David Baay

Funny, I read exactly the opposite. Why bother to say "currently or "at this time" if you have no plans to do something else in the future? The removal of "Early Access" is just an indication that it's considered stable and fully functional and ready for wide public release without reservations.

A bit of an exaggeration. Mercury was the original color scheme of SONAR X1 when the Skylight interface debuted in 2010. Pro Audio 4.0 of 1996... now that's a retina-burner. ;^)

Which theme? I don't see a significant difference between CbB and Sonar with the Mercury Classic theme.

FWIW, I always keep old versions around so I can tell whether something that's not currently working/appearing as expected is a regression.

Per the website it's Cakewalk Sonar: https://www.cakewalk.com/sonar Since the mixed case "Sonar" distinguishes it from 'old' SONAR and Cakewalk is back to being a subsidiary company of Bandlab rather than a product of Bandlab, I'm lobbying to just call it Sonar on the forum.

Welcome to the forum. FWIW, I mentioned this in an earlier post but without any particular emphasis or detail since the OP was so broad-ranging. To be precise, it's Process > Find/Change (previously Edit > Interpolate). You make a good point that CAL (technically deprecated long ago but still working at this time) can also be used after the fact to address some limitations in what can be done in real time, but the OP seemed to be mostly asking about what's possible within the main program and in real time in the way of MIDI routing/filtering/transformation so CAL didn't come up. The third-party CAL programming guide and even editors can still be downloaded from various sources. The best/safest/most current of these is always changing so I'll leave it to future prospectors to find it for themselves.

As I recall, providing some level of theme editing has been mentioned as a long-term goal by one of the Bakers, but I be hard-pressed to find the reference. Notwithstanding the reponse that Stephen got, if enough users express concern about specific contrast/legibility deficiencies, I think it still has a chance of improving in some areas. That said, my vision is not the greatest but I'm getting along pretty well with Sonar even on my 15" laptop that shipped with scaling set at 200% and which I've reduced to 160% to be consistent with the scaling of Sonar on my larger desktop monitors where the fine dialog font is not really a problem.

Using the Mercury Classic theme in Sonar, I find some things have better contrast than CbB and some are worse. My main issue is with the text in dialog boxes where the font is so fine it appears grayed out. I've reported this to the Bakers and I can only suggest that you report your specific issues as there is very little that can be controlled at this point other than choosing from the pre-defined color schemes/themes.

Is this because you're manually interacting with the synth UI while recording, or you just don't like Fast Bounce? Are you also exporting in real time? As I said, if that's the case, it's likely some interoperability issue with the driver is causing the crash, and doing a Fast bounce/export should avoid it because it doesn't involve the audio driver. I mentioned TTS-1 because you wrote "CBB virtual instrument" which I interpreted as meaning something bundled with it, and TTS-1 is the only instrument I know of that regularly causes crashes.

The PC modules definitely need more work, and I'm confidant they'll get it. These are the kinds of specific, actionable suggestions I'm talking about, and I've raised a number of them myself.

If a project has a preview file, a triangular Play button will be displayed when you hover of the project's thumbnail.

Those are Project Preview files that can be played from the Start Screen without opening the project. They will survive Clean Audio, but can be deleted manually without causing any missing audio warning on re-launching the project. Sonar automatically creates them when you export to file and if you export something other than the Master bus or Entire Mix, the preview will reflect that. So far as I know you cannot currently disable this function globally, but there is a checkbox in the export dialog to disable it and I believe that will choice will persist on a per-project basis. I'm hoping/expecting that eventually there will be more control over this feature, including the ability to limit the length of preview files to conserve space.

We heard you the first two times, and you need to start letting it go because 'it is what it is' to a great extent. Harrison and UAD notwithstanding (and both pretty minor players in the DAW space by my reckoning), the broader industry trend is still generally toward flatter, simpler graphics. The good news is that I can assure you that you'll get over it more quickly than you think. Your screenshot clearly shows how much sharper Sonar's vector graphics are. If you try to go back to CbB after working with Sonar for a while, you'll find it looks fuzzy and feels overly 'busy' in comparison. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement, and I encourage you to make specific suggestions about possible improvements to contrast, legibility, consistency, usability etc. Many such suggestion have already been implemented. Continuing to just generally bash the new graphics as "childish" is not helpful and won't change the overall direction that the UI is taking.

Try removing the Steinberg 'Generic Low Latency ASIO Driver' from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ASIO I understand the UR24C is a Steinberg product, but preumably it has a dedicated ASIO driver other than the 'Generic' one that Cubase installs and that's what you have selected in Audio Devices...? That Generic driver has been known to cause issues with Cakewalk, specifically; I don't know why.

Meaning buses are also unselectable? The only way I can reproduce that behavior is by selecting a track that's outputting to a dead-end Patch Point that isn't connected to anything downstream.

I have zero reservations about recommending Sonar precisely because it installs in parallel with CbB and does not interfere at all with continuing to use CbB. The guts of the program and project file architecture remain largely unchanged and projects can currently be migrated both ways without any issues that I know of.

So what instrument are you freezing? If it's TTS-1 which is a DXi and has proven to be less than perfectly stable for some users, try a VSTi. Did you try a non-real-time bounce and/or alternative real-time buffer sizes? If fast bounce works, the real-time problem is something to do with your audio interface driver. Have you rebooted at some point since updating? I understand the problem seems related to updating, but AFAIK no one else is experiencing anything like this so it seems unlikely that's the only factor. Maybe share a simple project for others to test and see if it reproduces on different hardware.

Have you ever had CbB or some other DAW software working consistently on your current platform, and is it a laptop or desktop? The only time I've had the transport and meters moving without producing output, and it wasn't due to some routing/state issue in the project, it was due to the interface driver getting into a bad state and needing to be re-initialized by power-cycling. If it's happening consistently with two interfaces, that would suggest either some 3rd-party application/driver is interfering or there's a more general issue with USB comms/power/sleep recovery, etc. on your system. I started having problems something like this a while ago on my laptop and eventually determined the USB port was intermittently losing contact at the connector. Swapping cables didn't help and I ultimately had to move it to a USB-C port that didn't have as much wear and tear on it. If those interfaces are currently bus-powered and have the option to use external DC input, you might want to try that.

No recording when everything else is working would most often be due to having inadvertently enabled Punch in a region outside where the transport is. No playback audio could be a lot of things. Is this with audio tracks or MIDI through virtual instruments? Are track and bus meters active when this happens, and you've verified the Master bus output assigned to the correct audio output driver. Do either of the interfaces have output meters, and are they active?

In the mean time, change the Source Category to Buses, and select only the Master bus. I would also suggest disabling Render in Real-time unless you really have need to hear the bounce or some plugin is misbehaving when fast-bouncing. Otherwise, there is no quality difference between fast (a.k.a. offline) and real-time (a.k.a. online) rendering.

What VSTi and is the MIDI your own or some 3rd-party content? What's your ASIO buffer size and do you have a non-zero value set for BounceBufSizeMsec in Preferences > Audio > Config File? Reverting AUD.INI should have defaulted it back to zero which tells CbB to use the realtime ASIO buffer size for offline rendering. If the realtime buffer is very small or very large, it can cause problems for some plug-ins. Post a screenshot of your bounce/export dialog right before OK.

How are you focusing the target? Are you clicking in the tracks pane of the Track View or of the PRV or something else? In general, I like to do track-to-track moves/copies in the track view, but I understand it might be easiar to make a partial selection in the PRV and change focus without leaving it. Ths advantage of doing it in the track view is that you can select the source material, move focus to the target track, and then cut/paste in one go without doing anything in between. Also, I recommend binding a keyboard shortcut for 'Go to From' (was F7 by default before SONAR X1, and that's still what I use). Then all you have to do after making your selection is hit the shortcut to set the Now time. Your method should work, but the extra steps make it more error-prone as well as time-consuming.

More likely a particular plugin is heavily loading a single thread or some combination of plugins can't be effectively load-balanced due to their location in the project. https://legacy.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=SONAR&language=3&help=AudioPerformance.14.html Cakewalk have been optimizing multi-threading and plug-in load-balancing as long as anyone in the business. If you can document a particular plugin or combination of plugins that disproportionately loads the first core in CbB/Sonar compared to some other DAW with an identically structured project. I'm sure the Bakers would want look into that.

Just writing mixed-case 'Sonar' should be enough to distinguish the new product from the all-caps SONAR of yore, but I've been adding 'new' in some cases just to make it clear.

Based on the Ref. Guide saying it works this way in Cakewalk/Sonar/CbB over all these years, I think that must have been the intent initially but somebody dropped the ball. Not sure why it's been so hard to get traction on it. My main need for it has been that I SM/BAN a free-form MIDI recording and then either discover later that I made a mistake or decide to re-record it and forget to delete the tempo changes from the previous round. Currently there's no way to undo that other than recording it into another DAW at a fixed tempo without syncing them.