Tutorial 9 - Exporting, CD burning and sharing

 

Note: The core SONAR installer does not include any tutorial content. In order to follow along with the tutorials, please download and install the optional SONAR Tutorials via Cakewalk Command Center (see Cakewalk Command Center).

Once your SONAR project is complete, you will want to share it with the world or burn a CD. SONAR offers many tools to help you do this. In this tutorial, we are going to explore some of the basics of these tools.

Before we get started, let’s open one of the example audio projects included with SONAR. If you have your own project that already contains audio, you can load that instead. However, your screen will look different from the images in this tutorial.

1.	On the File menu, click Open.

The Open dialog box appears.

2.	In the Go to Folder list, select Template Files and then open the Tutorials folder.

3.	Browse to the project named SONAR_AudioDemo.cwb and click Open to load the project.

Note: You may have to rename the file if you saved it with the same name during Tutorial 1.

Now that you have opened the demo project (or your own audio project), click the Play button or press SPACEBAR listen to it. If you do not hear any audio, review the steps in Tutorial 1 to ensure SONAR and your audio device are configured correctly.

Cakewalk Project Files are different from the audio you hear on a CD in that they are often multi-track. In this example, you will notice that there are nine audio tracks. In order to burn this mix to a CD or prepare it for distribution, we need to export or mix it down to a stereo track.

First, we need to click File > Export > Audio.

This will bring us to the Export Audio dialog box. This has many useful functions. Let’s explore some of them in detail.

You should notice that the top half of this window is very similar to the Open and Save dialogs that were discussed in Tutorial 1 - Creating, playing, and saving projects. This is used to navigate to locations on your computer’s hard drive and tell SONAR where you want to store the exported audio.

For this Tutorial, we are only going to explore some of the more common settings. If you would like to read about all of the options and settings click the Help button.

Control	Function
Channel Format	Specifies if the audio should be exported as stereo or mono.
Sample Rate	Allows you to set the sample rate of your export. 44100 Hz is used for CD quality audio.
Bit-Depth	Allows you to set the bit-depth of your export. 16-bit is used for CD quality and 24-bit is often used for DVD quality audio.

To burn an audio CD of your music

1.	Click File > Export > Audio to open the Export Audio dialog box.

2.	In the Channel Format list, select Stereo.

3.	In the Sample Rate list, select 44100.

4.	In the Bit-Depth list, select 16.

5.	Enter a name for you mix in the File name box.

6.	In the File type list, select Wave.

7.	Specify where you want to save the file. Make note of this location, because you will need to use it later.

8.	Click Export.

A progress bar appears across the bottom of SONAR’s screen while a CD quality audio file is exported. When the progress bar disappears, SONAR has finished exporting your project.

Now we need to burn our mix to a CD. SONAR features a powerful built-in CD burning application that can do this for us.

 

See:

Burning an audio CD

Uploading audio to SoundCloud