David Baay

If a reboot fixes it and just re-launching Sonar doesn't, it sounds like the Presonus driver is getting into a bad state. In that case, you may find that just power-cycling the interface also fixes the problem. I would try running it with some other DAW software and if it continues to misbehave, talk to Presonus. If it seem okay with another DAW you might need to look harder at the Sonar project content or try 'Reset Config to Defaults' in Preferences > Config File. This will back up your existing AUD.INI and replace it with a default one. If this solves the problem, you can compare the two files to see what's different.

Grooveplayer is used by the metronome; is it working? TTS-1 was indeed removed from CbB, but if you had any older licensed version of Cakewalk/SONAR installed, it would have kept working. If the uninstall broke something, you can use the custom installtion option to re-install plugins from the licensed version.

And check for the age-old culprit of many crackles: Steinberg Generic Low Latency ASIO Driver. Even when not in use, it seems to wreak havoc with Sonar and should be uninstalled.

Kind of out of ideas. Next step might be to install Microsoft's Process Explorer to see what all is going on. But I would also just check disk activity in Windows Resource Monitor to see what files are being written/accessed during a slow save. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

Is this affecting all/most projects of comparable complexity? Are they mostly/all audio or mostly/all soft synths? Are you still using the Presonus Studio 24 or the V-Studio 100 mentioned earlier? If you're running 192 or 96kHz and the project has no recorded/rendered audio yet, try 48kHz. Is your PC optimzed for streaming audio? Ensure the following at a minimum: - If it's a laptop, plug it in. - Set Windows power management to Best Performance. - Set onboard audio (e.g. Realtek) as the default device for Windows and generic multimedia apps to play audio. - In BIOS, disable Speedstep and C-States (CPU-throttling). - If problems persist, adidtionally disable Bluetooth and WiFi (at least temporarily to determine if either is a factor). - If problems still persist, run LatencyMon to see what might be causing high/spiking Defered Procedure Call Latency - a measure of the PC's readiness to respond to interrupts from the audio interface requesting a buffer refill (not to be confused with audio buffering latency). https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

Ah, OK. I misread "used to" as referring to some time in the past. 🤪 So far as I know it's always been up to the user to be aware and manually change modes. Or possibly the plugin itself could detect when it's being asked to process samples faster than real time and do whatever it needs to do.

I played around with your scenario, and others, but I cannot get the drum map to persist when focus is on a non-mapped track in any circumstance. I think the best it's going to get is for the Bakers to program the Drum Pane to persist the map assigned to the most recently focused drum track when PRV focus moves to a non-mapped track. If you have more than one drum map in the project, this could potentially lead to a situation where drum hits on a track assigned to another map are displayed in the wrong map but that could probably be suppressed by some additional logic. If projects only allowed a single drum map to be used none of this would be an issue. It seems to me the only way you support that is to have the drum map display based on track focus. I'd be curious to see how other DAWs handle this.

I think your best bet would be a late '80s or '90s vintage programmable multitimbral hardware synth that has a GM soundset like the various Roland, E-MU and Korg keyboards and rack modules. The basic soundset is there, but with the programmability to allow changing the sounds in all kinds of ways (including adding portamento) that most GM-only modules were not designed to support. I think GM was so passé by the time virtual instrument plugins came along that there was never a lot of developer interest in going above and beyond emulating a non- or minimally-programmable rompler.

Leaving "Render in Real-time" unchecked is Fast Bounce a.k.a. Offline. OP confirmed earlier that Realtime render succeeded but said the ouput had some pops/glitches. This is iinteresting in hindsight because that can also be a symptom of plugin compatibility issues with the 64-bit mix engine.

Thanks for the heads up. I should have thought to suggest toggling it one way or the other as a troubleshooting step.

I'm not sure what all is going on with your project - I'd have to get hands on with it to really understand and troubleshoot - but It's highly unlikely the update alone preciptated any of this.

Exclude all Sonar-related app and document folders from scanning by Windows Defender or other antivirus.

Sorry for the confusion. I guess I expected to be getting a reply from the OP and totally overlooked who was posting. There hase been some evolution of the behavior of the Tracks Pane over time and I forget which version you're using, but the behavior in Sonar is pretty much unchanged from SONAR Platinum: If the track number is lit, the expectation is that the notes of the track will be visible, and if it's not they won't. His screenshots are showing the opposite with regard to the visibility and selection status of the Drums track.

As noted, that will stop if you disable Always Echo Current MIDI Track in preferences; at least it will stay None until you deliberately arm or echo it. I had forgotten that the default to All External hadn't been implemented in CbB... another reason to move on to Sonar. You still can't assign a default input, but at least you won't have virtual ports echoed/recorded when you neglect to proactively assign one. Promidi's suggestion to use Track Templates is a good one.

It means the notes will be visible and editable when you click in them if Autofocus is enabled. But unless I'm going more blind than I thought, your screenshots are showing the opposite: where the drum hits are not visible, Drums and Bass are lit/selected, and in the shot where drum hits are visible only the Strings is lit/selected. The track with the name also lit is currently active/focused for editing. Very odd.

Kontakt: hey quad core, hot enuf 4 u? Quad Core: funny, how about I crash u?

I think it has always been the case that giving focus to a track in the Notes pane causes drum-mapped notes to disappear rather than be ghosted because the PRV depends on track focus to 'know' that a drum map should be applied (and which one if there's more than one in the project). Pretty sure I've reported this in the distant past. The mystery to me is how the OP got the first screenshot as the PRV track selector shows only the Strings track selected.

I have to say I find the synth-instance-per-kit-piece setup to be really pointlessly complex and time-consuming to manage with pretty much no benefit except that they can be frozen independently which has pretty minimal utility itself. But, if nothing else, the one thing you really should do is create a single custom drum map that routes the relevant note numbers for each track to its respective synth instance, including the SI Drum instances. Aside from being able to see drum names in the PRV Drum Pane, this is one of the key purposes of using a drum map. With a separate map for each track, you can only see one track's notes in the Drum Pane at a time. If you use a single map, you can see and edit the hits for all the kit pieces together.

Let's start with basic machine specs, O/S version and the symptoms of failure. And has any other version of SONAR/CbB ever been installed on this machine or is currently installed and working?

Hmmm... that's not what I'm seeing. and as i said, you can't create an Instrument track from a MIDI track pointing to a drum map so I think you must have added the maps via the Inspector after creating the Instrument track... no? In any case, as it stands now, if you want to use drum maps and have freezing work seamlessly, you pretty much need to keep the MIDI and Synth audio tracks separate. There are a various ways to use folders to help manage that.

Oops, missed that. Yes, and it's immediately apparent that the issue is due to adding a drum map to the Instrument track. By definition, a Simple Instrument track consists of MIDI and Synth Audio tracks with I/O ports referencing the same synth. The drum map breaks that association and the freeze button in the MIDI track is grayed out as Sonar no longer sees the connection between the two. You can add a drum map to a simple instrument track using the Output widget on the MIDI tab of the Inspectr, but you can't re-make it once you split it except by Undo. I'm thinking this might be easily resolved by having Simple Instrument tracks link the Freeze button to the audio side instead of the MIDI side.

Interesting, but should not be necessary. I'd still be interested in seeing the stripped project.

I can't get Sonar to show more than one instance of a synth in the Recent list. It may well be a bug in CbB that's been fixed.

Freezing freezes the entire synth; it's not possible to freeze individual outputs. If you split the Instrument track you can 'bounce in place' by executing Bounce to Track(s), specifying the synth audio output track as the target for the bounce, and then mute the MIDI, but that gets awkward and doesn't really accomplish anything vs. just leaving the track playing "live". The synth is still live for the rest of the tracks so you're not conserving resources. I would just leave it all live until you're ready to freeze the whole thing.

Since it's just MIDI with a soft synth, the .CWP project file is enough and should be small enough to post here on the forum. Or you can PM me a copy.