Karen Lewellen, Dec 11 2015:
Is it command line only?
For Audio recording and processing there is Joel's
Nama:
https://freeshell.de/~bolangi/nama/
Nama has a superb online help system! Try it out!
You can start there and then use the github repository, which right now is quite stable.
You will also need Ecasound for Nama to work:
http://www.eca.cx/ecasound
Your distro should already have a package for Ecasound though.
For MIDI there is Midish:
http://www.midish.org
There is a VERYT good and complete manual on the website!
Nama can use Midish, but I only ever use that for finally bouncing MIDI tracks to audio.
Here's a collection of extra midish commands, that help me in my own work:
https://freeshell.de/~silvain/software/fs_midish_extra-1.0.tar.bz2
Also to perform good audio processing I strongly recommend LADSPA and LV2 plugins. Your
distro should have a bunch, otherwise google for them.
For very good quality reverbs checkout Fons Adriaensen's jconvolver:
http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/downloads/index.html
It will tell you, which packages to download or again try your distro, though I'm not
sure about jconvolver.
Having heard about the win and mac giants, you won't get all of their features, but it
does work. Judging by the time it takes other people to learn those, the learning curve
here shouldn't be worse than that. Besides there are specific mailinglists and of
course the LAU here.
I hope this answers your question, since I don't exactly know, what Sonar'[s
feature set is.
In case you actually meant "sonar", I know of one sonar, which is a distribution
for blind people and has nothing to do with a DAW. :)
...
Ta-ta
----
Ffanci
* Homepage:
https://freeshell.de/~silvain
* Twitter:
http://twitter.com/ffanci_silvain
* GitHub:
https://github.com/fsilvain