Homebase for Sonar users

Thanks for your quick reply!
I can find the crossgrade in the webshop this afternoon (it wasn’t there several days ago). I’m pretty sure that I’m able to get the crossgrade now!

Hi Cubasers! I don’t know if that’s the correct term but I’ll use it until corrected.
Well I’m another refugee from Cakewalk. Started there in 1993 when the impending closure of Amiga forced me elsewhere namely PC.
Now that I’m running Cubase 9.5.1 I figure that’s about all the PC DAWs I’ve tried except Digital Performer.

I’m looking forward to being as involved here as I was over there and excited to be trying a DAW I haven’t tried before. My signature should give you an idea of how serious I am about my gear (still building my new PC),
The Cakewalk forum was a bit of a second home so I hope I can get that feel here and make new friends. I think there’s a few of us coming over. I’m not trying things out, I’ve jumped in.

Let me come back here and sing the praises of Ed Doll, who helped me patiently and resolved my query.
On another note: A few days ago I did some MIDI-editing in the Key Editor and I was very pleasnatly surprised by the ease with which this is done. Especially the right-click pop-up of the tools right under your cursor is a simple but magnificent extra, which makes a big difference compared to Sonar.

Discovered the 'logical" editor the other day. Wow - it made for some short work in the list editor. VERY handy!

Hiya transitioners!

I have to say I’m pretty delighted with Cubase, despite using only Cakewalk/Sonar for nearly 30 years. I use Cubase exclusively now.

I just thought I’d share something with you that helped me out a lot. When I bought Cubase, I also got a Black Friday deal on Groove 3’s Cubase 9 Explained. Turned out to be a great buy because although it doesn’t go very deep, it helped get very comfortable with my new DAW in a hurry. Since then, I found this which I also bought (they even reduced my price a little due to the course I already purchased!)

Groove 3 Power User Bundle

Some of the courses are based on previous versions of Cubase but I still think mostly apply. It’s 8 courses that–at the bundle price of $48–cost $6 each.

The bad news is the sale runs four about 4 more days, so get in if you want it.

Thanks, Ed. Got it running, liking it. Couple questions.

In sonar, I could access an asio control panel to change buffers from 128 to 256… how to in cb?

In sonar, I can select a midi clip and its associated instrument and bounce to track to write to audio. How to cb?

Quick way to duplicate like ctrl-drag in sonar?

Much appreciated.

  1. Studio > Studio Setup. Choose your audio device. There’s a button for its Control Panel applet. Setting Up Audio Hardware

    \

  2. Click the Freeze button in the track inspector.
    Freezing Instruments

  3. In Cubase it’s Alt+Drag to create a copy.

All the manuals are available online in web or PDF format.

Hi MUDGEL, nice to see you here.

I am an old Sonar user myself, and made the final jump to full Cubase in April this year. Until then I was primarily using Cubase with Sonar as third (I am using Ableton Live too) DAW (well - I use Wavelab Elements too). I have not tried DP myself, because I heard the older versions where not that stable and easy to use. That seems to be improved now. Still - the Cubase/Live combination is all what I need (and more), so I feel no urge to dabble around with other DAW’s. Maybe sometime on a rainy and slow day? Who knows…

Anyway - The forum here is not as lively as Sonar’s forum, but it’s not bad either. People here are most times visiting to asking questions or report errors (or perceived errors). In a lot of cases those problems are solved fast by the helpful other visitors here. It’s just not really a “chatting” forum, like the Cakewalk forums, but by no means bad.

Anyway - If you have questions about Cubase, or problems with Cubase, just come over here and ask away… :wink:.

It’s been like landing on an alien planet where you don’t know anything. I had to look up the manual to work out how to insert a plugin. Absolutely foreign. I’m sure I’m going to have many moments like that, but that’s OK as I’m a manual kind of guy. But I’ve yet to really spend much time with it as my PC died the day after I installed it. Maybe it was an allergic reaction to Cubase. Just kidding really.
In the meantime I got the last of the components today for the build in my signature and get stuck in.

Good to see a familiar name over here. I’m sure there’ll be more of us as time goes by.

To duplicate parts you can drag the little box on the side/middle of the part.

To bounce MIDI parts + instruments use the “EDIT → Render In Place” function. It’s important to actually read the manual on that. There is a lot of things you can do with it.

I would encourage new Steinberg users to drop by the lounge

Tell us who you are, what you do, in what area of the world you live.
If you have some music to share, “Made With Steinberg” is the place to discuss, praise or get help with a song.

There has been more chatter in general forum the past, but the Signal to Noise ratio was getting out of hand.
I think the moderators are doing a great job, keeping threads On Topic. That also makes it easier to search for solutions, when a problem arises.
Hope you all are going to have a great time here, Welcome.
See you in the Lounge.

I’d say you need at least a month to get your “sea legs” here for prior Sonar users. Cubase is pretty broad - but it’s UI conventions for interface elements are quite different than the “Windows Standard” conventions of Sonar.

Case-in-point: I finally decided to investigate visibility “Zones” in the visibility inspector. I tried like mad to click on the “dot”, but nothing happened. So, it’s over to the manual (no proper help file) and there it says to drag the dot “to the left” or “to the right”. So I tried dragging. Nada. Zip. Zero. I scratched my head for a minute before an idea popped up. Lets try clicking to either side of the dot - Bingo! So, the manual wasn’t much help, and there’s nothing about that “dot” user interface element to even suggest that it’s a toggle control. So whenever you hear some hipster rant about UI skeumorphism and claim that it limits creativity, you’ll know he’s full of beans. Flat design is simply a stylistic decision that may or may not contribute to a better experience. It’s been a few weeks of little trials like that. Still, I’m more than happy with Cubase - just thought it would be easier to transition.

I hope to be finished replacing the tailgate/hatch on my car tomorrow then I’ll finish building my new PC and look forward to the delights of installing win 10 from scratch. It was the free update from win 8.1. I’ve been told it’s as simple as installing it then contacting MS by phone for activation.
Then onto installing all the software and Plugins. All the sample libraries are Ok. This is finally be an exclusive DaW and multimedia workstation. Woohoo!

They used to be like radio buttons where the other dots were empty circles, which made it more clear. I don’t think it has much to do with using skeuomorphism or not.

Hello, unfortunately, I don’t believe there is a setting to automatically stop playback. I did a search as you have done and I found nothing except for the workaround. It’s frustrating but I’ve gotten into the habit of stopping playback.

It depends on whether you consider these a single control with three states, or a group of three radio buttons. If the former, there’s nothing to indicate it has three states. If the latter, there’s nothing to indicate there are three radio buttons. Even flat design needs minimal clues.

I’ve been familiarizing myself with Cubase 9.5 Pro over the past month or so and I’ve made the switch officially. I’m liking it. I am curious about 64-files. It seems Cubase can’t read them, is that something known already or am I experiencing an issue?

I have tested this directly with an audio wave file I export at 64-bit from Sonar.
I then import it into Cubase and you can see the container of the waveform but no waveform, rather a message that says it can’t reconstruct the image, along those lines. I go back to Sonar and re-export the same exact audio file at 32-bit, re-import into Cubase and works totally fine.

Hi, one of the newcomers moving from Sonar to Cubase here.

A question about groove quantisizing. I have been using several .grv format files in Sonar for years (not just the ”Cakewalk DNA Grooves-grv” that came with the software, but others I have bought elsewhere) and now I’m wondering if there is a way to use them in Cubase. For a while more than a decade ago, I used Cubase (probably version VST32 5.1 or something like that) and I seem to remember using my .grv’s back then. Can’t seem to find a way in Pro 9.5 or any mention online or in the manuals. Any pointers? Thanks.

So far Cubase can do all and more that Sonar did. Learning all the different terminology and work flow will take some time, of course. One thing I can’t find is how to reduce the track depth so I can see all of them on the screen. I’m sure it’s possible…what is the terminology? Sonar had a keyboard shortcut of “F” to enable this. Very useful.

CTRL+Up/Down arrow should increase/decrease track height. I say should because I remapped my keys ages ago and sometimes I can’t remember which ones are default and which ones I overwrote.

In the keycommands list are a bunch of zoom options for doing more global settings quickly. There are also a couple of height to data and height to name commands. And, you should look at Zoom Zap, it’s kind of a "zoom toggle thing that’s cool when you are doing fine edits.