Noel Borthwick

I don't see any point in using a WASAPI to ASIO wrapper when Sonar already has robust WASAPI support. You are inviting more problems and bugs by doing that. If you have a problem that is related to our WASAPI support report it as a bug and we'll investigate it in time. A WASAPI to ASIO driver couldnt get any better latency than Sonar already gets from WASAPI. Its typically limited to 10 ms for USB audio devices in shared mode, and can go lower depending on the manufactures support for WASAPI. Unfortunately a few manufacturers don't support great latency in WASAPI and if so the only recourse is to use ASIO.

There is a new feature coming in the next release that would help with this very issue.

Yes the problem was related to the loop construction view preview bus. I've fixed the issue for the next release.

There is forwards compatibility to the extent that older versions skip data for unknown features. That is essentially the definition of forwards compatibility since older versions cannot have code for features that don’t exist obviously. My point was that this has never blocked anyone in the past from sharing project with others using older or different versions of Sonar.

This is in the latest version of Sonar? If you pm me the original project file I can take a look.

I can open a Sonar project in a Cakewalk version from 2009. I don't think there is a likelihood of it preventing anyone from working.

Read these official links. Sonar projects are always backwards compatible with prior versions. We've supported backwards compatible from day one.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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

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 some other applications. The available redists from a new Sonar installation looks like this in Add/remove programs. If you have lots of older redists than this and have startup problems, uninstall all the redists and run the latest Sonar installer which should reinstall the latest ones. Alternatively, you may also install the latest Microsoft redistributable directly from Microsoft and to do a repair install in the installer. Read this article for more info on this.

If you are getting stutter on moving the mouse its a hardware driver level issue where your video driver is impacting your audio driver at the kernel level. There is nothing Sonar can do to alleviate this, and it will happen in any audio software. What audio interface are you using (USB or PCI)? In either case this is something to take up with the audio driver vendor or see if you can troubleshoot your graphics drivers.