instrument sounds to your projects including synths, strings, basses, acoustic and electric guitars, vocal hits and more. Its immense 7 GB content library, featuring 2200+ programs plus the Digital Sound Factory Vol. 2 Classic Keys Pack, gives you endless possibilities.

Track Templates make it easy to get your project started. SONAR includes a variety of templates for audio, virtual instrument tracks, and even entire projects. Save your own templates and recall them instantly any time you need that sound.

Media Browser lets you browse and preview audio and MIDI groove clips and patterns. Quickly build backing tracks for your song and preview MIDI with the virtual instrument of your choice.

During SONAR 8.5 development, Cakewalk engineers have added what they are calling a collection of “featurettes” that they are sure SONAR users will appreciate, since many of them came directly from user feedback, including: