brundlefly

First, as a best practice you should set the Input of the new traack to the specific port and channel that you intend to record, not All Inputs. Then check the properties of whatever synth the re-recorded track is driving, and make sure it's not unintentionally echoing MIDI input to a virtual OUT.

That's right. Virtual MIDI port drivers working at the O/S level look just like hardware ports to Sonar, and you can apply an Instrument definition to them just like any hardware port. Only ports presented by plugins within the project cannot be used in this way.

So that sounds like a solution, though it doesn't explain the cause of the problem with the original project. Any time a project won't load normally but will load fully using Safe mode, I'm inclined to think some sort of 'race condition' is occuring on loading plugins or other content. Re-saving may have changed the order in which things load, eliminating the race condition. I'm guessing this is part of Noel's investigation.

Just for the record, my preferred approach is to Output the 'Master Bounce' track direct to the main hardware outs (i.e. in parallel with the Master bus) and group that track's Mute in opposition to the Master bus Mute. Then you can freely A/B between them with one click, and your live mix is ready for further work any time.

It looked to me like the PC he has is state-of-the-art enough to be quite servicable for at least a couple more years. Unless he's selling it to pay for the Mac...?

You should be seeing its effect on the Master bus meter unles you have bus meters set Pre-fader...? FWIW, I typically use a 'Pre-Master' bus with no FX on it to sum all tracks and sub-buses and allow metering/managing the input to the Master.

If you're exporting only the Master, I think the only way the level of the file could be higher than the Master is if you've raised the level on the virtual hardware out bus at some point. If you don't see hardware outs in the Console view, drag the splitter at the far right to the left to reveal them.

I have seen this mentioned a few times with regard to the dark themes. The gridlines are good in the Mercury Classic theme I prefer.

There's also the per-project Clean Audio Folder option under Utilities. It cleans tha audio folder of only the currently open project.

I have used that utility only once and the results were catastrophic for me. I've used it for years without ever losing anything. So long as all the projects are on the same drive as the audio they reference, CWAF should not mis-identify files as Orphaned. That said, after running it, I move the files it identifies as Orphaned to a folder that's excluded from its scan and run it again to make sure nothing is identified as Missing before I empty that folder.

Sending a track to a bus with no FX on it simply duplicates the signal. If both the send and bus levels are at the default 0dB, the net result will be 6dB gain in the contribution of that track to the full mix. Louder always sounds better.

Yes, Bounce to Clip(s) converts a MIDI Groove Clip back to a conventional MIDI clip.

When you say "unison", do you mean voices on the same pitch or an octave apart? Either way, the two voices would first need to be combined in a single MIDI clip (with events on different channels if they're on the same pitch). Then it would be possible to write a CAL to do that but I don't know of one that exists, and it wouldn't be trivial enough for me to want to try it for fun. ;^) Do you run into this situation enough to justify needing a script for it? I would think it's not that difficult to do manually in the PRV with the two voices in separate tracks.

The combination of missing files and corrupted files suggests some systemic failure or 3rd-party software involvement. As Mettelus suggested, it's virtually impossible to have Cakewalk lose track of audio or delete it unintentionally without someone or something meddling with the file system directly.

I can confirm it's a problem in Sonar, but not that it's persisted for years. CbB works as expected for me.

@Noel Borthwick This is a pretty interesting observation. I can confirm that dragging a MIDI Groove Clip out does not stop the audio engine. Bounce that same clip to normal MIDI, and it will stop the engine when dragged out to the file system.

I mentioned earlier that I verified "Suspend Audio Engine..." is not enabled in Sonar. And even with that option enabled in CbB, the engine is interrupted only for a moment before the clip is dropped outisde the UI. With it disabled in CbB, there's no interruption at all.

Unfortunately I'm not finding anything. If not a configuration issue, I think it's likely audio-driver-specific and not OS-dependent because I'm seeing it on both Win10 and Win11.

Thanks for confirming. Good to know it's not universal. Can you PM me a copy of your AUD.INI file so I can compare configurations?

As noted, it's not a problem when the transport is running, only when stopped, so you have to actually look at the state of button or be monitoring some live input to know that the audio engine has turned off. As soon as you run the transport, it's going to restart automatically. This may still be a system- or configuration-specific issue, but I wanted to be clear about the conditions. I'm seeing it on both a laptop and a desktop machine, and have tested with two different ASIO interfaces plus WASAPI. I've also looked into various possible configuration factors like ensuring that 'Suspend Audio Engine When Sonar is not in Focus' is disabled and 'Always Stream Audio Through FX' is enabled', but have not yet found anything that makes a difference. When dragging a MIDI clip out, the engine stops as soon as the mouse cursor leaves the UI. If I change focus to the desktop or another app by clicking out of Sonar or alt+tabbing away, the engine keeps running. It's just this very specific case of copying a MIDI file out that does it.

I don't have it running As Admin and am able to repro the issue. Just to clarify: It's not that the clip can't be successfully copied to the file system by drag-drop, it's that the audio engine is turned off by the action. This isn't a huge issue but an inconvenience if you're depending on live input monitoring of any internal or external audio with the transport stopped. And if you don't notice the audio engine turned off you could be scratching your head for a while, trying to figure out what happened to your audio. P.S. I can repro this in the final 17.10 release of SONAR Platinum, but not in X3 or earlier.

I don't see it when drag-dropping from a track to a VSTi or vice versa, nor when dragging MIDI into a project from File Explorer - only when dragging MIDI out to file.

I can repro that when the transport is stopped. If it's running, the engine stays on. Given that, I see no reaosn that it would need to be turned off when idling. In the mean time, I recommend binding something to 'run/stop audio engine' so you can toggle it on/off as needed without having to mouse to the tiny button or run the transport. I often toggle it off when walking away from the PC to conserve energy.

You only get note names in the notes if no drum map is applied. But I understand now the request is to have this happen with a drum map applied which should be fairly straightforward and would be nice.

I'm not seeing a problem playing Sonar-exported MP3s with WMP on Win11, and the options dialog shows Sonar using the same old LAME 3.100 encoder.