Michael Crepps

Since these last 2 patches my Sonar has not been working well. 2 issues. One is when piano roll is open and I am in track view sonar becomes crazy sluggish. Cant stop playback. Just pretty much becomes unusable. I click back on Piano Roll view and after like 30 seconds it finally highlights that window and I can close it. Once Piano Roll is closed everything works fine. Been using cakewalk/sonar for 20 years. Never had this problem ever. Been really shitty last month or two. But recently I have a new problem. I use audio monitoring one active track to record Guitar. I add effects live as I'm playing using Amplitube 5. In sonar Performance window its playing everything and adding effects to my guitar live with no noticeable latency. Haven't had a problem doing this for last 5 years. But suddenly in last week I am getting these spikes. Audio processing stays around 18 to 20 %. Engine load stays between 40 to 65% if I have audio monitoring on or not. If I play the song or don't. If in playing my guitar even when the song isn't playing. Or if I click record and play guitar adding effects live to other tracks playing. Doesn't matter. No noticeable spikes either way. Same usage percentages if I click ply or stop or record or have audio monitoring on in a track. Barely changes the percentages of Engine Load and Audio Processing. But randomly like every 3 seconds to every 10 second there is an Audio dropout. Im getting a late buffer but whats crazy is in the performance window if im watching the Audio Processing jumps to 100%Max for a split second and the Engine Load jumps to 1300 to 1900% Max . This seems very weird. Never had this problem before. The only thing that changed is recent Sonar patch and a recent Win 11 update. My RME HDSPe AIO card Sonar said it wouldn't work with it. So I checked and RME released a new patch for it like a day or 2 after Sonar patch. I believe The RME card had problems due to Win 11 Update. Once I got new drivers the RME card showed back up in Sonar. But it worked fine for like a week then suddenly started having these strange spikes in CPU. I pulled up Windoes Task Manager and the CPU is spiking hard when I have these audio dropouts. Seems if engine load is jumping to 1300 to 1900% Max then there is some conflict going on. But I dont know haw to diagnose it any further. I am paying for Sonar. Not having a very good time with it. I hope someone can help. OK***** I think I figured out my CPU spikes. So weird cause after I installed new RME HDSPe AIO card drivers I have been getting a Popup when Sonar starts that Control Surface not loading. So I searched that subject on Google. It said it was a midi thing. So I thought maybe that's whats causing my Piano Rolls to lock up Sonar if its open in the background and not the the window I'm focused on. I went into preferences and under MIDI / Devices I had M-Audio Keystation 49 keyboard on but the RME AIO midi was off in input and outputs. Not sure if this would effect anything since I dont use the AIO Midi inputs ever but I clicked them on and went back into sonar and started testing if that helped Piano Roll window causing sonar to be sluggish. Well it had no effect. Piano Roll still messed up. Been messed up since last two Sonar patches. But to my surprise it totally fixed my CPU spikes. This is so odd but all I can figure is my audio card was being used as an audio device in sonar but because the midi was turned off even though I don't use it it was still causing some error and my Audio card was glitching out. I am playing everything now and my percentages in Sonar performance meter are not spiking any. So weird that it was Midi related. I guess when I updated my RME card it turned off the Midi devices in Sonar. Hadn't looked at it really because it was Midi and also because I been using everything without error for so long that I couldn't remember if the Midi devises were clicked before or not. Now if I could get Piano Roll window to work like it used to. I would be back in business. I am pretty sure the piano roll thing is Sonar patch related cause nothing else changed but the Patch. It was instantaneous after patch before last and still the same.

Yes if piano roll is open and I am in piano roll view everything works ok. Sluggish compared to before. When you move cursor or press play or stop its a half sec delay. Was instant before patch. if you close piano roll view everything works great. Its when open piano roll view and then click on track view for instance but piano roll is still open on another monitor but not the current selected window. Thats when everything goes crazy. When you click play you cant stop it. U can click on other windows. click stop click anything but nothing works for about 10 secs to 14 seconds. (counting myself). I have very good computer. I have three 4k 50 inch monitors and windows on every screen. I have 5 running instances of amplitube 5 and 7 other effects running on various tracks I have 5 keyboard tracks and 1 superior drummer track so lots of midi stuff. Vocals and 6 different layered guitar tracks going with amplitube running different preset on each one. Never had any issues before. Until this patch. I keep piano roll open a lot cause im constantly going back and forth between windows. I at least discovered it was the piano roll window. For now Im closing the window each time i leave it but I dont want to have to continue doing that since I know it can function fine with it on before patch. I did click on the GPU acceleration button and turned it off and restarted but had no effect on sonar. Still acting the same. Also just for more info. If I forget to close piano roll window and click play in track view and let it play for like 20 seconds or more without clicking stop then it takes sometimes 4 or 5 min to get cakewalk to stop playing. most of the time Im clicking play to listen to a section and not whole song. And you can kinda get it to stop after about 10 to 14 secs. but if you play like anywhere close to half a min it wont stop for anything. I click everything and it plays endlessly past the whole song for mins until it stops. craziness

If it helps any it seems to not effect sonar at all to be in the piano roll view. Its only when I make another window the focus that piano rolls locks up sonar. Even after it locks up once I can get back into piano roll and its the window Im focused on it all works fine. Piano roll will not work opened in the background without locking up sonar. Never had this problem in past. Only after this update.

Well it was working. I started back on a song I was working on. Then after a couple mins it started locking up again. But it was only when the piano roll view was up. I keep it open a lot. I am constantly messing with keyboard or drum notes. It was unresponsive. When you click on anything it takes like 6 to 10 seconds for program to respond. Once I finally got it to stop playing I closed piano roll view and its working fine again now. But I need piano roll view up a lot. I just tried opening piano roll view and I clicked play. It takes 9 secs to get sonar to stop playing but it took 14 secs for program to close piano roll view when I clicked on X to close window. Something wrong with piano roll after new update. I have to keep it closed. I try to see if other windows are causing this problem. too. After I reinstalled sonar I thought it was working again but i just hadn't opened piano roll view again yet. It causes same problem no matter what midi track I try to open up in piano roll view.

I reinstalled all drivers for hardware. There were new drivers on 18th. I thought maybe since they updated them others had similar problems. I did find one person in a forum that was having same issue since new sonar update. I updated all drivers and it didnt effect the problem any. But anyway I wiped my sonar and reinstalled it and now it working fine. Dont know what that update did nut it wa sa mess. Now its working. so who knows.

I dont see why it would be a hardware issue since I have been using cakewalk for over 20 years. 1997 I think. 100s of updates.and now this. Was fine before this new update. Its totally sluggish and unresponsive. Its not just play and stop. I see that its pretty much got a 10 sec delay no matter what you click on. Hardware or not its the same hardware I have had now for over a year. Cannot use the program at all like this.

I updated Sonar yesterday. And now its totally unusable. When I click play it will not stop playing. Like 10 sec later it finally stops. Cannot use the program like this. Not sure if there is other problems. This issue is so bad I just had to get off. I hope this gets fixed immediately. Its unusable now and I usually am out here for hours in my studio some days. I paid for this thing. It needs to work better than this.