photo caption: Brandon Ryan (Cakewalk) and Tommy Tallarico

Brandon Ryan of Cakewalk, a fixture at trade shows as the SONAR evangelist, teamed up with “the-man-is-everywhere” Tommy Tallarico for a highly informative panel on the use of workstations in multicore environments. SONAR, with its unlimited track count, is fully native 64-bit and Vista compatible, and in this demo was running a 150-track orchestral piece with a combonation of live and MIDI tracks, loaded with fx (some in 32-bit running off of BitBridge). After a brief rundown of the new capabilities in SONAR 6.2, they played a Tallarico composition form Advent Rising with 72-piece orchestra, 100-voice Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and 120 tracks of mixed MIDI (Tommy likes the percussive hits in MIDI, same as some of his brass punch). Tallarico was a SONAR 2 user way back, then switched to Nuendo, but has switched back for the MIDI-audio power and recording power of the new release. He also took time to praise Cakewalk and Intel for taking the time to really work together in developing applications for new generations of native hardware. This, he said, is how all development should work. Never a hiccup in this demo.