David Baay

Pretty sure I have many projects in that state, and have not noticed any issue with CbB/Sonar persistieng the lane-solo state. Possibly this is related to whether you're configured to have new takes on top, as I am...? As for Staff View, given all its limitations and odditiies, I would never have thought to try getting it to deal with multiple lanes though I suppose it should. I usually create dedicated "for Notation" tracks (with left- an right-hand piano parts separated for the Grand Staff since a single split point doesn't usually cut it) that I hard-quantize with manually 'filled' durations so I'm less dependent on Sonar's display options to get the notation to appear half-way correct.

There's no evidence this issue is related to yours or that there's a global issue with opening old projects in Sonar. As you know, I have hundreds of projects going back to Cakewalk for DOS 2.0, and I've had trouble with only one that had empty Prochannels, similar, but not identical, to the one that first gave you trouble. And that particular issue was fixed before the first full public release. If you're having trouble with more projects, they likely all have some particular thing in common that needs to be specifically investigated. After so many years on the forum, and helping other resolve problems, you should know better than to say "this is exactly what is happening to me" on the basis of superficially similar symptoms (crash on load), when the root cause isn't yet known in either case.

That's interesting. Suggests it might be some sort of race condition that has a different outcome on different systems. I'll give it a whirl on my main DAW that's closer to your spec: i7 6700k with Win10 vs. my laptop that runs an 11800H CPU with Win11.

@sjoens I suggest we keep the discussion about the mechanics and appearance muting clips and notes in the dedicated thread you started rather than complicating this one that's more about how to audibly mute/solo whole drum parts by note number and control what gets bounced/exported than how muted clips and notes are displayed.

That's because clip muting and note muting are two different mechanisms. Clearly since clips are not accessible from the PRV, they cannot be unmuted from the PRV, but notes are accessible from the TV. I suspect this has to do with the various possible combinations of muting, selection, PRV visibility and PRV focus. You'll need to give a very specific example that specifies all these elements to demonstrate whether there's an actual issue or it just isn't working as you would expect/prefer. A demo project with specific config settings and steps to reproduce a problematic would be helpful. I'm not saying there isn't room for improvement of the design logic and presentation, but so far I haven't seen anything described that is clearly not working as designed other than the poor visibility of muted notes and possibly the conditions under which you can and can't use Alt+right-click to mute notes. EDIT: I should add that there isn't much point in dicussing these behaviors with reference to CbB as its development is largely frozen. But to the extent that Sonar works and looks the same, I'm happy to help figure out whether there's something that actually needs to be fixed.

In both CbB and Sonar with the Mercury [Classic] theme, they turn medium gray in both views when selected and white when de-selected. It's true, the outlines of de-selected, muted notes in the PRV are nearly invisible in Sonar. They were just slightly bolder/darker in CbB and more visible. And I seem to recall, they were clearer in earlier versions, but that may just have been due to my younger eyes seeing better or lower monitor resolution using fatter pixels. This must be theme--dependent. In Mercury [Classic] notes are darker when selected.

No. Actually, I created the project from another experimental one that had all the notes of a short piano piece in separate tracks by pitch. I dragged those clips to lanes of a track one by one, starting with the track that already had the lowest notes in T1. I think it defaults to drawing in T2 because that clip has the starting note at 1:01:000 and all the other clips start later.

Glad to help. Do you still have CbB installed? The project hangs Sonar, but opened successfully in CbB for me. I closed the Console view, minimized all the Old Jim Bass tracks that had oddly maximized heights and re-saved it, but Sonar still hangs. I can play around with it some more tomorrow and see if I get it to behave, but if you have CbB, you might be able to resolve it yourself. I would start by stripping out anything you're not actually using in the current project (like all those bass tracks with output set to None). Whatever the cause, I hope the Bakers will take a look at it and determine why Sonar is having a problem with it that CbB doesn't.

I don't see how that works once you have all the lanes populated and want to add more notes to some lane. For example, I have a test project with 10 populated lanes that always puts new notes into T2 when you draw in the PRV. But I found my own workaround: Lock Data on the clips in all the lanes, leaving only one unlocked, and that's where new data will go.

Share the project? If it'll open for me or someone else, we might be able to save a copy that works on your system. If it doesn't open for anyone that'll confirm a fix is needed from the Bakers.

Apply an appropriate Drum Map to the output of the MIDI track and you will be able to mute/solo individual kit pieces as well as having them named in the PRV's drum pane.

I use them mostly when recording the first few passes of a new piano improvisation as MIDI. Unless I've already played through it many times before I decide to record it, I tend to hit a lot clams or improperly voiced chords and go down blind alleys (or too well-trodden paths) of harmonic progression, and may still be working out rhythms while (hopefully) capturing moments of inspiration and 'happy accidents'. As mentioened, I always have Create New Lane enabled in record options and usually also Sound on Sound at his point. After recording 16-64 bars of that 1st take and saving it (with 'Raw' or '1st Take' in the title), I'll typically do one of two things: If it was a fairly solid take, I'll record a rough melody/lead over the 'groove' into a new lane, and I'll often do several of those, stopping, rewinding, muting the previous clip and recording another melody or harmony take into another lane. If the initial 'groove' recording is too rough for that, I'll mute that take and do another one, maybe practicing a bit in between to be able to play things I liked from the first take more smoothly. If a take is really bad/useless, I'll undo and re-record, but if it has anything potentially useful in it, I'll keep the lane and just mute the clip. Occasionally I'll do some some loop-recording of melodies/leads to get down a lot of ideas quickly but more often I just stop and rewind for each take or work with a 'groove' take that's long enough (either by recording or copy-pasting) for me to improvise for many bars. I generally do all of this without a click, just playing freely. Somtimes my playing is pretty metronomic all by itself, but some pieces lend themselves to a deliberately free tempo. At some point, I'll re-save the 'Raw' project the way it is and start snapping the timeline to the MIDI, using Set Measure/Beat at Now, so I can start editing, quantizing and maybe smoothing out the tempo variations, re-saving periodically with a suffix like "Snapped thru 17;01, Quantized thru 8;03" (semicolons because colons aren't allowed in file names). Once I have the timing nominally tightened up, I'll often go back and re-record a more structured melody/harmony into a new lane with better timing (because the tempo is flattened and the groove is partially quantized), borrowing themes and riffs from the earlier takes - basically comping by re-recording. Bottom line: I don't generally use lanes for 'comping' in the classic sense, more as a sort of warehouse for alternative takes and ideas and for quickly layering melodies and harmonies over a 'groove' at the composition stage. I develop and polish pieces mostly by re-recording, just using those early takes as a reference rather than copy-pasting and comping a finished track from bits and pieces of different lanes. Eventually melodies and harmonies will often be re-recorded on new tracks with a different instruments, but I may keep the piano melody to play in unison with the new instrument(s). I may do the same to record a bass line on piano, but more often I'll fire up a dedicated bass track for that. In any case, I almost never completely discard those early takes; I'll just save the project with a descriptive suffix in the name and clear out unused takes from the new version or maybe archive them in a hidden track if there's still a chance I'll want to use them later. I often use lanes to build up initial drum tracks in the same way on a single Instrument track before they get moved to dedicated per-output Instrument tracks later on for mixing.

I don't think there's any 100% predictable or easily controllable behavior. Pretty clearly developers did not consciously address how the PRV would interract with lanes when manually entering new events, and some enhancement will be needed to give users positive control. Ideally you would be able to clearly identify and specify the target lane from within the PRV.

Ignoring for the moment your impression that the direct-monitoring sound has changed, if there's a radical difference between monitoring and playback - other than the (significant) factor that some room and 'in-head' sound will be heard while recording - it could be in the project configuration. If this is happening in projects all started from some custom template, possibly that template has changed. Do you hear the same difference recording and playing back in a new project from the Basic template with no backing tracks?

Usually T1 in my experience, but can vary depending on the editing history of the track. The workaround is to move any clips out of that lane to the new lane and let CW put the new notes where it wants. I'm pretty sure I reported this issue in the distant past but haven't been persistently bothered by it since I record most of my MIDI in real time with Create New Lane always enabled.

If the new note is more than ~5 beats past the end of the previous event, a new clip will be created. This can be avoided by dragging the boundary of the clip later before drawing/pasting new notes.

Thanks for the explanation. I'd still be interested in checking it out.

I suggest you run MemTest86 and see if any errors are found. In case you're wondering about the different versions available in different places - as I was - check out this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MemTest86

If the sends aren't being returned, you don't need to use an External Insert. You can just remove the EI and send form the Aux directly to the ouputs that you had assigned to the EI. And there's nothing to be compensated because all tracks/auxes/buses are subject to the same outbound ASIO latency of the interface and nothing else, unless ther are plugins that require delay compensation. If there's still a sync error, it's likely related to some PDC issue. Are you using any plugins in the project that you know require compensation? If you can share the project, I'd be interested in checking out the routing and sync on my system.

External Insert has an automatic delay compensationn mechanism. It needs to be set by clicking the button under 'Delay' after assigning the send/return channels. Sonar measures the actual round-trip delay by sending out a transient and measuring how long it takes to return and usually does not need an additional manual offset. When the external device is analog, this delay is just the RTL of your interface's A/D/A converison plus an ASIO buffer each way. It should not matter whether the EI is on a track, an aux or a bus so long as its delay compensation is correct. I should add that this delay compensation works the same as PDC for plugins with lookahead buffers; the tracks that aren't going through the external insert have to be delayed by the calculated amount to sync up with the delayed return signal of the tracks that do.

You can use the forced output channel of each track so you don't need to be concerned about the embedded channel of the recorded/sequenced/drawn MIDI events. The alternative is to get Sonar and use the Absolute Time Offset option in its Articulation Map implementation to change the offset in the region where a particular articulation is used. This is why the absolute time offset in Sonar was originally implemented as an Articulation type rather than a whole-track offset.

Yes, that's a classic use case. Historically the multiple synths would have been hardware synths - and probably different ones - but it's equally applicable to multiple instances of the same non-multi-timbral soft synth. I love making Sonar (and other softwares) bend to my will which is why I actually relish challenges like this. Sonar can do all kinds of coos things that may never have been specifically envisioned by the developers. The complexity may stymie new users on occasion but it can do magic in the hands of an experienced user. With complexity comes power and flexibility. That's going to be difficult unless the synth instances can be be configured to respond to only one channel so you can channelize the program change messages in the event list which is the only way to differentiate them. But then you'd have to channelize the note events as well which would defeat the purpose of being able to sequence MIDI freely in a single track without thinking about which synth is going to respond. And if you channelize the drum map, you'll just be back to sending all four program change messages to each synth on their respective channels. If it were me, I would use CodeFN42's MIDChFilter VST to distribute note events from a single drum-mapped MIDI track to the 4 instrument tracks, and use the Patch widget (or program change events if necessary) on the each Instrument track to set the patch. The Instrument tracks will also give you a place to do individual automations, velocity offsets, etc.

Only if one path is subject to the delay of a PDC-inducing plugin that the other one isn't, andCW does handle that case correctly in my experience. Aux tracks themselves do not introduce any extra delay. Are you seeing/hearing a problem? If so, what's the setup?

Not at my P.C. but I believe you can save new patterns as .PTN files. Have you checked the Ref. Guide? Should be in there.

I have sometimes experienced that it shows no progress and never proceeds to offer me the Install option but has in fact downloaded the file to Downloads\Cakewalk, and I can run it from there.