Sonar 7 vs Reason vs Ableton live (what's your opinion)

[kb420]

You can do all of that with Rewire. Actual midi note data, you would have save as a midifile and open it, but with Rewire it would be easier to record the audio.

You can Rewire Reason into Sonar, and Live as well as Pro Tools. I think Live has the best Rewire features for Reason.

 

[jlgrimes11]

JLGrimes, Thanks for that intense breakdown between the DAWs. I do enjoy working in A-live much better than Sonar. I don't know about you, but Sonar seems more "buggy" to me. But still I was leaning towards SONAR because it seemed to have better sounds, "out of the box", than A-Live. I also thought it would be cheaper for me to upgrade to SONAR 7 PE than it would be to purchase live. But, I did find some cool prices online and they cost the same for me. The only other advantage to the SONAR purchase is the amount I would save buying their cool plugins and I also thought the "in house" plugins blew away A-live. But, I believe I found those plugins for the same price as the online upgrade price for their LE versions of dimension and rapture that come with SONAR.

Audio Snap would be a cool feature. But what good is it if I cannot understand SONAR's work flow? I'm a computer Tech so I know my way around a computer. But SONAR software is not user friendly to me.

I mean I was getting confused on simple stuff. I was trying to delete my last take. The edit>undo did not work. Ok fine..there must be another way? To this day I could not find it and those notes are still there in that track.

I like the way A-live shows all the instrument controls on the bottom of the screen. SONAR does not do that. In SONAR you have to open adjust the controls in the plugin application itself. I'm no "Synth master" I may want to adjust the tone a little and maybe a little volume. It seemed a lot easier to do in A-Live.

Compatibility to midi controllers was another thing I did not like about SONAR. ACT has a limited database of controllers and some popular ones were missed. I have an AXIOM 25 and ACT(SONAR) only listed the AXIOM 49...how lazy! If I go with SONAR I'm going to sell my AXIOM and buy something that's on the ACT database. I just want to plug and play and the extra time changing parameters I feel should have been mapped from the git go is not worth the effort. It's so easy to do in Reason. It's a little harder in A-live. But, at least A-live mapped the transport keys!

Yesterday I thought I was going to get SONAR. but, now I'm having second thoughts.

BTW what do you think of apple logic pro?

KB! Do you use A-Live in the studio or do you usually do live stuff with it? Do you believe A-live is a cool enough studio DAW as well?

When you start comparing Live against Sonar, Live is better for composing on the fly, Sonar has a more tape machine style interface. In some instances though tape machine style recording has its advantages like punching in takes.

Where Sonar really shines is when working with large projects (like 24+ tracks). Sonar has a killer arrangement view (much better than Live's), great bouncing functions, offline processing, track management functions like pressing F to size up all of your tracks nicely to the computer screen. Sonar also has a great mixer. Once you get to large projects, I think working in Sonar starts to get faster than Live. Sonar's midi is also more sophisticated than Live's once you get to editing and quantize options. Sonar is definitely the most studio app. Reason and Live are more composing although both are nice mixing apps as well (Reason just don't record audio, Reason's most glaring flaw).

 

[ntukza]

Wow, you guys are awesome. Thanks alot

QUESTIONS ABOUT REASON:

1) Is it sufficient to use Reason as a stand alone software?

2) How does Audition compare with all the stuff you guys mensioned above, and particularly in conjunction with reason 3?

 

[SmooveMode]

I can answer #1. As JL mentioned, Reason does not have any Audio recording capabilities. This pretty much makes it necessary to run with another application(if you want to record audio). There-for I would not call it a "stand alone" application for that reason.

I hope this helps!

I have a question for Both KB and JL. Let's say I want to record/play/edit 10 tracks of audio (not necessarily at the same time). How powerful does my PC need to be when using SONAR?

 

[Storm]

SONAR will handle 10 tracks of audio no problem. For me, it's only VSTs that add any real resource requirements to SONAR. The nice thing in SONAR is that you can "freeze" synths that are using lots of resources. SONAR is unlimited in how many tracks you can have, but some plug-ins require more power. In SONAR, it is quite easy to "bounce" your tracks and freeze synths or effects or just "archive" the track to free resources.

Example, you have a clean guitar recording and added a compressor, guitar amp sim, reverb plug-in, and a stereo widener plug (or whatever) in the FX bin of SONAR. If all those plug-ins are killing your machine, "bounce" the processed track to a new track and archive the original and you'll have your "sound" in a track with no plug-ins using resources.

Sorry I was away from this thread, but I wanted to add that I feel Reason can be your Master application unless you're adding instruments live in a show. It has no audio input capabilities. BUT if you have a small recording program such as Reaper or Audition / CoolEdit Pro or whatever, you can record your loops there, use ReCycle to cut and splice them then they are always available to the Dr Rex player in your live show. You wouldn't need Ableton Live at all. It all depends on how you're going to work, but as a long time Cakewalk guy, I don't know if SONAR is what you're looking for. I just wanted to add that too. ACT in SONAR has been a pain in the arse for me with my Oxygen8v2. In Reason it works like a gem.

I forget some of the other points from the previous page, but hopefully this helps add something for you.