Canopus

My old backup desktop had a Core i7-3770 and was thus not officially supported for an upgrade to Windows 11. Being a better safe than sorry guy, I didn't want to gamble. A few weeks ago I replaced it with a refurbished office desktop with a Core i7-8700 CPU, which just meets the official requirements for Win11. After moving the disks and the graphics card over from my old PC, I now hopefully have a backup PC for many years to come for not that much money. As an added bonus, the i7-3770 CPU didn’t have AVX2 extensions, which some applications nowadays require. A regedit hack would never have fixed that. I would never buy a used PC from eBay or such, but from firms with the business idea of refurbishing hardware bought from offices, I don’t really see any risks. Bargains can definitely be found.

But the local help file is not the pdf reference, but a file called Sonar.chm, stored in Sonar's program folder. It was initially not available for Sonar Free Tier, but, according to a recent post, support has responded to a request that it was "actively working on resolving it for a future update." I don't know if that has happened yet.

The paid version and the free version of Sonar is the exact same product. Whether some functions will be blocked at runtime, or not, only depends on the logged on user's credentials. If you've got a paid membership all functions will be available. If not, a few functions will be blocked. After having installed Sonar through Product Center, you have to activate it. If you during activation select NOT to pay for a membership, Sonar will work anyway, but, as I said, with a few functions blocked.

By Bandlab, I must assume you mean Cakewalk by BandLab. As from Augusti 1, Cakewalk by BandLab is no longer possible to activate. As I said in another thread, just a few hours ago, the best option in this situation is to download the free version of Sonar:

The orange messages can't be blocked and are there for a good reason. In case you’ve missed it, Cakewalk by BandLab (CbB) is no longer possible to activate as from August 1. Your current activation will work a couple of weeks more, at most. After that you will still be able to work in CbB, but you won’t be able to save. Of course, that means it will be of no practical use. The good news is that there is now a free version of Sonar. It’s basically the same DAW as the paid version, but with a few, less essential, functions blocked. You can download Sonar using the Cakewalk Product Center. After installing, you simply choose NOT to start a paid membership during activation.

But that’s Fleerspeak®. You’d need a translation table to understand what it actually means. Here’s a friendly reminder.

Tengo EZdrummer, EZkeys, EZbass y EZmix funcionando perfectamente en Sonar. Lo más probable es que tus rutas de búsqueda en Preferencias > Archivo > Ajustes VST | Rutas de exploración VST no sean correctas. Asegúrate de que las rutas en Sonar coincidan con las de Cakewalk SONAR. Sonar no podrá encontrar los plugins instalados en las rutas que faltan. Además, si te refieres a ser el propietario legal de Cakewalk SONAR, ese producto nunca ha sido propiedad de BandLab. Que yo sepa, Cakewalk SONAR sigue siendo propiedad de Gibson. Traducido automáticamente al español por Google, así que disculpen cualquier inexactitud.

... and the Export > Run Tasks function.

To use both versions, you need two separate BandLab accounts. I do have a paid membership, but to be able to test both versions I also have a separate user account to be used with the free tier. The currently logged on user determines which verson of Sonar will open. In fact, there's only one binary version of Sonar; the features available will be determined at runtime by the logged on user's credentials.

Orders of magnitude advances in GPU power since then, on all types of devices, might be the very reason why Apple makes these changes. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Considering that Microsoft always follows Apple design-wise, the recent presentation of Apple’s Liquid Glass, coming to all their platforms this autumn, will most likely mean that Microsoft soon will make similar changes to Windows. This leads me to believe that there is a GUI paradigm shift ahead, and that the current simplistic, flat look of so many DAWs and plugins will have to adapt, or otherwise soon look very dated. Let’s hope that the architecture of Sonar’s vector-based design is flexible enough to meet the new modern.

It's still there. Just scroll down a few pages in this post and you'll see it.

No. In both CbB and Sonar, the only way to do it is in the Synth Rack drop-down menu.

I just updated Cakewalk Product Center to the most recent version. When doing so, I had to sign in to BandLab, which I did. But only five minutes later, when starting Sonar, I get a 'Session Expired' toaster. Is the BandLab backend server slowly developing dementia? If the server can't remember my log-on status for five minutes, it sounds pretty alarming. At the same time, I did get a toaster stating there was a Sonar update available. Could it be that you are automatically thrown out whenever there’s an update? If so, is that really necessary? To me, this 'Session Expired' toaster usually occurs several times each day, so it's becoming a nuisance. Persistence is futile?

Now that would really be something! No, you should be able to just download the most recent version of Sonar. Sonar Premium and Sonar Free Tier is the exact same product. Whether it will block certain features, or not, simply depends on the user account you're logged in to. If a user hasn’t got a paid membership, those features will be blocked. If you can’t find a download link anywhere else, you will find one at the bottom of this page: https://www.cakewalk.com/sonar?default.asp

I have no idea. If it's not a support issue, then maybe there's no place to go.

This is basically a peer-to-peer forum. One can never expect developers and/or support staff attending to every question raised. In fact, sometimes they do, by their own free will, but that's the exception and not the rule.

Okay, so it seems to be a Color Scheme thing. When using a scheme with brightly colored control backgrounds, like Light or Light Gray, everything looks okay. Using a color scheme with dark control background, the controls are colored in such a way that it's not visible. However, they are selected. Sounds like a pretty easy fix.

That chart needs to be updated. Workspaces has a Crown symbol next to it in the last version of the Free Tier, and so has the Run Tasks button in the Export dialog. Additionally, Offline Help is not mentioned in the chart, but is currently blocked in the Free Tier. However, BandLab marketing seems to have changed their minds about that one.

As I don’t know your background, I may say things you already know very well. If so, bear with me. You don’t mention what plugin you’re using, but I must assume that it’s a string library with a number of articulations. If it’s only got legato, then I don’t think it’s possible to get realistically sounding trills out of it. Simply put, look for a plugin library with a Trills articulation. Here’s one example from Native Instruments: As for human feel, any orchestral library, worthy of its name, would use round-robins. Basically, they record a number of samples that contain the same note, but as it’s recordings of human performers, each sound will differ slightly. The plugin will then switch between different versions of that sound, so that it feels more human.

I don't think SONAR X3 ever had support for themes. It first appeared with SONAR Platinum.

I think that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work, as one of the staff once told me so. But given all the people above who doesn’t have got it to work, as well as my own experience, I suspect there’s some glitch in the code. Maybe if that push notification isn’t immediately attended to, and the supplied download link isn’t clicked while still visible, Sonar won’t give you a second chance to download? I have no idea, but I definitely think someone should look into it.

As none of the proposed solutions above have managed to solve the problem, I'd suggest both of you contact Cakewalk support.

Check if you’ve got a file called SonarHelp_Documentation_1.0.0.21.exe in your Downloads or possibly Downloads\Cakewalk, folder. If so, just double-click it. That’s how I solved the problem on my computer. The file had been downloaded, but never installed, and that's why it never turned up among the product update links.

Hej Krister. Tråkigt att du har problem. To start with, Local Help works for me in Sonar, so it's not a general problem. I know from my own experience that Sonar might think local help is installed, when in fact it isn't. In my case, I had downloaded the file, but not installed it (i.e. put it in the correct location). However, the download itself apparently triggered Sonar to believe it was in place. So, do you have the file Sonar.chm in the Sonar root folder C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Sonar? As you have selected Always Use Local Help in Preferences, that really should be all that's needed. If you haven't got the help file in that location, go to Help > Check for Updates > Product Updates, to see if you have a Help download link waiting.