Aaron Doss

UPDATE (SOLUTION FOUND) Disabling the piano roll GPU acceleration fixed my slowdown issue. It's strange that they defaulted this option on when it's also marked as an "experimental" feature. Support also recommended staying on Nvidia Driver version 572.16. The latest versions of the driver are buggy with Sonar.

I have a ticket open with support on this. This issue does not happen with an audio only project. but it does happen with a midi track (driving external devices) or a VST track. I dumped my system info earlier in the thread. I am up to date on drivers and patches. The audio engine works fine it's the user interface that slows down. The previous version of Sonar worked fine and the current free version of cakewalk work fine. I am running Nvidia driver version 572.16 which is behind by two versions, however when I contacted support about it they said to stay on that version because that is stable and the new versions 572.47 and 572.60 are known to be unstable with Sonar. My system is overkill on all resources for sonar, I built it for video production and it's completely overpowered for music production. I may have found the issue in the current version, they added a GPU acceleration feature for the piano roll and I think that is causing the slowdown, I have disabled it in the advanced settings and it seems to be running ok so far. But I have not used it extensively yet. I will find out for sure this afternoon.

I have created some new projects with the new version, the same issue persists. The only VST I am using is Kontakt 8 (full version). If I use a plugin it's typically the compressor that comes with Sonar (I assume the bundled vsts are tested with the system) Otherwise I am using reverb in Kontakt, I mostly use its internal effects chain. I have seen this issue happen with projects that don't even have a vst instrument. If I drive external midi instruments with a midi track in sonar it can also slow down. I am pretty sure the issue is related to the piano roll. The longer that is open the slower it gets. The slowdown is exponential. it will only be sluggish and then it will take 2-5 seconds to do something then 10-30 seconds then it will just hang, the longest I have wanted is 5 minutes before I force kill the application. As a new user in this forum my account is restricted, I can only post like 4-5 times a day before I get locked out for (presumably spamming). I contacted the admins to try and lift that restriction but have not heard back from them yet. So If I don't respond within a day that is why. It's very annoying to try to get support and not be able to answer questions because my account is timed out. I did see in the release notes that the piano roll is now GPU accelerated. I am going to try and disable the acceleration and see if that helps. Aaron

@Wookiee I am running Windows Defender on a wired network (directly to my router). I just tried disabling the defender process but that does not have any effect on cakewalk's performance.

Since this is not a .net application, I can't run a profile in visual studio without the debug symbol package. So I am running sysinternals process explorer. If I had the code or at least the debugging symbol library I could probably find the slowdown issue. I have been monitoring Sonar and Kontakt for the last 10 minutes but have not seen any significant change in CPU utilization, Memory usage, handle count or thread count. My system has plenty of resources to handle this application. The audio processing engine does not seem to have issues, it's the user interface that becomes very slow. Now taking several seconds between pressing play/stop for the project to respond. Since I am not familiar with the system architecture, I am open to any suggestions from the dev team on what I should look at. I have all the Microsoft development tools and can pretty much run whatever utility they provide. I forgot to mention in the last post I am running NVidia Driver version 32.0.15.7216 Aaron

The previous version of Sonar (2024.12) worked perfectly. The current version of Cakewalk (2024.12 free) works perfectly. I have attached a detailed export of my system information via the "system information" tool. The brief specs are as follows: Dell Percision 5820 Tower Win 11 pro 10.0.62100 Build 26100 Xeon W-2175 CPU 64Gb memory Sound interface: MOTU M4 (USB) Graphics Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060Ti I have windows core isolation disabled I am running dual monitors, I have Sonar split between the two monitors (main interface on one and piano roll on the other) For VST's I am using Native Instruments Kontakt 8 (full current version, not player) Norie Piano Claire Piano Session Strings 2 I am a software engineer myself, I understand the value of troubleshooting. I have sent in crash reports in the past, which the dev team did fix. However, this issue involves a slowdown, and I don't get the opportunity to generate a crash report. If there was a profiling tool I could use, I would gladly run that for the dev team. Aaron system info.txt

I am currently running 2025.02 and am looking for the rollback installer, I can't find it in the release notes like in the previous release versions. The current version is only usable for about 10 minutes before the UI becomes so slow that I have to close or force kill the application and re-open it. I would like to run the previous version while this is being fixed. Thanks, Aaron

2025.02 is not stable, after 10-15 minutes the UI slows down and becomes unresponsive, it also crashes randomly. The previous version was stable Can we get the installer for the previous version? I would like to run that while this version is being fixed Thanks Aaron