Home Studio: the long walk from Sonar 7 to Pro Tools 8 - Part 3

Introduction

Originally, this entry was published during March 2009, in my old Spanish version of this blog. I am revisiting this entry, together with the previous two, because I find them interesting for that people that wants to migrate from Cakewalk Sonar 7 PE to Pro Tools 8.0 LE.


Current situation (at March 2009)

Finally, I was able to work with acidized loops!!!.

There are several things that you have to take into account if you change from Sonart to Pro Tools. In Pro Tools you have to:

1. Go to the window named Workspace and, push the button with a metronome icon, to be able to hear the loop in your project's tempo, instead of the original file's tempo. This, Sonar explorer does automatically, without your notice or intervention.
2. Go to any of the loop files and push that button with an speaker icon. If you pushed the metronome button, the wav file will be analyzed looking for its structure and ticks and, an Ok mark will appear to its left hand, before you can hear the loop.
3. To be able to drag and drop the llop as a region with "Elastic Time", you need to previously change the option Setup -> Preferences, tab Processing, Drag and Drop from Desktop Conforms to Session Tempo, radiobutton group set to All Files.
4. With this option active, the loop will be pasted to the track with elastic time properties, independently of if the track was defined as to wrok with Samples or Ticks.
5. To adjust the imported loop to your session's tempo, you will need first to push the button Conductor, in the transport bar and to choose the tempo for your project.
6. Only then, you will be able to change the track from Samples to Ticks and, to select some kind of algorithm to be applied to adjust the tempo (Polyphonic, Monophonic, etc).
7. Once done with previous steps, you can enjoy the looping options of Pro Tools, way versatiler than in Sonar.

Something that doesn't work very well is to apply faders to a couple of acidized loops. If you do that and you try to consolidate both regions in a single one, part of the information in one or the other stereo channel is missed. So, you better leave your fade outs for the end of the project.

Well, it's time to migrate Sonar projects to Pro Tools!.