One of the goodies that ended up in my studio thanks to the holidays season is Cakewalk Sonar Studio 8.5, widely acclaimed DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). As a long time user of Cakewalk’s software products, I was looking forward to seeing what’s the latest and the greatest in the Sonar line.

There is no shortage of Sonar reviews in various music magazines, and I’d recommend Derek Johnson’s for  Sound On Sound and Rip Rovan’s for ProRec.com. I will cover this from more personal angle, as an end user (and abuser).

The installation  for me went smoothly. I was up and running within 30 minutes from the start. Most of that time, about twenty minutes, was spent copying “creative content” to the hard drive. The neat feature is that Sonar allows you to copy all settings from the previous installation while keeping the old version intact.

After spending proximately ten hours working with Sonar Studio 8.5, I  have only good things to say. the biggest pleasant surprise was how efficient and stable the new sound engine is. Not only that the software uses less CPU processing power compared to Sonar Home Studio 4XL, but it appears to be a rock solid application.

Numerous workflow enhancements allow you to get things done faster. This means that you can focus more on the creative side.

These improvements alone, for me,  justify the price. When you add all the goodies (for the full list of features see here)  the whole deal feels like a bargain.

These are just my initial observations, and I’ll provide updates as I go. Cheers, and happy music making!