User Guide for new Sonar?

[John Vere]

Is this not available yet? @Noel Borthwick @Jesse Jost 

I have a few questions and I opened the documentation but It seems its the Cakewalk 2022.11: version covered.  

First- is some of the Start screen projects have the Preview icon but most don't.  It scared the heck out of me when I found the one that did and the project played at 110 db! 

Second- I did manage to open the spectrograph in the Pro Channel but I had to open , close it a few time before it shows in the mini view of the EQ. This is why I was confused about it's existence. It seems you have to enable the EQ. But it doesn't show unless you turn the EQ on and off a couple of times.  

Third- I'm finding Mix recall having trouble retaining  saving . You save it and it doesn't always show on the list. As you see in the screen shot scene 1 and 2 are missing even in the folder and 3 is missing on the recall list? . This is a brand new project 100%  Sonar built. I'll see if I can repro it in a different project tomorrow.  

Everything else is just wonderful. I'm slowly getting over not having a white PRV.  

[sjoens]

Looks like there's no Help yet.  Help > Documentation points to the legacy documentation web site whether Always Use Local Help is checked or not.

[David Baay]

13 hours ago, John Vere said:

First- is some of the Start screen projects have the Preview icon but most don't.  It scared the heck out of me when I found the one that did and the project played at 110 db! 

The Project Preview file is created by default on the first Export of the project from the new Sonar (see the checkbox at the lower left of the Mix and Render section). After that, you can choose to enable/disable the option to replace the preview file or not on subsequent exports. The rendering of the preview file should follow the Source Category and other settings in the  Export dialog so that it matches the level of the 'external'  export file. I suppose it's possible that routing of the playback from the Start Screen could alter the playback level, but I haven't noticed a difference in any of my projects; the Preview always plays at exactly the same level as the live project.

You can find the preview files in the Audio folder of the project; they have long UIDs for names. If you save alternate versions of projects to the same project folder (as I often do) there will be a preview file for each and it won't be easy to tell which file is associated with which .CWP except maybe by its date or by changing the file extension and seeing which project loses its preview capability in the Start Screen.

[John Vere]

Thanks I'll see If I can just disable it,  I have no need of this feature really. It was loud because I wasn't expecting it. And my volume level just so happened to still be on at unity as I had been mixing. I normally do most work at about  -65db.  or less.  My wife can only listen to so many takes !  

[bitflipper]

As a one-time document writer, I can tell you that documentation is always playing catch-up with development, especially early on. Changes are just happening too fast for the documentation to keep up with, even if they're only changes to the visual presentation. And a big part of the work being done now is graphical in nature.

Fortunately, a great deal of previous information remains applicable to the new product. This is especially helpful for beginners who are just trying figure out the difference between a track and a bus or the relationship between latency and buffer size. I would not hesitate to recommend reading the existing documentation to new users looking for a quick start.

Still, old hands like John (and me) still have to do a double take when anything familiar changes or new features are encountered.  The first time I saw the new start screen I had to stop what I was doing and figure out what was supposed to be happening. I am still taken aback when a previous graphical component changes, like the little toast messages (e.g. that tell you when there's a new version available) suddenly conform to the new color scheme. When I first saw that, my kneejerk presumption was that my antivirus was issuing a warning. But no, it had just changed from a blue background to black. 

Having preview files has not been an issue for me, because I don't hear them. The reason? I normally export projects as FLAC, and the preview player does not yet support FLAC files as previews. The files are there, but don't play back. So you might consider that as a temporary workaround, exporting as FLAC rather than WAV. Being lossless, it can be used even if you're exporting to a mastering service or submitting a track to an online collaboration.

I have checked aud.ini, cakewalk.ini and the registry, and there does not appear to be a setting to disable previews,  although I expect that to come along later.