The most significant new features in Sonar 4 Producer Edition ($959) revolve around its surround capabilities. It handles multi-format surround mixing with over 30 supported configurations, and SurroundBridge lets you use stereo plug-ins in a multichannel environment. Also new in Sonar 4’s toolbox are Lexicon Pantheon Surround Reverb and Sonitus Surround Compressor.

Now you can freeze tracks, effects, and synths and convert frozen data to groove clips. Use pitch, gain, and pan envelopes to control time slices in loops. Cakewalk’s cooperative efforts with Roland have produced TTS-1, a multichannel DXi plug-in with a General MIDI 2 sound set. Other new features include a Navigator view, a video thumbnail track that supports QuickTime and Windows Media, and the ability to display track layers, which organize multiple tracks in a single folder track.

For project studios and aspiring pros, Sonar 4 Studio Edition ($479) has the Producer Edition’s core engine and streamlined user interface, but without Producer Edition’s surround mixing and editing, MPEX time scaling, POW-r dithering, Sonitus fx Suite, or numerous other features. For more information, visit www.cakewalk.com.