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Around AES, Cakewalk increments the most significant digit in Sonar's rev number to the latest upgrade - and this year was no exception. As Sonar is a pretty well-known quantity by now, we'll focus on the most significant upgrade features; for more background on the program, go to www.cakewalk.com.
Have It Your Way
The level of customization has evolved dramatically: Choose from far more colorization options, customize the display of widgets in the track view (as called up by different tabbed views), edit menus and toolbars, and determine how plug-ins are shown (by manufacturer, effect type, or whatever), as well as organize plug-ins in multiple folders simultaneously and choose the configuration you want for a particular project.
So is all this useful? If you make changes carefully and deliberately, customizing can definitely improve workflow. I'm down to one user toolbar that does 99% of what I need, and use the track view widgets as a "to do" list when mixing - starting with all, then removing widgets after finishing a function (e.g., after setting phase and trim for each channel, I remove those widgets). The menu editing lets you distribute functions between toolbars or menus, depending on your preferences. Customization isn't the "killer upgrade" feature, but over time, the program can much more closely support the way you work.
Audiosnap
Think of this as a toolbox of tempo-stretching, audio quantizing, and groove extracting tools (Figure 1). So far I've matched tempo to a recorded rhythm (and the reverse), had existing clips follow tempo changes, "nudged" individual hits or notes forward or backward in time, and quantized beats within a clip. That's not all you can do, but it's enough to convince me that this is a groovy tool. Although some operations require more work than others, just imagine completing an entire song, then deciding you want the tempo to ramp up subtly toward the end from 133 to 136 BPM. You can do this with AudioSnap by snap-enabling all clips in the song, then changing the tempo.
Normally, it would be bad form to review something like this before checking out all the possibilities. But that means the review wouldn't be done for months . . . this powerful feature will justify the upgrade for...