Colin Nicholls

Do you have a controller sending a CC or something to enable RecArm ?

Thanks for writing out those instructions. I followed them as exactly as I could, and - you guessed it - could not reproduce the issue. IN my case, I copied a random .wav file into D:\TEMP\ and used that in the filename picker dialog. I can confirm it overwrote the existing file with the new export, and didn't append an underscore. If you enter a filename that doesn't already exist on disk; export to it; then re-export picking the existing file, does the behavior still happen?

Is it adding an underscore even when you provide an override to the preset name template in the Export Audio dialog? In other words, how exactly are you doing this?

@Matthew Carr, try disabling FX at the project level (it's the button in the Mix Module) and see if the behavior changes. If it does, then the problem is being caused by one or more FX plugins.

Are you trying to run another DAW or audio application at the same time? What happens if you reboot and just open Sonar?

Different products can co-exist, e.g. Cakewalk SONAR Platinum; Cakewalk By Bandlab, and the new Sonar. Different Tiers of new Sonar can be accessed providing you maintain two Bandlab accounts, one with an associated premium subscription, and one "normal" user. Then you can sign out/in as different Bandlab users to compare the differences between Premium and Free Tier. If you install the latest UPDATE to any of the products mentioned above, then that is the version you are able to use, short of re-installing the previous update. All the plugins installed should be available in all versions of the Cakewalk applications, as I understand it.

At the risk of going off-topic, the creators of ChatGPT and its ilk have trained their predictive text engines on a LOT of information made freely available on the Internet, including a LOT of obsolete or deprecated technologies, but that isn't a reason to bring those technologies back. Other than declaring CAL Scripts as an unsupported and unmaintained feature of Sonar, there has been no hint of it being removed. Would it make a difference if someone promised not to remove it? I think we've all been around the block enough to know that anything and everything is subject to change with no notice at all (sometimes we get a month, nice!) regardless of what anyone has been promised in the past. I don't expect CAL to suddenly become unavailable in Sonar, for what it's worth.

I think it has been removed, which is fine with me because clearly it wasn't complete. The Cakewalk site seems to have undergone a nice refresh recently too, and now has a nice FAQ about the Free Tier and other related subjects. At this point, if you want a definitive list of what is excluded from the Free Tier, you install it and look around for the "Premium" crown icon.

Yeah, I reported this as a bug, and I think it will be addressed in the next update. It's not supposed to be appearing until we try to perform an operation that needs online access.

I hope you feel better after letting off some steam. Your experience isn't typical, if that helps. Oh, and fortunately, you don't have to pay for Sonar if you don't want to - there's a Free Tier that gives you all the functionality you need to be productive. What have you tried? Which VSTs? Can you build up a simple project from empty and add plugins, etc, one by one until you hit a problem? What driver type are you using, and what is your audio interface hardware? Are you switching between different audio applications? Some Apps remember their ASIO settings and restore them, but Sonar currently does not and you can find that settings have changed from the last time you ran it. I realize you are comparing Cakewalk and Sonar, so do you have a sample project that works fine in Cakewalk but causes issues in Sonar? Can you reduce it to the bare minimum and post it here? Perhaps we can reproduce your problem?

Just for kicks, I thought I'd try to reproduce this on my system. It's Windows 10 FWIW. I used two Stress Test projects: Stress Test 1 : 40 Audio tracks, each with 1 instance of Helix Native VST3 (amp+reverb) Cakewalk By Bandlab: Sonar: ----------------- ------------------- ----------------- Audio Processing: 12 % (approx) 12 % (approx) Engine Load: 17 % (approx) 20 % (approx) Resource Monitor: 12.0 % 12.3 % Task Manager: 19.5 % 20.3 % Stress Test 2: 40 Instrument tracks, Cherry Audio GX-80 Cakewalk By Bandlab: Sonar: ----------------- ------------------- ----------------- Audio Processing: 16 % (approx) 13.5 % (approx) Engine Load: 30 % (approx) 21.0 % (approx) Resource Monitor: 18.4 % 15.6 % Task Manager: 29.4 % 27.4 % Maybe the first Stress Test shows Sonar slightly worse off performance-wise, not that I would notice or call it significant. The second Stress Test shows Sonar to advantage. There is almost no difference between Idle/Stopped and actively playing back.

I've never used Video tracks in Sonar so take this with a grain of salt. Maybe this is a "use the right tool for the job" situation. What I would do is the following. I would either do the project in something like DaVinci Resolve (which is free) rather than Sonar, or, I would play the video on another device or computer, and would talk.speak along with the video and get that track recorded in Sonar, then take my "final" audio and line it up with my guide track that I previously record. (Unless you are providing the audio track yourself, then your guide track can be your actual track)

Well, some people just can't stand that 13 second wait during application startup, so there's that We are told that exciting things are in the pipeline that will be Full/Subscription only. I recommend you use the Free Tier until such time as the new features are announced, and make your decision about upgrading then. If there is one thing that is very clear over the last few years, is that there is no one strategy that BandLab can take that will make EVERYONE happy 😄

Those checkboxes used to work in an earlier release... I think this is a regression. Look for normal functionality to be restored soon I would expect. Hey, @John T I recommend documenting each of the issues you've identified, clearly in a top level post for maximum visibility.

It's not absolute. Many folks have reported the exact opposite; that Sonar performs BETTER than CbB on the same project. So there must be some other factor here.

Where, somehow, there will be no learning curve? My experience shows that Sonar will open projects saved in CbB and there is no discernible difference. Cut and Paste work exactly the same. The only reason they would save to a different location is if you chose to do so with Save as.. If you register Sonar as the default application for opening .cwp files then they will all open in Sonar. 12Tone/Cakewalk/BandLab have always put effort into ensuring that almost any version of their DAW can open a project saved with any other version, it's actually pretty amazing that they've done this. If there is a saved feature that is not supported, it just won't use that feature, and so long as you don't save, it will be retained in the project if you chose to then open it in a later version.

This has been reported and accepted as an issue, and I'm pretty sure it will be addressed in an update at some point soon.

That looks like a bad memory chip doesn't it, or something.

Hi John, unfortunately that is correct. Themes are not supported in the new Sonar. It uses an entirely different graphics/display engine (vector based, not bitmaps) as part of the High-DPI support. It's early days, though, and BandLab/Cakewalk haven't ruled out bringing back some form of user-customization for colors in Sonar. I fully expect to see some kind of theming back in the product in the near future but it won't be based on the previous theming engine, and those Cakewalk themes will not be compatible. The built-in themes (more than just Tungsten and Mercury!) do a good job and being generally acceptable to most people but of course there's always something that, if only we could tweak slightly, would make it perfect 🙂 I hope that helps.

I would think it was a problem if you chose "Basic" and then decide you'd actually prefer the fuller menu set... etc. with no way to back out of the initial choice.

Some other DAWS or Audio programs may reset the buffer size and other ASIO settings , but Sonar just opens and uses the ASIO settings at whatever they currently were set to last. SO if you are comparing DAWs or whatever, double check before you open a project in Sonar that the ASIO buffer settings are where you expect them to be.

This happens to me whenever I un-dock the Synth Rack. It never seems to remember how I last sized it in Floating state.

A MIDI track is just that, a MIDI track. You can create one completely independent of any virtual synth. Ctrl-Shift-T or right -click in the left pane of the Track (Arrangement) View and select "Insert MIDI track" It will point to the default MIDI output but you could create an empty Drum Map and point the MIDI track to that.

Shift-C Also Right-click on the space next to the icons to get more options

Citation needed