Noel Borthwick

There is nothing “fishy” about having a promo screen in free software. Its extremely common for all companies which offer a free version to have some sort of adware in it. In this case the popup is for our own products. I think if anything Cakewalk is extremely lenient about what is being offered in the free version compared to the competition.

Performance differences can be very system or project specific. If you are seeing a demonstrable difference, try and pare down your project and find out which elements cause the difference. Then you can send a project to analyze and I can look into it more closely.

7 hours ago, Sergei Pilin said:

Okay, then it appears that I have two absolutely different but somehow anomalous computers  who always show in Task Manager that Sonar uses more CPU for each of my projects using the same settings in both Sonar and CbB. Quite well may be I'm an absolute minority here but I don't really believe I'm the one and only with such behavior. 

Here are screenshots of  playback in the both programs at the same time stamp, 9% vs 12% CPU, it's about the same for any other of my projects.

P.S. I just noticed on the OP's screenshots that during playback CbB runs at  3.91 Ghz and Sonar plays back at 2.40 Ghz. Might mean something, that's a substantial difference

Product center has a different version number from Sonar so thats normal.

On 7/10/2025 at 12:56 AM, Sergei Pilin said:

It's just Sonar uses more CPU than Cakewalk for the same project. If a complex project in Cakewalk is on the verge of crackling but still plays fine, it may not play well in Sonar and start to dropout there. No settings could change that.

Sonar uses less CPU than CbB

On 7/10/2025 at 5:21 PM, Jan said:

I think I might have found the likely culprit - when the ProChannel is unchecked the glitch does NOT seem to occur. This would explain why it wasn't happening on MIDI tracks and when in "MIDI" view of Instrument track (they have no ProChannel to display). So I guess this is potentially a temporary fix for me, although that's still a bug and regression from 2019.09...

@Jan Can you share a simple project that exhibits this issue?

This was a back end issue. Its fixed in today’s update of product center.

Awesome thanks for checking it.

@Steve Moddelmog Please try the latest version of Product Center that just dropped. There are fixes that address problems that were preventing it from correctly identifying Sonar premium users. Let me know if this addresses your issue.

Sonar has been updated to  31.07.0.084. Please read the release notes and update as soon as possible since this update contains fixes and optimizations for some important user reported issues.

Please note that Cakewalk Product Center has also been updated. CPC is a forced update due to breaking back-end changes that were preventing it from properly installing add-ons for Sonar Premium users. It also correctly tracks previously installed addons for some additional installers.

3 minutes ago, Steve Moddelmog said:

So I tried uninstalling Cakewalk Product Center completely (using Revo) and reinstalling.  Still no luck.  Yet when I open Sonar and click "About Sonar," I see "License type: Membership." But I can't install any Membership-only features such as TH-U. Getting a little sour on this whole thing.

Pm me your user ID and we can look at your account. Ideally you should contact support with account questions.

22 hours ago, Anders Svensson said:

Hey!

I'm experiencing the same problem as @Cyril Johnson. If I try to add the LP-64 Multiband effect, Sonar crashes.
Strangely enough, the effect loads in existing projects, but there is no sound output from the plugin until I flick the plugin power button off and on again. Then it works for existing projects, but I can't make it work for new projects.

I've used this effect extensively in previous projects and would love to see a solution to this.

Send a dump file and we can see what's crashing

Yeah, there are subtle bugs that can go unnoticed for years, decades even. I've fixed bugs that have been there since 2005 or earlier.
And then some user comes along and sees the bug immediately due to something very specific in their workflow and says - this app has not been tested, <insert expletive here> 🙂
I actually just fixed one like that - a crash with no audio devices present that was introduced in 2013.

Anyway, thanks for reporting this so clearly. It was a pretty important one to fix.

2 hours ago, Stxx said:

Again sorry for this.  I'm a VERY experienced user who did A ROOKIE MISTAKE!  I havent used SONAR / CBB regularly for a while now and i need tro get back into the flow

No worries I was just concerned that there was an issue with their activation.

We are planning for a degree of customization and considering json file based approaches too.

Hi @Jan

I investigated this problem and was able to reproduce it with Sylenth1. It is indeed a bug and exactly as you suspected that the tempo was being used as an integer.
In October last year I heavily optimized time reporting for VST plugins to reduce CPU use and we now cache tempo to avoid expensive calculations.
However, I had a typo in my code that was returning an integer instead of the fractional tempo. This issue was not caught since most people tend to use integer tempos.

The bug is now fixed and will be in the next update that we release soon. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I'll send you a build that you can verify.
 

PS: I PM'ed you a link to a build with a fix. Please report back.

It will expire independent of being signed in or offline for that matter. Sign in doesnt have anything to do with activation other than identifying the user to the server.

I think you are getting confused with their UI. As I mentioned its auto activated inside Sonar and Next. The UI of the plugin is whatever general UI Overloud has for an external license. The key here is that you should be able to stream audio and use the plugin with no limitations.

If you try running that plugin in another DAW or even CbB you will get this dialog and can only use it as a demo.

This has been addressed for the next update.

The Internet connection message has been fixed for the next update. It was unintentional.

6 hours ago, Stxx said:

I purchased membership and it showed TH-U as INCLUDED add-on and I downloaded it but it requires an auth code.   Previously overloud provided cakewalk auth code for TH3.   Do we need to purchase this for TH-U or is there a sonar only TH-U (lite) code somewhere so we can use it???

There is no auth code required. TH-U will auto activate inside Sonar and Next. You cannot use it in cbb or another DAW if that's what you are trying to do.

1 hour ago, AB9 said:

First, I am very happy with Sonar.  Everything important thing I need is there and the ability to record with very low latency is outstanding.

I did notice an issue recently that is not critical, but still an issue.  When I save to one hard drive I get a progress graphic of the saving.  That is great.  But then when I go to save it again to another hard drive, the progress graphic is not there.  It appears that it does save it though.  And any other hard drive after that, the same issue.  I try to save every project to at least 3 hard drives.

Any thoughts as to what may be causing the loss of the progress graphic on additional saves?  Is it a Sonar issue, Windoes issue, something else?   Anyone else noticing this?  Thank you!

Its most likely that the save is so fast that you dont see the progress display. A second save is likely faster due to caching.

2 minutes ago, dreamcache said:

I made a separate post, but sharing here as well–

For whatever reason, when I start Cakewalk Sonar and click the main program window, it causes the Quick Start Menu to disappear. This continues to occur even when I manually re-open the quick start menu.

Screen Recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TzT04H8DsUQAIRVCJ-6Doh_IzDvUm_JR/view?usp=sharing

It's a small thing but I like to resize my window before interacting with the quick start menu, so it adds an extra few clicks to my workflow. Small but noticeable over time!

Not a bug. Its intentional that clicking the title bar dismisses quick start. Most users try and interact with the menu or close the app when the quick start is open so we facilitate this by dismissing it.

7 hours ago, Alexey Batura said:

That’s why I really hope we’ll see new ProChannel modules in the future. I'm not even sure what else could be improved in the DAW itself, it's already incredibly solid, but please please consider adding more ProChannel modules. That would be amazing.

New prochannel modules are being considered but we don't have anything to announce just yet.

There is no good reason to uninstall unless you desperately need the space. If you uninstall fully you might lose some plugins no longer distributed is the  one thing you might consider. Otherwise if you are never going to need to check something there you can uninstall.

2 hours ago, ZincT said:

Have purchased 1 year's sub now, so no more nag screen for me  👍

I noticed that the performance meter seemed a bit "spiky" with big peaks on different threads. So I tried the experimental  Enable GPU Acceleration option. By the way, is there a config file setting for tweaking cpu usage (there was in CbB)? My CPU is a Ryzen 7 5800x (8 core 16 thread).

On restart the language had changed to Spanish but otherwise the spikes had reduced quite a bit in the performance meter. I changed the language back to English and restarted which did as expected but when I went to the Preferences - Display again I noticed the language was set to Japanese although the language on the display was definitely English! However, English was definitely displayed again after a restart. So, maybe a bug there somewhere.

Also, I thought there was a bug with opening instrument UIs, but in fact it was opening the UIs almost off the bottom of the screen, so I could only just see the title bar of the UI at the bottom of the display.  Is there a setting to change this somewhere? Maybe due to my monitor being 3440 x 1440?  I am also using the scaling which gives a very nice display at 120% and superbly crisp text.

Thanks

Cheers for getting Premium, you wont be disappointed esp with whats coming later.
Regarding the perf meters, they don’t measure UI load by default but rather audio processing load unless you change the metering options to show global system load.
Some spikyness there is not abnormal, since its impossible to  perfectly balance load on your CPU in a real world project since you may have varying processing or plugin loads on tracks and buses. Turning on Plugin load balancing will help smooth the load  if you have many plugins on each track and arent running at super low latency. 

If you have a recipe for the language change issue, please send me a PM.