As a professional software developer with over 30 years of experience, I’m honestly stunned by the current state of Cakewalk Sonar’s ASIO implementation.
I’ve tested the latest version of Sonar on a clean system, with all third-party VSTs removed from their default paths to eliminate plugin-related interference. Despite this, the application consistently crashes or disappears as soon as I attempt to switch to any ASIO driver — including well-maintained ones from major vendors and even ASIO4ALL, which used to work flawlessly for years.
In some configurations, simply selecting an audio driver leads to an immediate Blue Screen of Death — something that should never happen in any user-mode application, let alone in a production-grade DAW.
Most concerning, however, is this: Sonar's current installer actively reinstalls the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable, specifically version 8.0.59192. This happens even if you’ve already removed older runtime versions and have the latest 2015–2022 VC++ redistributables installed. If the software is so dependent on a 20-year-old runtime that it reintroduces it silently, then something is very wrong with the deployment model.
Telling users to "just uninstall all old redistributables" while your own installer injects legacy binaries back into the system — potentially destabilizing audio subsystems — is not a viable support strategy.
I strongly suggest the development team revisit the runtime dependencies and ASIO handling logic. What you have now may technically boot up on some machines, but from a system integrity and reliability perspective, it's broken — and that’s putting it politely.
As a professional software developer with over 30 years of experience, I’m honestly stunned by the current state of Cakewalk Sonar’s ASIO implementation. I’ve tested the latest version of Sonar on a clean system, with all third-party VSTs removed from their default paths to eliminate plugin-related interference. Despite this, the application consistently crashes or disappears as soon as I attempt to switch to any ASIO driver — including well-maintained ones from major vendors and even ASIO4ALL, which used to work flawlessly for years. In some configurations, simply selecting an audio driver leads to an immediate Blue Screen of Death — something that should never happen in any user-mode application, let alone in a production-grade DAW. Most concerning, however, is this: Sonar's current installer actively reinstalls the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable, specifically version 8.0.59192. This happens even if you’ve already removed older runtime versions and have the latest 2015–2022 VC++ redistributables installed. If the software is so dependent on a 20-year-old runtime that it reintroduces it silently, then something is very wrong with the deployment model. Telling users to "just uninstall all old redistributables" while your own installer injects legacy binaries back into the system — potentially destabilizing audio subsystems — is not a viable support strategy. I strongly suggest the development team revisit the runtime dependencies and ASIO handling logic. What you have now may technically boot up on some machines, but from a system integrity and reliability perspective, it's broken — and that’s putting it politely.