Noel Borthwick

A secondary advantage with those is that if a plug-in takes the system down it won't crash the host.

Can you send the source wave file that exhibits this? Perhaps it may shed some light on why it happens, assuming its reproducible.

3 hours ago, Terry Kelley said:

I have to load CbB beyond rational thought with VSts before it even flinches. If someone notices a difference between CbB and Sonar with a few instruments, something else is amiss. CbB can handle A LOT.

Excluding Arturia Augmented "Anything" ... And no, it doesn't get any better in Sonar. 

Even with a modest project using virtual instruments at low latency, the performance gains with Sonar are very significant.
Sonar will allow you to run at 64 or even 32 samples with instruments that were impossible in CbB. Of course if all you do is run at 1024 or higher then you aren't going to notice the low latency performance.
Even besides realtime performance we've additionally been focusing on improving speed when performing common editing operations. Those are certainly gains that any user will see on any hardware.

24 minutes ago, noynekker said:

In my humble comparisons  between CbB and NuSonar, the new audio engine optimizations are just marginally better . . . I'll take it . . . especially for my well aged I7-3770 CPU, and wonder if many here just want their iZotope Ozone plugins to keep up with the times, without $$ upgrading CPU's and Cores. When I first read about this new feature of optimization, I kind of thought it was geared towards the newer computer systems, a few tweaks here and there to the startup INI file . . . poof !

I really like the improvement, but for me only a minimal improvement, until I do an upgrade I'm thinking . . .

Its anything but a marginal improvement - depending on the workload you throw at it. Imagine a project with 128 instances of Kontakt - Try doing that with Cbb and run at low latency. Not that most users are going to do that, but the fact that the engine now has the headroom to handle this allows more modest projects to run at far greater stability, especially at low latency. 

Correct this was changed because 99% of the time a user doesn't need every single parameter exposed and consuming resources.
Adding them on demand is the way to go. You can also create track templates if you need them often.

10 hours ago, Johnbee58 said:

I've renewed my membership.  Now, how do I access the Exclusive Creation Tools like the Voice Cleaner, mastering tools, etc?  Are they accessible in Sonar?

Thanks🙂

John B

Those are BandLab specific tools so you can accesss them via BandLab studio. They aren't accessible in Cakewalk apps today.
If you want them in Sonar or Next, send a feature request to BandLab support...

What your see when zoomed in is the raw audio not the preview audio. Preview audio is computed from averaged out windows and stored in the Wov files.

If you don't see it when zoomed in then it's not there and I wouldn't worry about it.

There are definitely plans to implement more comping features in the roadmap.

June Press Release

https://caldecottmusic.com/press/11521-cakewalk-software-exclusively-available-bandlab-membership

MusicTech Overview

https://musictech.com/news/gear/cakewalk-next-cakewalk-sonar-bandlab-free-daw/

Cakewalk Next is much deeper than project 5 ever was.

The licensing is per user and we allow a for generous number of machines, more than most users would need. The actual count is not specified today but if the system is abused it may result in activation being revoked.

7 hours ago, Daniel J. Wojcik said:

It was an older project not in the Quick Start anymore.

Even so, if you open the file by navigating to the folder from quick start, just click ok and it will open the project. There is no need to right click and choose open as. "Open as" will try and launch sonar as a new process, which isn't needed since you are already browsing for a file in sonar.

I also tried following those steps and there was no issue here - it picked the file and returned to the dialog. I suspect your problem is related to shell extensions causing explorer itself to hang rather than something in Sonar. IOW this isn't something fixable in Sonar.

15 hours ago, Daniel J. Wojcik said:

Quick Start.  The one that automatically opens when you start Sonar.
No zip files.  Although the drive itself is compressed.

It looks like the hang is somewhere in the OS rather than Sonar. But why are you trying to open with from the browse window in Quick start in the first place? Just open directly from quick start. There is no need to do "open with"

This is raw engine performance optimizations so it won't magically solve bugs in plugins unfortunately 😉

Thanks for your feedback. The last update is possibly the most important performance update we’ve done in more than 15 years actually. 

The work started with trying to resolve some somewhat unrelated timing discrepancies with VST’s and also to solve some severe problems dealing with huge synth projects. However, as part of profiling the app to find the root cause of these, as a happy accident I discovered a major bottleneck that was preventing the multiprocessing engine from efficiently load balancing. The reason this was not discovered earlier, is that the problem was obfuscated in some completely unrelated transport functionality and it never showed up as a problem earlier. Imagine searching for a needle in a haystack… The net effect was that the engine would be unable to independently process tracks as efficiently as possible. This had a knock on effect to all processing including our plugin load balancing technique. Once this issue was resolved many longstanding issues magically disappeared. We also fine tuned a lot of the VST processing code so now it has the minimum overhead, allowing for much better low latency throughput.

It doesn’t stop there. For the next update we have been working on improving MIDI editing performance, better support for large scale projects, and resolving some longstanding MIDI rendering issues. Already multi-track PRV editing performance has been massively improved. We’re talking hundreds of times faster to perform certain operations!
 

But are you willing to take the turing test? 😜

Re more friendly surface support yes we have lots room for improvement and I’m sure azslow himself would attest to that, but there is a lot that can be done today albeit differently from other DAW’s.

It was likely the driver rather than the hardware but it's great that a simpler solution worked better.

If you reported the issue to them its likely they fixed it. You can contact them and ask.

I'm not sure why this is so confusing. Cakewalk makes multiple products. We always did. In fact decades ago we had a DAW called project 5 that was sold alongside SONAR for several years.

Next is primarily targeted to songwriters and creators and is a streamlined yet powerful interface for users who dislike the complexity in other DAWs.

Bandlab membership offers both products along with a bunch of other benefits. You aren't exclusively getting Sonar you're purchasing a bundle of services. There is no compulsion to use all of them and there are many who are on Mac's only who would never use Sonar, so it makes complete sense to have Next in the bundle.

And Next is no longer in beta. It's officially released as part of Bl Membership as is Sonar. We have an ongoing beta program for both Sonar and Next like we do for all our products.

@Sal Sorice I looked at your dump file. It appears to be a plugin Musio.vst3  thats blocking the app from shutting down.
As you can see from the stack information, Sonar is trying to exit but the plugin has blocked it from shutting down. Contact the plugin developer and give them the dump file. Only they can fix this.

>    ntdll.dll!00007fffa618d144()    Unknown
     KERNELBASE.dll!00007fffa3d0306e()    Unknown
     Musio.vst3!00007fff45061737()    Unknown
     Musio.vst3!00007fff450615d0()    Unknown
     Musio.vst3!00007fff45061cdb()    Unknown
     Musio.vst3!00007fff453ba1a4()    Unknown
     ucrtbase.dll!<lambda>(void)()    Unknown
     ucrtbase.dll!__crt_seh_guarded_call<...>::operator()<...>()    Unknown
     ucrtbase.dll!_execute_onexit_table()    Unknown
     Musio.vst3!00007fff44d63c82()    Unknown
     Musio.vst3!00007fff44d63da8()    Unknown
     ntdll.dll!00007fffa6109a1d()    Unknown
     ntdll.dll!00007fffa614dcec()    Unknown
     ntdll.dll!00007fffa614da7d()    Unknown
     kernel32.dll!00007fffa540e6ab()    Unknown
     ucrtbase.dll!exit_or_terminate_process()    Unknown
     ucrtbase.dll!common_exit()    Unknown
     Sonar.exe!0000000140a1a218()    Unknown
     kernel32.dll!00007fffa54074b4()    Unknown
     ntdll.dll!00007fffa61426a1()    Unknown
 

You can't use task Manager or CPU as the only metric. Do the test I suggested and see if it makes any difference.

Recording will obviously put some extra load on the system, but if you want to test the limits of your system you can try and increase the dropout tolerance here and see if recording still works without any clicks or pops.

Try increasing DropoutMsec to 100 ms or so, or even try setting MaskDropoutDection to true.

4 hours ago, Sal Sorice said:

Using Scarlett 8i6 Gen3 with latest ASIO drivers. Sonar never crashes, just hangs after closing on some projects and RAM usage drops over the course of a few seconds and seems to settle at about 600MB or so.

My batch file works fine but hoping to find the root cause eventually.

Is likely plug-in related. Contact me on PM and send me a dump file captured from task Manager. It will be big so you will have to compress and upload to a file share service.

It's come to our attention that a very small number users have crashes on start up for the newest version of Sonar.
The symptom is the app disappears on startup. This issue has been confirmed to be due to the presence of a corrupted Microsoft VC redistributable. Sonar relies on the VCRedist runtime at a very fundamental level for proper operation so a corrupted install will cause the app to crash in unpredictable ways.

In all the most recent reported cases the problem was caused by to the installation of an old obsolete VC runtime by the popular DaVinci Resolve video editing app. 

The resolution to this is to install the latest Microsoft redistributable from Microsoft and to do a repair install in the installer.
Read this article for more info on this.

Don't be afraid. Running at low latency wont break anything
At worst you will get glitches or dropouts.

14 hours ago, Michael Richards said:

I tend to not be a minimalist and load up on Neural DSP guitar plugins and Spitfire orchestral plugins, so I will give this a workout and we'll see if I can even maintain a clean 64 samples. This alone is major selling point for Sonar. I love it.

@Michael Richardsplease report back on your findings when you do this.