Joseph Kesselman

Thanks, all. Switched this machine over to WASAPI and it hasn't blown up yet... <grin/> @bdickens, I *am* moving to a better audio interface -- but that's on the other machine, for now. (Actually, at some point I expect I'll be looking for a serious mixer-with-full-capture device as part of a stage-and-recording sound kit, but I'm hoping to delay that until the financial market and supply chains have returned to something closer to normal.)

I needed something; Sonar was being weird about talking to the sound drivers and ASIO4ALL did fix it. And I vaguely remembered having to use ASIO in the past, so that was the straw I grabbed ... and it worked, however ugly it may be. I can certainly try WASAPI. Instructions seem to be available at https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=SONAR&language=3&help=AudioPerformance.29.html assuming those are still vaguely current.

Sigh, ASIO4ALL apparently dropped out and Sonar was trying to use Windows sound directly. Fixing that appears to have resolved all my current confusions.

It never pains but it roars... New problem today: I'm on an oldish Lenovo laptop with Realtek HD audio. When I start Sonar, it's now behaving as if the analog output is not available, and is trying to put me onto the SPDIF side of that driver. Yesterday I was able to use the analog output, but today it's unhappy. The audio profile says the device should support 44.1/16-bit stereo, which is what the project isset to. I haven't found a conflicting program. So I'm more than slightly confused. Need to figure this out first. I presume it's self-inflicted somehow, but I'm not sure what I did between yesterday and today to cause it. On the good side: Despite not being able to hear it, I was able to round-trip (import then export) the .wav file and the result sounded fine in another app. So the garble I was hearing might have been related to audio driver weirdnesses. Wheee. "If it was easy, they wouldn't need us, right?"

Great, just wanted to make sure before pulling the trigger! I've been (very occasionally, I admit) using the Cubase code since long before Sonar; I got hooked by one of the early minimal-function versions, and the reasonable loyal-customer upgrade prices kept me following along. At this point I have a DAW setup that *FAR* exceeds my current needs -- heck, Platinum did that by itself -- and my skills in using it, but I hope to dive in deeper now that I'm retired. Most of my experience is actually small-stage live sound, largely folk and folk-adjacent styles, but I'm starting to learn mastering. Re the problem: I've never had a problem importing audio into a project before. And I'm really surprised since these are stereo .wav files, which should be absolutely vanilla bytestreams. They're output from a Mac copy of Audacity, which the performer used for recording and a bit of initial mixing. I can play the using just about any other Windows audio app I've tried, But when I open a Basic project and import these files, it's as if every other sample was zeroed. Only thing that has occurred to me is that upsampling might have malfunctioned, but so far I can't imagine why. I'll reboot, try it one more time, and if it still fails I'll post images and/or clips.

Apologies, but I didn't see this in the FAQ and your discussion search tool didn't filter things down much... I still haven't cut over from Sonar Platinum to the BandLab version of Cakewalk, because I've been nervous about the risk of losing previously purchased/installed VSTs. 1) Can I have both Sonar and Cakewalk installed at once on a single machine, while I convince myself that I don't lose anything by moving over? 2) Can they share the plugin pool on that machine? The projects directories, including old sample projects? Or should I plan on copying those over manually? 3) Are there any other known issues/hazards in having both installed, other than using a lot of disk space? (I just ran into a .wav file that isn't importing happily into the old Sonar Platinum product, and since there's a chance that this is a bug fixed in BandLab's version I'd be interested in trying it. I'm just trying to determine whether it'd be safer to do so on a new machine.)