Tutorial: Page (1) of 2 - 05/03/05

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Two SONAR Workflow Tools SONAR's Navigator view is great for zipping around a project quickly By Frank Moldstad

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As you use a program over time through several versions you become accustomed to a certain workflow. And even when a new version of the program introduces different tools, the old ways of doing things still work. It's easy to continue on the way you always have. But by doing so, you're not taking advantage of features that could change the way you work.

Two such tools are the new Navigator bar introduced in Cakewalk's SONAR 4, and new features in the Slip Editing tool, including the ability to slip edit multiple clips simultaneously. 

The Navigator is one of the many workflow enhancements introduced in SONAR 4, and I only realized its power recently when I was looking at the View options available from the top menu.

Navigator is a default view when the progam is installed, but at some point I must have closed it and forgotten about it. After all, it had never been there before in previous versions, so I didn't miss it. I've just been using the keyboard commands and the mouse to get around large projects, as before.

Navigator is accessible from the View menu

But the other day, when I opened the Navigator view, I was working with a large project (30+ audio tracks), and having a hard time getting around quickly. I was cleaning up a myriad of little things, like a singer humming the starting note for an upcoming harmony part and a guitarist positioning his fingers on a chord while waiting for his entry point. It required me to jump around diffferent parts of the project, zooming in and out. And the Navigator was exactly what I needed to get around quickly.

A narrow horizontal bar that appears at the top of the project, the Navigator view offers immediate and intuitive selection of wherever you want to go on the timeline, on whatever track you wish.

Grab handles on the top, bottom and sides allow you to size the Navigator view's rectangular box edges, which enclose a complete miniature overview of your project, with individual tracks the same various colors as they appear in the tracking window..When you expand the Navigator view horizonally or vertically, the files in the Track view correspondingly change size . Whn you click on a specific point in the Navigator view, that region becomes what you see in the Track view. It's all too simple.

Although all of this functionality was previously available through keyboard and mouse commands, this is by far the easiest way to get around a Sonar project. It's kind of like having a magic wand that transports you wherever you point it, at whatever view size you want -- practically down to the sample level if you keep dragging. And when you're ready to return to a global view, it's quick and painless to do so just by dragging the handles back.

All project files are displayed in compact form, with resizable and movable box for positioning view.

I found a neat trick for getting around the Navigator view by dragging in the sides and bottom to create a compact little box, which then can be moused around up and down and back and forth across the project if you're looking for something. This essentially combines the functions of the bars on the right hand side and bottom of SONAR's interface for moving up and down and back and forth through a project. Navigator combines these X and Y plane tools into one. 

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