Reference Guide

55
About SONAR
Introduction
Game sound development
There’s no better tool than SONAR for composing music for electronic games. Clip-based
sequencing lets you create and reuse musical themes freely, so you can associate musical sections
with game characters, locations, objects, and actions. Your creations can be saved and replayed
using the compact MIDI file format, which adapts its sound automatically to the target hardware for
the best possible sound reproduction.
Next topic: “Sound production and engineering” on page 55.
Sound production and engineering
If you want to produce music CDs or master tapes, SONAR has virtually everything you need from
recording to mixing and mastering. Multichannel recording lets you capture studio or live
performances track by track. Reconfigurable buses provide full control over your mix. Real-time
stereo effects like chorus, flange, reverb, and delay/echo can be applied as track inserts, in effects
loops, or to the master mix. SONAR supports 44.1 KHz sampling for CD-quality sound, 24-bit/96
kHz sound for DVD-quality sound, and lets you choose from lower or higher sample rates as well. All
audio effects are 32-bit floating point for faster processing and high-quality sound reproduction.
Many effects now support 64-bit processing for pristine quality.
Next topic: “Web authoring” on page 55.
Web authoring
SONAR is the ideal tool for developing and producing music and sound for the World Wide Web,
because it lets you save your work in the formats that are most commonly used on web sites: MIDI,
MP3, and Windows Media Advanced Streaming Format. Any SONAR project—musical composition,
audio clip, commercial spot, jingle with voice-over—can be stored in a web-compatible format with a
few simple mouse clicks.
Next topic: “Film and video scoring and production” on page 56.