Can feature-rich applications continue to add features without becoming
difficult to use? That’s the key challenge for the top audio production
suites, which seem determined to pile on everything imaginable. Perhaps
to guard against feature fatigue, Cakewalk has concentrated recently on
the workflow side of SONAR. While SONAR 4 Producer Edition has more
than 100 improvements, most are designed to enhance usability.

Two of the best new features are track folders and SurroundBridge.
Track folders group together multiple tracks into a single folder. This
lets you simultaneously mute, solo, record or archive all the tracks in
the folder. The tracks in the track folder are represented by a
Composite Clip, which you can cut, copy, paste, move or slip edit as
though it’s a single track. If you work with large numbers of tracks
that can be sonically grouped together, track folders can make them
much easier to manage. SurroundBridge transforms any stereo plug-in
into a surround-sound plug-in. It works by creating multiple instances
of the plug-in and automatically manages the links among those
instances via a unified interface.

Also new to this version are high-quality POW-r dithering (for reducing
20-, 24- or 32-bit audio to 16-bit audio) and support for more than 30
different multi-channel configurations (such as 5.1, 7.1 and LCRS). You
can now freeze tracks, effects and synths in order to temporarily free
up resources. And the package includes a selection of third-party
plug-ins, such as the Lexicon Pantheon Surround Reverb (it handles
multi-channel environments up to 7.1) and TTS-1 DXi multitimbral GM2
synthesizer (it creates the General MIDI 2 sounds of an
industry-standard Roland synthesizer). On the downside, you’re limited
to only one video track.

All this adds up to a significant upgrade for an already strong audio
production environment. If you work in Windows, and audio editing is a
key component of your job, these improvements could save you both time
and frustration.