Effects on clips

You can insert real-time effects on clips, in both MIDI and audio tracks. Each clip that you insert an effect on displays its own FX Rack, that you can use to manage the effects on that clip.

The characteristics of clip-based effects are:

Splitting a clip copies the effect(s) onto both clips.

You can copy or move clip-based effects from one clip to another, and to or from the FX Rack on a track.

A clip’s FX Rack also appears in the Clip Inspector.

Audio effects can be automated by using clip envelopes.

The Track view Clips > Bounce to Clip(s) command follows clip boundaries—effects tails are cut off, unless you slip-edit the end of the clip to leave space.

Freezing a track or synth will also freeze the per-clip FX Racks.

To insert an effect on a clip

Do one of the following:

Right-click the clip, choose Open Clip FX Rack on the pop-up menu, then right-click the clip FX Rack and choose the desired effect.

From the Browser, drag an effect onto the clip.

Open the Clip Inspector and show the Clip Effects section. Right-click the FX Rack to select an effect, or drag an effect from the Browser.

The FX icon appears on the clip(s) after you insert the effect.

A. FX icon

To open or close the FX Rack on a clip

To open a clip’s FX Rack, click the FX icon, or right-click the FX icon and select Open Clip FX Rack from the pop-up menu.

To close a clip’s FX Rack, click the X icon that’s in the upper left corner of the clip’s FX Rack, or click anywhere outside of the FX Rack.

To delete, bypass, move, copy, or re-order a clip effect

To delete an effect, right-click the effect name and choose Delete from the pop-up menu.

To bypass or un-bypass all the effects on a clip, right-click in the clip’s FX Rack and choose Bypass FX Rack from the pop-up menu.

To enable or disable an individual effect, click the effect’s on/off switch.

To move an effect to another FX Rack (on a track or a clip), drag the name of the effect to the other FX Rack.

To copy an effect to another FX Rack (on a track or a clip), hold the CTRL key down, and then drag the name of the effect to the other FX Rack.

To change the order of an effect in an FX Rack, drag the name of the effect up or down to the desired place in the effects chain.

To apply inserted clip effects

1.	If you want to apply the inserted effects on more than one clip, select them.

2.	If you want to leave room at the end of any clips for effects tails, slip-edit the ends of the clips to leave some empty space.

3.	Click the Track view Clips menu and choose Bounce to Clip(s).

After the progress bar disappears, the bounced clips appear with new waveforms to reflect the effects processing. The inserted clip effects are removed from the bounced clips automatically.

Canceling changes made to real-time plug-ins

EnablePluginCancelButton=<0 or 1>, default = 0

In SONAR 4.0.2 and earlier, opening the property page of a VST plug-in during playback could result in a slight disruption in playback.

The cause for this problem has its roots in the little Cancel button that sits in the top right corner of the plug-in's property page. The purpose of this button is to allow the user to cancel out of any changes they might have made to the plug-in, restoring back to whatever state the plug-in was in before they opened the GUI window. To make this work, SONAR would need to take an initial snapshot of the plug-in's state, and some plug-ins with large amounts of preset data could cause an audio hiccup if the data was captured for the Cancel button.

To address this issue, SONAR 4.0.3 (and later) does not take a snapshot of the plug-in's state by default, and the Cancel button is not available. There is a new Cakewalk.ini variable to bring back the Cancel button if desired, but be aware that this may also result in hiccups when opening VST plug-ins during playback.

This variable should be set in the [WinCake] section. For example:

[WinCake]

EnablePluginCancelButton=1