Noel Borthwick

There is no auth code required. TH-U will auto activate inside Sonar and Next. You cannot use it in cbb or another DAW if that's what you are trying to do.

Its most likely that the save is so fast that you dont see the progress display. A second save is likely faster due to caching.

Not a bug. Its intentional that clicking the title bar dismisses quick start. Most users try and interact with the menu or close the app when the quick start is open so we facilitate this by dismissing it.

New prochannel modules are being considered but we don't have anything to announce just yet.

There is no good reason to uninstall unless you desperately need the space. If you uninstall fully you might lose some plugins no longer distributed is the one thing you might consider. Otherwise if you are never going to need to check something there you can uninstall.

Cheers for getting Premium, you wont be disappointed esp with whats coming later. Regarding the perf meters, they don’t measure UI load by default but rather audio processing load unless you change the metering options to show global system load. Some spikyness there is not abnormal, since its impossible to perfectly balance load on your CPU in a real world project since you may have varying processing or plugin loads on tracks and buses. Turning on Plugin load balancing will help smooth the load if you have many plugins on each track and arent running at super low latency. If you have a recipe for the language change issue, please send me a PM.

@Bristol_Jonesey are you signing out after activating? Irrespective of whether you actually stay online or not activation will be retained for the lease period as long as you stay signed in to Sonar. (Sign in is not the same as being online) >>I'd rather not have to go online every time I open Sonar. >>Is there a fix for this? Being online is definitely not a requirement. Will need to troubleshoot this with you as to why this is happening. Send me a PM.

Is not that Sonar is incompatible. It's just that we don't do any significant testing on it. We have limited staff and resources are spent on testing current software. I was just trying to rule out a system level issue.

There is nothing to fix lol. Turn on show strip colors in preferences.

Please read the FAQ about the free tier. This has been rehashed many times. The free tier only includes the Core features of Sonar, not all features you could find in now discontinued. cbb. Many of those older features have been greatly improved in Sonar. If you want the full Premium Tier feature set of Sonar you will need to purchase a BandLab membership Our free tier is very generous compared to other free DAW offerings but it won't include the entire Sonar feature set now or in the future, as new features are added. Again just core features.

A forced update is not related to activation. It's when there are certain bugs or backend changes that mandate everyone switching over to the new version for consistency. We do this periodically but relatively infrequently to sync the user base with the latest version. In this case we're working out some issues in the system in preparation for future changes and this required the update. Additionally we corrected some copy that was leading to unnecessary confusion about the new free tier.

Sonar initializes and still uses DirectShow for the purpose of dx plugins. If something got messed up with dhow this would explain why the problem only manifested in sonar and not your other DAW's. It doesn't necessarily mean it's a bug in Sonar itself.

Yes as I said the "gap" was intentional to fix a problem. You might not have seen it bit it could happen intermittently which is why I had to make that change. I'll look into it next week and see if there is an alternate way to address that problem.

Well look into this next week and see if we can repro it.

Regarding the external insert issue, we looked at the code and indeed in Sonar there is a change to how bypass works. However its completely intentional and doesnt have anything to do with engine stability. Its exactly the opposite in fact. In Cbb there were numerous bugs with EI and when bypassing and unbypassing rapidly you could crash or hang the system because the external insert has very complex routing internally and it led to a race condition. To solve that I made it do a proper "hard bypass". In fact bypassing from the fx rack is always a hard bypass as opposed to an internal plugin bypass. In the case of the EI the old code wasn't handling it in a threadsafe way. The New EI has extended functionality and doing this was the only safe way to handle it. That said I'll consider implementing a soft bypass mode for the EI - this will have to be done from the plugin UI's bypass button. This isn't available today for the EI. In any case the TLDR is that this is not a bug but expected behavior today. Much better to be safe than crash.

Did you mean Win 11 above?

@Tommy Byrnes Im sure we’ll get to the bottom of it with some troubleshooting. Very important - your signature mentions Windows 10. Please note although we don’t block installing on Windows 10, we no longer test with it and Win10 (and earlier) have known graphical problems that will never get fixed by Microsoft. The UI engine in Sonar has been through major changes and it uses new API’s that allow it to handle modern displays. Its possible that some of these could have compatibility issues in Win 10 esp with certain display drivers. I’m not saying this is your issue but its not impossible. If you have another machine with Win 11 I recommend trying it there as well. Also are both your monitors set to the same resolution or different?

Have not come across this. It's not impossible that it's win 10 related. Please note that we don't test anymore with windows 10 except for the most rudimentary stuff.

In addition to this some plugins attempt to throttle DSP based on workload so it's conceivable that it could change the quality when it's more efficient . This doesn't apply to rendered audio obviously.

A null test won't catch playback related issues caused by dropouts that i mentioned above. The dropouts will null too lol An easy test to show the effect of dropouts is to lower your latency as low as it can go on a heavy project. You will start to hear distortion as it gets too much for the CPU. In general however the sound of realtime audio processing is less important than the sound of rendered audio since that is immune to dropouts or performance related artifacts. Of course if you are using it live thats a different issue.

While there are no direct fidelity changes other than plug-in up sampling (assuming that is enabled), if you were driving a very loaded project you may be getting missed buffers in cbb that no longer happen in sonar thanks to the major performance enhancements. Missed buffers or small dropouts can lead to distribution in the audio. Is possible that this is what you are hearing different.

That's odd, when you see it again post a screenshot. What version of windows are you running?

It's now migrated if it was on in cbb, however the new default is off. Is not a good default to be on because it doesn't work well in every color theme.

In the latest build Show strip colors is now migrated from CBB settings if you choose to migrate. The new default is off that's all.

Correct that's likely what you saw. If you purchased a license you have access to mastering in the BandLab studio Web app. Just upload your mixes and you can use it there.