Sonar to Pro Tools using OMF
One of my first fears with switching to Pro Tools was the fact that I would not be able to use the 100 plus Cakewalk projects I have created over the past 4 or 5 years (yes I do have projects from that far back). Luckily for me I have always used Cakewalk’s per project audio files option, which keeps recorded audio in a project folder, instead of a general audio folder. This made my job somewhat easier (it’s still not painless though).
One of the first things they tell you on the Pro Tools getting started DVD is to name your tracks before you record! Recorded clips or regions will take the name of from the track they are recorded onto. So if you have a track named “Acoustic Guitar 1″, the resulting name of a recorded region will be “Acoustic_Guitar_1-01″ or something along those lines. If you did not name the track before hand, than it will take the name “track 1-01″ or “Audio 1-01″ …etc. You can see that if you had 50 or 60 regions or tracks in a project file it could get confusing if the tracks aren’t named logically. For some of my old Sonar projects, I did name tracks up front…..however some I did not, or I had a mix of both. So I could see that simply importing one region/clip wav file at a time, and trying to rebuild a project was going to be almost impossible, because in some cases I have 7 or 8 different clips/regions that make up one track. A vocal comp could be even worse!
I had read before that Pro Tools “supports” importing OMF files, and Sonar can export OMF files. OMF stands for Open Media Format, and was developed by Avid, and is supposed to allow an easy way to interchange audio files between different software platforms. Notice how I wrote that Pro Tools “supports” OMF files; Pro Tools LE does not (at least out of the box) allow you to import OMF files, to do this you will need the DigiTranslator. This is where you start to ask yourself just how much money are those old projects worth? In my case because my projects were so unorganized there was no other way I would be able to save them.
Next I fired up my Macbook which has Windows Vista installed (via bootcamp) and also has my version of Sonar 6 Producer installed as well. I opened up a project in Sonar, hit select all, and then export to OMF. There are a few options to choose from when exporting: I wanted to include all of my audio files, instead of just linking to them so I selected this option. I also left the files as wav instead of aiff. After the OMF file was exported I opened it up on my iMac with Pro Tools and ran into my first problem; Every where I had created a fade in Sonars and not bounced the clip, the fade was missing resulting in an abrupt ending or starting track. Also every individual clip that overlapped in Sonar was put onto its own track in Pro Tools, so for instance I had a bass guitar track with 4 overlapping clips in it, Pro Tools put these 4 clips on 4 different tracks even though it was really the same Track. So back to Sonar but this time I bounced every track down using the “Bounce to Clip” function. This creates a single audio file for each track. I then re-exported the OMF file, and imported it into Pro Tools. This time everything worked great, and the tracks remained lined up. If you have a small project, you could just import track by track and you would not need the DigiTranslator, but for projects with large track counts the DigiTranslator saves you a lot of time. Some information that does not come through with the OMF file is: MIDI data, Pan/level information, Automation, and Tempos. I did find that markers will come over from Sonar though (I’d rather the other stuff came over…). So I do still have some work to do, as far as lining up the click track again and esentially the project will have to be remixed again, but my recordings remained intact (and that was my ultimate goal).
In order to import any MIDI data contained in your old project you must use Sonar’s “save as” feature and save the project as a MIDI file. This will erase any audio data contained in the file, but leave the empty audio tracks, so you must delete the empty tracks before importing the MIDI file into Pro Tools or else you will have that many empty tracks in Pro Tools as well. Be sure to write down (maybe in a txt file in the project folder) the project Key and Tempo, so you will have a basis to go by once you are working in Pro Tools. If your project has multiple tempo changes, than they will need to be set up in Pro Tools before importing your Midi files, as any tempo change after the fact will effect the MIDI data.
Here is a link to Cakewalk’s site with more OMF export information: http://www.cakewalk.com/Tips/December02_OMF1.asp