
You can do the same to find out the notes of a riff recorded in a rush and have a transcription in no time. You then have to simply route it to a virtual instrument and listen to the latter play the melody you were humming a moment before. You have a melody buzzing in your head? A mic, a vocal recording and a simple drag-and-drop of the audio file into an empty MIDI track later and you have a transcription of the notes. Melodyne is also a wonderful tool to take notes. I won’t say anything about the proven quality of Celemony’s processing algorithms, but the difference with V-Vocal is huge.

A bass out of sync? A slightly out-of-tune vocal? Two or three clicks and everything is in the right place, with the possibility to undo or bypass the effect anytime to compare it to the original. It’s extremely easy and intuitive to use: right click on an audio clip or a region, select the Region FX menu and bingo, Melodyne’s editing window appears in the MultiDock view with the possibility to move along the timeline (that of Sonar and the MultiDock), zoom in/out of the edited region and, thus, correct the wrong note on a chromatic and a time scale. Just like Presonus’ Studio One, Sonar X3 profits from the ARA (Audio Random Access) technology, which allows the integration of Melodyne Essential directly in Sonar’s interface. On the other hand, for the vocal corrector, we benefit from the integration of Celemony’s Melodyne (Essential version). So, how do the developers plan to compensate for that? For the multieffects: no restitution whatsoever. In the meantime, no R-Mix nor V-Vocal, both of which ought to be made up for. Now it’s the right time to do some hard drive housekeeping… Before uninstalling the previous Sonar version, bounce to audio all audio tracks that use R-Mix and/or V-Vocal and reimport them into the new X3 projects. In the second case you will have to do without V-Vocal, which is not available for purchase.Ī third alternative is also possible, and I think this is the one that ought to be adopted.

Several solutions: either you keep X2 installed and both plug-ins are available on X3, or if you are a fan of clean installations (formatting recommended), you uninstall X2 and simply buy R-Mix. The audio interface used is a FireWire T.C.Electonic Studio Konnekt 48. This review was made with a commercial version of Sonar X3 Producer (version X3b) on a desktop PC (i7 3770, 8GB RAM), running Win7 64 bits and Sonar (64 bits) on a SSD.

They simply got axed, which creates some compatibility problems with old projects. So, let’s go into the heart of the matter and start with the casualties, the disappearance of certain plug-ins, two in particular: the R-Mix multieffects processor and the V-Vocal corrector, both by Roland. That was expected, as a consequence of the divorce.

The result of the scan was that several plug-ins used in the old project (created with X2) were no longer present. This pop-up informs us that the software is scanning (in the background) for plug-ins on the computer, which is a good idea that spares us from having to sit in front of the screen waiting for the inventory to be taken. The Skylight interface seems identical to previous “X” versions, and only a pop-up window on the lower right corner of the screen invites us to think that there’s something new down there. At first look, nothing seems to have changed. Once done with such formalities, it’s time to open an old project created with Sonar X2.
