The information in this article applies to:

• SONAR 8.5 Producer
• SONAR 8 Producer
• SONAR 7 Producer

Sound Designer II files are the domain of a few died in the wool Macintosh DAW programs, notably Pro Tools and Digital Performer.

There's a few catches of course for handling these files, most importantly the fact that sound designer II files use a resource fork and they are toast without them. This means that a sound designer II file basically can only live on Macintosh HFS and HFS+ format volumes, but if you need to transport these files, there ways around this limitation.

If you need to send a file like this over a web or ftp server, they need to be encoded into a flat file, and that will usually be a stuffit or stuffitx file (.sit or .sitx,) which means it will also be compressed as well as flattened. There is a stuffit program for Windows that enables you to open these files, but by default it will discard the resource fork when expanding these files, thus rendering them unusable.

Stuffit 11 has a few options for handling mac resource forks. The one you need to select is "Encode each resource fork in AppleDouble format" in Stuffit's "Cross Platform" options. This will create a separate file with a leading '.' char in the same folder as the data file. This file is essential for properly importing a sound designer II file. The next issue is the fact that none of the audio files will have an sd2 suffix, so you have to turn off the .sd2 filter in SONAR's import dialog (change it to * "all files".)

From there, you can select the data fork of the file to import, and as long as the matching resource fork file with the leading '.' is in the same directory, you should have success importing the file.