Does anyone know why when you have midi tracks and audio tracks and you try to mix them down to wave format you lose the midi? The only alternative I've found is to mix down to 2 stereo tracks on the "bouce to tracks" option to get it all on one set and then convert to MP3. But then you wind up losing your original separate tracks for editing later. What to do?
Essentially this is what you are doing in the "bounce." The audio tracks are playing, and the MIDI "gear" is performing what ever the assigned MIDI track has recorded. So in the bounce you are recording the MIDI to an audio file.
Arm a track for recording. Mute the "audio" track(s). Mute all but one of the available MIDI tracks, if you only have one, thats even better:) Make certain the MIDI gear is on, set your levels and begin recording.
Just copy the midi track before you bounce it to an audio track, thus preserving your original data.
Or switch to Tracktion, where such standing on one foot with your tongue out while closing your left eye, halfway, is not required. Two clicks and all your tracks, audio and midi, are mixed down to WAV, MP3 or some other format. It even has 64 bit rendering. You can get tracktion embarassingly cheap too.
I have Sonar 5 (cakewalk) and I seldom use it any more. Sometimes for V-Vocal or auto-tune, but never as my main program. I was skeptical of Traction at first, now I lament spending the 500 bucks for Sonar 5.0.
It was fine. I'm just bitter about the 500 bucks! If you've always used cakewalk, it makes perfect sense, because you invested the 100 plus hours to gain a real comfort level with it.
If you're on hour 50 though, switch now. Tracktion is a no-brainer that works better than cakewalk ever did. You wont need two hours to figure it out, and you can spend the other forty eight making music instead of pulling your hair out, assuming you have some.
Some of the hardware that mackie makes for it is surprisingly decent and affordable too.
I got Tracktion in beta last year and it is sleek. I use sonar 5 producer mainly but have used the finalize effects in T1 on some stuff. Mostly it gathers digital dust. But I look in on it from time to time.
T1 had some pretty annoying flaws. I'm running T2. If you like Sonar, and your CPU can handle it, more power to you. It's a great program in it's own right. Hell, I own it and a host of others. They're all good. I just prefer T2 because I find I'm able to spend more time making music with it than dicking around with the program.
