I am looking at upgrading to the latest version of Sonar, but don’t know if it’s worth the significant price increase for Sonar Platinum instead of just upgrading to Sonar Professional. The features in question, that I am questioning the value of are Drum Replacer, Vocal Sync, and some of the Pro Channel options. Are they worth the huge jump in $$$?
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I am a Sonar user, and don’t want to switch brands. It works well for me, I know the software, and I am comfortable with the workflow on it. I record my rock band as a hobby. We don’t use much outboard gear, but like to mic drums, guitar cabs, etc. I also already own a lot of decent VST plugins. I’ve never worked with MIDI instruments or drum replacement, but would like to play around with it a bit.
i have platinum and i have yet to use those features. So… i can’t tell you. I have it because i was able to upgrade for a fairly reasonable amount over the years otherwise i think i would have a hard time paying that much as well. Anyway maybe someone else has used those features and can let you know.
I went in for platinum mainly because of the addictive drums bundle, otherwise if you already have plugins that do what you need then you won’t get much value from upgrading.
I’ve tried to use vocal sync but it wasn’t as simple as I expected it to be, I wound up manually adjusting some takes. Maybe it’s easy once you get the hang of it but I haven’t needed it yet.
What version of Sonar are you on now? I’ve used the drum replacer on kick and snare with mostly positive results. I use some of the pro channel stuff all the time. Vocal sync I’m not sure about, I haven’t used it enough yet.
I’m currently way back on Sonar Home Studio 6 XL, so pretty much anything is an upgrade. I decided that, since this is a hobby studio, and I only really record with my own band, that I can’t justify the cost of going to platinum. I talked to the other guys in my band, and a couple of them don’t like the idea of vocal sync. If we don’t do it right, we do it again. When we are basically recording ourselves for fun, they are probably right. As far as drum replacer, I can do that on my own with a few extra steps. I don’t really need to save time doing lots of projects. It would be nice to have the extra pro-channel features, but not for the cost difference.
Sonar Professional came in the mail today Can’t wait to try it out!
Can’t wait to try it out!