Noel Borthwick

I recommend that prior to purchasing plugins ask if they have been tested in Sonar. If not, and you get an answer like that, vote with your dollars. We work with any plug-in vendor big or small that is willing to work with us on resolving compatibility issues, even when most of the time it ends up being a plug-in fault. If it's actually a host issue, we promptly fix it. Read this article for a course of action to diagnose plug-in compatibility problems.

By any chance do you have ExceptionHandlingSeverity set to anything but 1 in preferences | File | Initialization File? Reinstalling Cakewalk will have no effect on your projects. This looks like some Windows shell component is potentially corrupted or out of sync.

Something to note. You are using multiple voices in a single instance of Kontakt. CC7 is interpreted per MIDI channel so if you have multiple voices responding to the same CC perhaps this could lead to the behavior you are seeing. Another possibility for resolution is why not use Sonar’s volume automation for mixing instead of using CC7?

As I mentioned above the best test for issues like this is the phase cancellation test. Because it completely takes monitoring (and your ears) out of the equation. Route the kontakt track output to a master. Bounce the track itself. Now solo the bounced track and the kontakt track. Please invert one of them and play. You should hear silence or almost silence depending on if there were certain plugins used.

You can phase invert even with instrument tracks. Solo the instrument track and the boxes track and invert phase on one. If you attach a project file someone may be able to provide some clues.

Hmm I don't expect that to happen. I'll look into that.

If the project sounds correct inside Sonar the most likely problem is that you are not exporting the exact same signal flow through your busses. Make sure everything is selected before exporting. Another thing you can try is do a real time bounce to rule out buffer size problems. Also for troubleshooting page down your project to the minimum, removing plugins and bounce a single track and compare. It should be a perfect copy of what you hear and can be compared by phase inverting the bounce and original track.

The message coming up is generic device arrival message. It doesn't distinguish between asio or other drivers. It's just telling you that a new driver came online. Remaps to which device?

Im confused, even if the AxeFX driver is available, if Sonar isn’t set to use it in preferences it shouldn’t be imposing its sample rate limitation on Sonar. Are you using ASIO mode or WASAPI? In ASIO mode only the selected device sample rate is used. If you turn on fractal while Sonar is running it will prompt to use it but you can always choose to not do so. Is your question that you want to exclude that message from appearing?

If you are getting an interruption when using ASIO even though streaming is not using that device, check if you have any “fake” asio driver such as ASIO4All or its variants. If any of those are present, as part of Sonar’s start up when the ASIO drivers are enumerated and checked those drivers will potentially reinitialize other audio devices causing the problem you are seeing. Other than that there is no way that Sonar can affect a different device since in ASIO mode it only talks to ASIO devices.

Be thankful we give you diagnostic codes to help troubleshoot problems. Good luck getting that in other DAW's 😛

Lookup error code 5 here Try raising the playback I/O buffer size to 512 or so.

That's correct. Bandlab membership gets you both Sonar and Next so you can open your project in Sonar, export to cxf and then open in Next. Please read through the docs so you can verify what's supported via cxf. Most data will migrate, but features specific to Sonar won't go across so you may have to bounce a few things if so.

The only time that message is displayed is if the language setting was modified in preferences. Most likely you inadvertently changed it perhaps by pressing an incorrect key or you accidently visited the Customization | Display page where language is the first item there. If you can reproduce it are sure that you didnt modify the Display page let us know.

While AI generation is new, algorithmic music generation has been around for 30 years or more. Products like Band In a Box, Jammer etc have been used on countless productions and there haven't been copyright issues, at least any I have heard about. While there is some legit concern about copyrighted data being used for training LLM's, for music often the training data itself is algorithmic.

New versions of BA don't even allow downloading Cakewalk, and it does self update.

We’ll look into it. Can you share the Next project that throws the error?

Thanks for your interest and for signing up to use Sonar. I think you will be pleased with the improvements we’ve made to make it run much better even with moderate hardware. We’re aware of some of the confusion and looking into better ways to highlight the migration path for Sonar and Next to existing Cakewalk users, better trial offers etc, so stay tuned. Oh and BTW we have long discontinued the use of BandLab assistant to distribute Cakewalk software. The new product portal is Cakewalk Product Center which can be downloaded here. Product Center does allow you to download Sonar and Next directly from one central portal. Cakewalk Next is not intended to be the kitchen sink workstation that Sonar is today. Its primarily designed to be something that is most conducive to the music creation and ideation workflow, rather than production. However thats not to say that the product won’t keep evolving more in other areas. It already has some features that exceed the capabilities of Sonar. Its advanced Synth rack is one example where it can stack multiple synths within a single instrument track. Track groups too allow seamlessly mixing groups of tracks without the need to set up bussing. Also while Next may be new, it was built from the ground up to support all the multiprocessing smarts that Cakewalk is known for, and better. I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t support large projects. The next userbase typically run with lots of plugins from what we see. Take a look at some of the demo projects in Next which may be fairly representative. Windows store is also something we have considered a while back. RE project migration, you can’t open CbB projects in Next but there is a brand new Cakewalk Interchange Format specifically designed to do this, which allows you to open Sonar projects in Next and vice versa. Of course Sonar opens any project from CbB or any prior version of Cakewalk.

No its independent public domain data. Songstarter was a Google partnership. https://medium.com/platform-stream/bandlab-launches-songstarter-an-ai-powered-tool-built-to-fix-musical-writers-block-1581577ec02 The AI team also creates specialty training data using their own proprietary tools as well. There is a lot of investment in this.

BandLab has a dedicated team working on AI music. SongStarter is one such product as well as stem separation. They are not yet available in Sonar but can be accessed via BandLab studio. Cakewalk Next does have access to Splitter. https://www.bandlab.com/songstarter https://www.bandlab.com/splitter But to answer your question yes we are thinking about fruitful uses for AI.

it's best to share a link to the project file and audio data since it could be specific to the data.

There are many changes to Sonar since CbB so a difference in behavior could be what's exposing a vulnerability in the plug-in. From the crash info there isn't anything for us to glean since the crash is exclusively in the plug-in code with no Sonar context.

@Tay Zonday both Cakewalk Sonar and Next are paid products currently only available via BandLab membership. This information has been available on our website for quite some time now. See screenshot. There is also an FAQ at the bottom of the page that explains more about membership.

I'm afraid I can't help with this. The plugin is crashing not Sonar. Send the dump file to the plugin vendor to analyze. If they need assistance or have questions about Sonar after looking into it they can contact me. 00000000ffff07dd() Unknown [Frames may be missing, no binary loaded for Listento.vst3] Listento.vst3!00007fff4752f707() Unknown

I’m not sure if this is applicable here but we have come across some problems with certain plugins that are flooding the Windows message queue to the point where it goes unresponsive. Windows has a 10000 message limit and if the queue is bogged down more than that it hits a “fuse” and messages get lost. We actually had some bizarre problems caused by plugins doing this that we had to mitigate against in Sonar. If you can reproduce this in the standalone app, you should report it to the vendor.