Colin Nicholls

This banner and timeout window are the only feature that the "Free Tier" has, that actually isn't included in the full subscription version 😉 Seriously, if you subscribe to the full version, the banner and timeout will no longer be displayed. That's what you would need to do.

Preferences > Colors

Not at present. The colors do change depending one which theme you select.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. It's the Internet, I get that. *sigh* The "soft launch" refers to the "Free Tier" which has been available for just over a week or so, I think.

My eyes! The goggles do nothing! Seriously, UI is so subjective isn't it. Personally I think there will be some user customization of color coming to new Sonar at some point, but I don't blame them at all for focusing on other things whilst rebuilding the UI engine from the foundations up.

Klevgrand produce unique and interesting instruments and effects, i'm tempted; but goddam do I already have too many reverb plugs

Themes, obviously 😉

You can only install one copy of Sonar. Whether it is the "Free Tier" or the "Full subscription version" depends on how you are logged in to BandLab. CbB has always been able to be side-by-side installed with Sonar. So you can have CbB + Free Tier Sonar, or CbB + Full Version Sonar, but not all three. That said, the essence of the answer is, yes, you can have all three versions available to you, but only one tier of Sonar at a time.

It's no secret I use several different DAWS. One of them is very good about restoring the Buffer size that I last chose in the application, upon opening. Sonar, however, doesn't seem to do this. It leaves the ASIO buffers (etc) at whatever settings the previous application chose. I have existing projects in Sonar that require large buffers (~1024) for playback. In the Other DAW, however, I have been tracking with low latency and much smaller buffers, and it restores these settings upon opening the app. When I switch back to Sonar, I have to manually go into the Preferences and reset the ASIO buffers back to 1024. It would be nice if Sonar remembered this and restored it for me. Thanks for your consideration. Cheers! (Before trolls show up, I have experience with low-latency tracking in Sonar too - but I'm not currently using it for that.)

I used Claude Sonnet 3.7 with limited results (and it made me feel dirty) before I discovered ConvertWithMoss which is easy and does a brilliant job.

Honestly I thought development was over for that plugin. I've been moving most of my custom instruments to DecentSampler. Good to know it's still a thing. Thanks!

Hi Camero,

Man, that is frustrating! I can see why you'd want to let of some steam; I'd do the same. Probably I'd use more swear words. But here's the thing: Many, many people with many, many different configurations are not experiencing this. For them, Sonar is working fine and in fact, better than CbB ever did. It HAS to be something about your hardware, or your software configuration. Installed any new plugins lately? Any other applications? Trying out other DAWs? What if you create a new empty project in Sonar. No plugs, just raw audio. How does cut-n-paste behave? Add another track or two. Then add virtual instruments. At what point does the problem start to appear? What are your hardware specs? What Audio interface? Driver model? buffer size? Take your project in the video, and save it somewhere else, and start pulling it apart until you isolate the problem. Does the crash happen when you disable the audio engine? What if you change audio from your current I/O interface to, say, Windows internal sound card (if possible). Change driver types. Have you run generic hardware tests on your machine? RAM test? could be a damaged memory chip. All this testing is a pain in the butt, I know. Maybe it would be easier to convert all your projects to a different DAW. God knows it's tempting, I've been there.

It depends where you're coming from. But here's a good place to start learning about what is new:

Not to refute your basic point, which is that contrast between clips and background in the Track View is clearly a pain point and could be improved, but I would encourage more honey, less vinegar.

Jeez you guys are harsh. Having worked in UI I know that there's no pleasing everyone, but cut them some slack. Overall the UI has been steadily improving, and any glitches are soon dealt with. It is OBVIOUS that they care about usability and no-one decided light-grey on white was by design. Report the issues as you see them, I'm sure they will get resolved. Also, it's a small development team and any effort put towards a theme editor to please the <10 people who actually care is not good use of resources. I'd prefer they concentrate on their core features, and I'm one of the <10 people.

Confirmed, I see this in Mercury theme only. Mercury Classic has black buttons with White text/icon and still looks a little strange, but very functional. I'm sure the UX Bakers will be all over this in the next release/patch. I'm a Light Theme user myself and it is much improved in 2025.05, in my opinion.

Very cool!

Honestly wondering why we don't have a sticky about ASIO4ALL at this point

Does this happen with a brand new empty project, just recording audio (no plugins) ? I would put money on this problem not being related to the latest update, but some other factor. Yes, it sucks not being able to roll back to a previous version; doing so would be a very handy way of eliminating the new update as the source, which would save us all a lot of time So many things might be the issue. When was the last Windows Update ? Are there any new Services running that you might not have noticed? Have you updated your graphics driver? Are you able to roll back to a more generic video driver and see if there is a change in Sonar behavior? Try changing your I/O buffer setttings , just to see if this affects the symptoms you're observing. Can you switch from ASIO to WDM or something like that, again , just to see if it has an effect? Check the locations on your hard drives for audio files, etc. Plenty of free space? Installed anything recently that might make a difference there? Perhaps run a health check on the drives.

Do you know what ASIO4ALL is? Read about it here. There are reasons why Cakewalk don't recommend it. Basically because there is no way to limit Sonar's use of the ASIO4ALL to only the small subset of use cases where ASIO4ALL is a reasonable choice. Sonar simply expects more from an AISO device. Like folks say, if your Audio interface doesn't have a proprietary/native ASIO driver, you will be BETTER OFF using WDM, which Sonar ALSO SUPPORTS.

For the longest time I had two MIDI interfaces connected to my DAW: My venerable USB Midisport 2x2, and sometime later my ECHO Layla PCI Audio interface added a third port, which I didn't use. My controllers (one keyboard and one drum pad) where both coming in via the midisport. I got very used to selecting the A port on the Midisport explicitly for any MIDI recording. After a while (15 years!?!) I think my eyes just filtered out the "all inputs" option; I just assumed you had to select a specific input to record to a MIDI track. Since my studio rebuild this year I now have one physical DIN input from my Quantum; and three "new" USB MIDI sources - Keylab MkII; Touche, and the Ghost Audio sliders. Suddenly that "all inputs" option makes a ton of useful sense. I decided to post this revelation in case there was one or two other sad individuals out there who shared my "feature blindness"

I've been using Cakewalk/ProAudio/Sonar since 1996 and I've never realized that I could select "All Inputs" and record simultaneously from multiple controllers. This is great! I feel such an idiot for not realizing it. I know, I know.... it's not like it's labelled "secret mysterious mode" or anything, it's literally called "all inputs". Do what you will with this information. (Context: It all started with a fairly recent acquisition of a Expressive-E Touche SE and a Ghost Note Audio slider controller. Yes I've been using different MIDI tracks to capture the data. No more!)

[never mind]

Prompts you to confirm each plugin at project load time, giving you the chance to skip them. Hold Shift down during project open.