Sonar Home Studio 6


I recently upgraded to Sonar Home Studio 6, a stripped down DAW based on the Sonar 6 engine.  I'm liking what I see so far.

Why Sonar?  I'm not ready for everything that Pro-tools has to offer, and I'm not set up to run a Pro-tools friendly rig.  I'm a PC user, and Cubase seems to cater to the Mac users.  Lastly, all my project files are in Sonar's format .

Install
Install and Registration went very smoothly.  I was able to register the program online, and they promptly e-mailed my activation code.  Once the install was over, the very first thing the program did was import all of my global options from the old version of Sonar.  It was one of those "You had me at Hello" moments.  It then scanned my VST plugins folders, and fired itself right up. 

Differences
Upon opening one of my project files, I received an error message.  It wasn't a big deal, but previous muted sections of the project had been un-muted upon import.  It's a little frustrating, because I now have to go through and make those changes again.   Other than that, the layout is very similar to the full versions of Sonar.  In fact, with some of the features removed, it opens up a lot of screen real estate. 

I am now limited to 64 tracks.  Horror of horrors.   I really don't see that being an issue.  Home Studio doesn't have  of the fancy software synths that come with a full version of Sonar.  I don't need those at this point in time.

What I get
For under 100 dollars, I get a sleek DAW that I know will perform well from past experience.  I get the ability to freeze tracks to save on system resources.  I can export projects into a flash player that can be posted on a web site or a myspace page (really cool...I think).  I get that wonderful Cakewalk midi functionality for my e-drums.  I can create loops and groove clips.  It has a metronome!

If you want a little bit more, you can go for the XL version.  It's about 50 dollars more, and you get an extra sample package, another software synth, a drum sequencer, and a Peak Limiter plugin.  I didn't need any of those things, so I went with the normal version.

I'm happy with it.  It does exactly what I need, and it didn't break the bank.  I'm about to fire it up and record my drum solo 

Your friend in the digital age
Nate

edit:  My only gripe so far is that they removed the Track Layers feature, which allowed you to edit multiple takes within a single track.  Now, I have to bounce each take to a new track, in order to edit them together.