Matthew Simon Fletcher

Not sure why you're being personal or how that remark relates to my comment. Mark and Noel have explained the position - new features won't work but it's not going to stop you being able to load Sonar projects in Cakewalk.

There shouldn't be anything that will break - my understanding is backwards compatibility is something being considered. There might just be certain functions that aren't as easy to do (i.e. controlling performance of soft synths) or are slower (midi editing)

Sonar is stable enough to be considered live. Your projects aren't trapped to Sonar and will still be openable in Cakewalk. There have been a few threads about the licensing model and at the moment I'm not aware of any non-subscription purchase plans. In general I'm in agreement about rental, but the volume of stuff you get access to, and the significant Sonar improvements in my view makes this worth it.

Yes - i'm very surprised by this finding, as I wouldn't have thought it was connected. Hence not trying it until now!

Okay so it appears that swapping from ASIO to WDM/KS is a workaround for this. Can people confirm which driver they are using and whether also applies in their cases?

I was playing around a bit with the GPU Audio stuff and I think if more companies adopt it it'll be great! The company who make Vienna Ensemble (linked above) have another product who make use of that capability to improve processing performance on reverb for orchestral instruments and it has some big performance benefits. It sounds like you're having a similar thought pattern as I did "wait a minute, look at all this spare processing power going to waste!). There should be a free demo of Ensemble for 30 days (if not I think if you email them they'll sort it out). So currently you just assign the instrument to an instance/channel on the host machine and there isn't any loadbalancing other than you manually doing. It is a feature request that comes up quite often to have VEP be intelligent enough to move workloads between devices, but there is some complexity here, especially as you'd need to ensure all machines had equivalent licensing for any plugins.

Hadn't thought of it like that, but yes absolutely also a nice benefit!

All good! These things happen Glad it's sorted

Hi Steve - thanks for confirming you've seen this behaviour Noel and I are discussing further.

I use Vienna Ensemble Pro which @Xoolinked There is a free alternative; https://audiogridder.com/ Basically it runs as a stand-alone application on one machine and then as a plugin in DAW. You load whatever VST's you want in the app and then as long as you're connected via LAN they'll be visible/audible in the project with practically no latency (as long as you use a high capacity internet cable capable of 1GB). Happy to send you some screenshots or whatever if you're interested further! It is really cool. I used to find an advantage to hosting instruments in it even on the same machine, although with Sonar improvements recently that's probably less useful. The perk for me was I didn't need to buy a super computer - I just bought lots of cheap second hand off the shelf mini-PC's and I can just keep stacking up as needed.

Sure - will message you shortly! Here's another interesting observation. I reimported the part in question into the project and at first it didn't show the glitch, however after zooming in and out it now appears consistently. At one level of zoom a random spike also appears at the end of the track, but if you go in/out at all that one goes. Again no content anywhere near that so can't see how it could be approximating anything, and again why it's only at one level of zoom that's neither too far in / out is bizarre.

Don't get me wrong I think CBB performance is very good and yes, individual mileage may vary and you may still be fine with CBB. But as Noel says if you compare the theoretical capabilities Sonar is significantly ahead in stability and performance and there are further improvements coming all the time. Recent updates have focused on the audio engine but there's more recent developments on general operations and particularly midi, one of these processes was I recall several thousand times faster now. I run a variety of projects from small to extremely large (500 tracks) and I see noticeable improvements consistently in all of my user-cases, which allow me to work more efficiently/effectively. More music in less time! For me it's about being on a platform that is being scaled to meet the demands of new instruments/technologies and also get the best result of the equipment I already have. I did have three servers running all of my VST's, but I now often only run two, despite increasing my workloads. That's the efficiency/scalability/performance benefit.

The new engine optimisations are in Sonar. My understanding is that Cakewalk will only be getting a limited amount of bug fixes and maintenance so that it continues to function rather than any big changes. Would highly recommend updating to anyone who hasn't or is considering it; it is definitely worth it for the performance boost alone if you're running more than a few instruments

Thanks for your thoughts. I've tried various combinations of recreating the pictures in Cakewalk and deleting these to force re-creation. I am always able to see a spike. Exported the track discussed so far to audacity and you'll see there's nothing at 3:09 which is the timestamp. Nothing visible in Next either. Not sure how the generation process is different on Next, but given it displays fine can we back-port it? It seems like there's enough evidence from different people's projects that something odd is happening here.

Hi Noel, How zoomed in do you need to go before it goes from the preview audio to the raw audio? Because when I opened the project file at different times the level of zoom in which the spike was visible was different. Surely that should be consistent? Also why is it that regenerating the picture caused the spike to disappear but then after saving/reloading the project it became visible again? Lastly, even if the preview audio is averaged out, how would a spike suddenly materialise in a section in which there is no other audio? In the example above I could understand it because there is some content near it, but in other examples it can be minutes apart. So I can't see how the preview would could be calculating/drawing it as such? I get this may seem like a minor issue but when you're dealing with a lot of tracks at a high level, it's really key to be able to know where audio is/isn't, so you can quickly trim sections that aren't needed but without moving other content. Currently due to this it's taken me longer to tidy-up / check a project and conversely I've also accidentally deleted things, thinking they were simply a UI glitch due to this bug.