Beatscape, a plug-in introduced with Cakewalk SONAR 8 Producer Edition, gives you a way to manipulate loops and samples using a non-threatening interface. The process is simple: you map samples to its 16 onscreen pads and trigger them with MIDI notes. To get the most out of Beatscape, check out the cool tutorial from Electronic Musician, available on emusician.com. Brian Smithers has been around the block with SONAR and other …

Many plug-in VI creators (and convolution reverb makers) still follow the annoying habit of, during the install process, loading sample content on the same drive as the application – not the best practice when performance and reliability are being tested by your DAW software. Usually you have to jump through several hoops to get the samples relocated to a dedicated audio drive. But sometimes you get a little help, …