Through Thursday July 23, registered Cakewalk customers can save BIG on our most popular virtual instruments. Whether you’re looking to increase your sonic arsenal, freshen up some tired sounds, or simply up your soft-synth game, the Summer of Synth promotion is a great way to do just that and save big at the same time.
Visit our online store to see how much you could save on sounds this summer with Cakewalk!
Cakewalk has teamed up with The Serious-Sounds Network to bring you a summer of endless sound-sculpting possibilities!
Over the next three months (May, June, July) we will be giving away free copies of Z3TA+ and Rapture, along with Craig Anderton’s New Electronic Guitars Expansion Pack. At the end of each month Cakewalk and Serious-Sounds will draw two lucky winners at random.
Serious-Sounds.net is a massive members-only community for music producers providing tutorials, help, and advice on the world of music production and more- all available for free!
TO BE ELIGIBLE to win the contest all you have to do is either log in or register at Serious-Sounds.net(registration is quick, free & easy) and answer a few simple questions located in the exclusive competition thread. Then simply email your answers along with your member username & number to the address provided within.
PLEASE REMEMBER: You must be a registered member at Serious-Sounds.net to view content on The Serious-Sounds Network. If you’re not already signed up, then register today!
Need new sounds for your mix? There’s a new library of club presets now available online for Z3TA+. Check out the video and grab the presets at Synthtopia !
Whether you’re looking for luch, warm pads, slowly evolving atmospheres, searing leads or sparkling FW sounds, Cakewalk’s Z3TA+, delivers the goods and includes hundreds of professional presets. Z3TA+ is an award-winning analog-style synthesizer with incredible sound-shaping capabilities. The exclusive bandwidth Waveshaping technology makes Z3TA+ one of the best and most respected synths in the industry.
As a complete instrument, Z3TA+ is oriented to the professional musician and sound programmer looking for uncompromised sound quality and features. Z3TA+ ships with DWi, VST, and stand-alone versions.
Cakewalk’s CTO Noel Borthwick sheds some light on the features “under the hood” in SONAR 8.
*Note that this list is not a substitute for the official feature list & other features already documented in the SONAR 8 manual. Rather it is a list culled from Cakewalk’s Engineering Department*
Enjoy!
Performance optimizations:
Although every version of SONAR we shipped in the past had some degree of optimization work, SONAR 8 is the first version of SONAR to which we applied the same engineering process to performance optimizations as we do with other more user visible features. i.e. we established goals, built a specification for the optimizations, split up the work into milestones and tracked the progress of these tasks just as we do for other features. To make testing more deterministic, we devised various internal profiling tools in order to track and measure changes in performance across a variety of hardware platforms on XP as well as Vista.
Systems tested included brand new cutting edge platforms from Intel and AMD as well as earlier generation machines.
We split up this work into the following classes of performance enhancements for SONAR 8:
1. CPU and kernel level optimizations – use less of your CPU to do the same amount of work
2. User Interface optimizations – faster drawing, scrolling, zooming
3. Driver level optimizations – more efficient access to drivers, minimizing driver state transitions
4. Vista OS specific optimizations – Better use of MMCSS thread priorities, support for custom MMCSS task profiles, new WASAPI support
5. Audio engine optimizations – optimize “hotspots” in our bussing, streaming and mixing code
As a result of all these changes, SONAR 8 has the following benefits:
– greatly minimized kernel usage. This helps provide more “kernel bandwidth” to drivers who need it the most. More kernel bandwidth translates into less potential for audio glitches.
– Lower CPU usage – translates to better performance at low latency
– More efficient use of audio drivers – esp with ASIO drivers
– Better performance on Windows Vista esp X64. Many of the complaints of Vista performance as compared to XP have been solved with SONAR 8. X64 low latency performance should now be on par with X86.
– Faster application launch
– Less flicker in GUI. Track view splitters no longer flicker when resizing.
– More responsive zoom and scroll with large projects. Zooming with wave files now uses 1/2 the RAM with 24-bit or less stereo or mono files used.
– Better meter performance.
– Improved thread scheduling by insuring threads are properly distributed on processors.
This link shows the overall benefits of SONAR 8 as compared to SONAR 7: http://www.cakewalk.com/Products/SONAR/English/benchmark.asp
