Bass Guitar

It’s glitches. I just got the same thing. It said I wasn’t activated. Click the toaster and it went away. The whole website experience of obtaining Sonar is really badly organized. And then there’s still the confusion with the legacy site is top of any search for “Purchase Sonar”. You need to understand that you need to first search for Bandlab and even then you end up with everything but any anything about Sonar. You need to know to search for Bandlab Membership first. But you need to log in and it never works with out trying 4 times! Then you’ll need to know you need to search for the Cakewalk Product Centre. And you need to log in again and it doesn’t work the first time. Then you install Sonar and you log in again and it says you are not a member. Nice welcome.

I found the most useful thing that they kept is the saturation slider. Play with that and it helps a lot.

I use Nero and I feed it 48/. 24 wave files no problem. It has a good Dithering system built in. There’s a lot of information about dithering and after reading a lot of it I decided that it is not very important to my type of music production. People obsess about this stuff when in the end there’s more important stuff to worry about like the music itself. Who cares if you recorded at 192/ 32 if it’s not a good song.

Me too. I have not totally abandoned it yet because I will be back in a shot the minute they somehow rectify the shortcomings of this new graphics system. No complaints about anything else other than the topic that is censored. I just can’t see some icons very clearly but that said, this is now common in a lot of software. My latest one is some projects would open and the Browser shows the instrument tab highlighted but the list was the effects.

Exactly. So I have a wave file that is 48/ 16 and import it it will still be 16 bit even if the project is 44.1 or 48. Sonar doesn’t change the bit depth. So why the need for dithering. I really can’t think of what that setting applies to?

Yes but Sonar in my case is using 32 floating point so I can’t see a case where dithering would apply. Most cases where I would be importing audio files they are always lower bit rates.

The message you will get is you are already signed in and the price is not the discount. The discount is only for new accounts. As I said we complained about this in July 2024 and were told they would "look into it" guess not. So I had my 3rd email which is what I'm using for this user name. That worked to get the discount. What was interesting is on checkout it showed your fee $70 and then next year renewal as $99. So that seems a bit different than before. Because when I went to renew this last July it was $189 and the sale price was I think $59 that was showing in a pop up when you opened Cakewalk or Sonar that month. It only lasted a few days and then they announced the end of Cakewalk, I feel sorry for anyone who was foolish enough to pay the$189

Long standing fact-! USB mikes are for podcasts and rarely can be used with any Daw. I agree with @57Gregy Buy a Mike that comes with a proper XLR cable. I just picked up a Tascam large diaphragm condenser Mike for $89 ! It’s got a bit of background noise but you can’t hear it unless there’s total silence. Im blown away by how good it sounds for that price.

Yep. I tried to get the discount but I am locked out on both accounts. The first one was from almost 2 years ago when Sonar was released. I signed up for monthly in hopes that they would eventually be selling it. Buy that Summer it was clear that wasn’t going to happen. But when I tried to switch to annual which was on sale for about the same price as it is today I was told NO. A few of us complained that this was a poor way to treat loyalty!! So I just created a new account with my other email. That ran out last July and now I am expected to pay full price. My only option would be to create a new email account. It’s just not worth it.

And now you know why nobody likes subscribing. Im sure once you connect with a real person they will sort it out. But luckily I see it is on sale now for only $70 so it’s a good time to renew. Just start a new account with your new e mail. I had to do that to get the discount over a year ago. The discount is usually not available to members. So you might save money by becoming a new member.

This started when Noel explained why they had removed access to Wavetable due to the end of life. And I swear that he said that they had removed it. Fine either way it is gone. I looked into what is still supported and that was the Virtual midi synth. The reason why I did this is I have a few apps that still depend on it like Media Player and Chord Pulse and I didn’t want to suddenly lose them because of some upcoming Windows update. I simply made Virtual midi synth the default. Everything works and not only that it seems to sound better. The following might not be all accurate as I am in Mexico right now and can’t verify. So this is what I’m pretty darn sure I learned. My main computer is W11 so checking around in all my music apps I found that it was only new Sonar and Cubase 15 that blocked Virtual Midi synth and MS Wavetable. Studio one blocked MS Wavetable but not VMS. Note this is what I am requesting Cakewalk needs to consider. Waveform. Mixcraft and Harrison still have both Players available. As well as other apps like Band in a box and Jjazzlab. Virtual Midi synth is an upgrade from MS Wavetable and all my apps recognize it. Its free.

You might be onto something with the Firewire notice. If I remember that's what I would get is some warning about Motu Firewire driver? My interface doesn't have firewire? So that could only come from the driver coding where they are possibly sharing the code between devices. But possibly your interface does have firewire

When you say the audio quality is not very good that brings up a red flag. Are you using an audio interface or just some an adapter cable into your computers line input. If so that would explain possible pour quality audio. Who knows what's going on there. They could have some sort of auto leveling as well as the quality of the A/D convertors will be questionable. I've owned a lot of different laptops as example and there can be a huge difference in the built in audio quality. And then a second red flag would be why are you thinking a compressor would solve this. You should be recording the tracks at a safe level, like -12db. After they are recorded you can easily adjust if needed. The way all Daw's work is the recorded audio will go directly to "tape" . And the next question is do you want to squash the sound or simply limit its output? Possibly what you want is a Brickwall Limiter. like pro channel the concrete limiter.

Yes they removed the access to MSWavetable and it would seem the Virtual Midi Synth as well. I can understand the MS Wavetable as it is no longer supported but the Virtual Midi Synth is supported by the developers. It’s still available in a number of different Daw’s. The work around is the VST SynthFont which even has a VST3 version. It’s only $14 euros. it uses almost all the same sound fonts.

May I ask why you need to lock the song to the grid? Are you going to add midi tracks? Make sure you use a backup copy. It’s worth a shot to try the dragging the kick drum to the timeline trick first. It takes no effort or time and if it works great, if it doesn’t just undo and try the slow method. I’ve had very good success using it.

All VST plug ins need the location of the folder where they are located added to the scanner pathways. Otherwise Sonar doesn’t see it. Edit. Sorry it’s not a Plugin but a plug.

You mistake might have been uninstalling Cakewalk before you installed the new version.

It to me is sort of unexpected behaviour but when it happens it tells me I have that track open in the PRV.

A concern is that you mentioned that you were using digital drums and SSD 5 VST. There might be enough latency to throw you off. You must be using WASAPI shared mode I would assume.

This thread is a year old. The OP Howard only ever made the one post and never returned. But you did dig up the fact that a lot changed in the last year. I have X3 and in my personal opinion it is a terrible example of Sonar. And W11 for me has been the fastest version yet.

Don’t you just hate it when all of a sudden it works and then you don’t even know why?

Right. I think the other day someone said that it was still working. My version on my laptop died right on schedule. As an experiment I tried exporting midi, nope, drag a midi clip, nope so all you can do is open projects and take screenshots of it to preserve your settings and stuff. I uninstalled it- Good bye old friend I’ll miss you. I don’t care what anyone else thinks but it was definitely the best Daw of all.

This is what I was getting at. I never changed the one in preferences because I’m not exactly sure what it is for. As said I overwrite all the presets in the export dialogue because I mostly export at 48/. 32. So I want dithering off. As far as I can tell this is now global to all projects because you have to always choose a preset for what you are exporting.

Probably because they bookmarked it.

Well you can feed the phone amp with a TRS to 2x TR. Y cable plugged into the headphone jack. I have a few different sets of phones and I run the headphone volume at 12 o’clock . Sometimes as high as 2 o’clock. Where are you setting the mix control? I have that at 12 o’clock as well. It’s really loud.