When I embarked on a journey to try recording with Sonar on my Asus EEE PC 1000HE netbook, I didn't know what kind of results I should expect. To be honest with you, I didn't want to know because I was, um, how should I say this, was a little scared that things may not work out at all.

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Before I tell you about what came out of my experience, I wanted to preface my story with a fact that is hard to resist: we all know that netbook hardware is not built for any heavy media work. For example, read this article that describes the famously-known Intel Atom processors just to get an idea what I am talking about. I heard that people run Photoshop and Audacity on those machines and, while these programs do not run fast, they nevertheless allow the user accomplish some basic tasks.

I wanted to go conservative with my set up and ended up connecting the M-Audio's EMU 0202
as my USB sound card and loading Sonar LE 4.0 as my recording software. Let me also add that I am using Windows XP Home with Service Pack 3 as my operating system.

Installation went with no problems whatsoever, and so did Sonar's Wave Profiler. In fact, I went as far as loading a new project with four empty tracks in it. Unfortunately, This is, where my problems started.

I was not able to arm or input echo any of the tracks, and when I finally did, the computer would restart as soon as I hit the “record” button. Switching to ASIO format made things even worse in that it became impossible to do anything with tracks without receiving the “drop-out” message from Sonar's audio engine.

Of course, this was by no means a thorough test of my netbook's audio capabilities but my experience showed that perhaps we should keep dreaming for a little longer! :)

Several questions would have to be answered before we can call it a quit on this issue:

1. Is Windows XP Home Edition the best OS for netbooks when it comes to audio recording?
2. Is Emu 0202 USB sound card the best choice in terms of driver reliability and WDM/ASIO support?
3. Is Cakewalk Sonar the best match for netbooks?

The last question is particularly interesting to answer because I did get to record 4 tracks of audio using Audacity 1.3 beta software. Additionally, I did successfully install Band In A Box and even got to jam with the “band”.

Perhaps we cannot yet enjoy Sonar on our netbooks, but we can surely start using these little machines as scratch pads to help us remember those spontaneous moments of inspiration. :)

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