Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Taking a song in Sonar and creating a musical score

Sorry I don't know how to phrase my question in a better way. I was watching someone using Sonar and he took a piece of music he had downloaded and he did something with it and it analyzed the music and created a music score of the different instruments. Did I see correctly and if so how did he do it and will my earlier version of Cakewalk 9 be able to do the same.I have a Casio CDP 220 R hooked up to my desktop using Windows XP

Cakewalk should be capable of doing this, yes, if by "creating a musical score" you simply mean an arrangement with different instrumentation? If you mean then print it out as sheet music, Cakewalk is limited in scoring capabilities. But for arranging, yes.

You say you have hooked up your Casio to your PC, so I assume you got MIDI USB working correctly. What exactly did you need to know?

He most likely downloaded a midi file of a multi instrument arrangement as opposed to an audio recording.

It takes a sophisticated scoring program that can do that and do it well. Sonar is a current program that is very advanced in it's capabilities, cakewalk 9 is not.

You can convert Audio to Midi in Sonar X3 Studio and Producer as well by the ARA integration, then just open the generated Midi file in the Score Editor (which is a pain to use IMO). Take a look here : http://blog.cakewalk.com/easy-audio-to-midi/
I have Sonar X3 Studio which comes with Essential Melodyne but I have never used it really. I tried the Score editor and I really couldn't stand the interface of it.

Thanks guys.Yes I am using a USB cable to connect to my PC. I down load a lot of piano stuff from Youtube and try to play some of the arrangements, but this is difficult if you cant see what they were playing so I was hoping that somehow cakewalk could analyse the notes and produce a score so that I could see what notes were being played what key etc. I recently downloaded a 30 day trial version of Sonar X 3 with a view to buying but compared to pro audio 9 it seem very complicated so I let it expire. It is also a bit over my budget. What is Sonar Studio and would that do what I am trying to do?

The Sonar Studio version is cheaper than the Producer version. It comes with less tools and instruments than in the Producer.
Take a look in the comparison:
https://www.cakewalk.com/Products/SONAR/Versions

The studio can make what you want but it doesn't come with TruePiano or the other instruments/effects that come with the Producer. Melodyne Essential is in both versions which you can use to convert one line melody (if not mistaken) from Audio to Midi including a singer's voice (this was the original purpose actually, like tunes adjustment). You can be sure of the details from the manual or Cakewalk forums.

Learning a new DAW is to commit a lot of time and effort to it. I don't know if Sonar is the best option for this task because I have never used Melodyne Essential (I don't have a need for it really). You might need to demo other DAWs which can convert audio to midi and then decide which one suits you more. There are like Ableton Live (no score editor), Cubase (only the top version has a full score editing), Studio One (no score editor) and maybe others that I forget now. I didn't mention Logic because I think you are with a Windows machine.

Personally, I don't use Sonar a lot but mostly Ableton Live Standard and Cubase Elements 7. Ableton Live doesn't have score editor, so I use Notion 4 ReWired with it. Notion 4 is a score editor which also can be used Rewired with Sonar and Cubase. Anyway, if you decide on Sonar X3 Studio, then you can get it with a big discount now in JRR Shop (which I bought mine from there also, a downloaded license) for $119 but you can get I think additional 14% discount in the final cart if you write 'group' (without quotes). Oh, and the upgrade price from Studio to Producer is $149 which is cheaper than buying the discounted direct price for the Producer version ($329)