Sergei Pilin

100% agree with all this. Readability should be the first priority, "nice design" choices are distant second. The current color and design choices are as if they don't want to distract users with text and numbers making them as unnoticeable as possible. If they don't have decent designers then just make all the colors editable as in the older Cakewalk. And please, PLEASE, keep things consistent - if a user chooses light colored themes don't force them to have random dark elements such as this horrid black menu and dark themed Articulations and Export dialogues. Ones chooses a light theme for a reason.

Here it is. Spire instance test.zip

Just tested the same 54 Spire instances project with ASIO (96 samples) - Cakewalk wouldn't play it without crackles despite much faster computer, started removing track by track and the crackling stopped when I had 38 tracks. Amazing how low latency ASIO is so much more demanding than WASAPI. Sonar DOES play the original 54 copy project with no crackles! Although one more copy and it starts craclking too. So credits where credits are due - Sonar IS much more efficient than Cakewalk with low buffer ASIO. P.S. Replicated this project in Reaper, stopped at 104 tracks which still were playing with no problems. Now that is some optimized engine

Okay, will do and report. It's RME Babyface with my faster computer where I use ASIO and record stuff. The previous test was using the in-built laptop's Realtek sound, thus WASAPI

I just did just that - Instance of a Spire synth playing 6 note chord with 6 voice unison. Added Fab filter EQ with some adjustments, Valhalla delay and Lexicon random hall. Then started duplicating this track until it started to crackle then removed one more track just to be safe - 54 tracks on some modest 6 years old 4 core laptop in Bandlab! Wow, that's some power we have nowadays! Opened this project in Sonar and it totally crapped out with cracks galore. Started removing tack by track, it sort of stopped crackling at 44 tracks but all sounded wrong as if the polyphony was reduced. Didn't want to find out what was up with the polyphony since it was obvious Bandlab TONS more efficient that Sonar anyway. Both programs have identical config settings and use WASAPI shared. I could try it with ASIO too but kind of lost interest since it's obvious for me that I don't want to trade that much of performance.

I did have one channel visible with the spectrum analyzer, I turned it off and it didn't make much difference but it got me thinking - I tried to get rid of everything that was moving on screen - Piano roll, track view, everything that was animated on the Control bar, leaving just Console view so the only moving things were a couple of channel levels. It easily shaved off some ~20% of CPU usage (40 vs 33 in the Task Manager) which was much closer to Bandlab usage, so I guess most of the CPU usage difference comes from the new vector gfx overhead, mystery solved.

I simply look at the Task manager with the same project running. Where Bandlab uses 30% Sonar uses 40%. Where Bandlab is one/two plug-in away from start crackling, Sonar is already crackling. So when I see in the changes "we made several performance improvements to the audio engine to improve CPU use" I wonder under what circumstances these improvements become apparent, maybe you need some Threadripper 24 threads CPU and the 10 threads one I have are not enough to see the improvement. Right now what I see is a perfomance downgrade compared to Bandland on _my particlual computers_.

Hello, A question to those who has directly compared performance of the new Sonar after the newest performance enhancements with Bandlab and has found Sonar is faster/snappier/etc. The reason I'm asking is under all circumstances with all different projects I've tried on two different computers with ASIO and WASAPI, Bandlab _always_ uses less CPU for the same projects and allows more plugins until it starts to crackle. I'm just wondering under what conditions these enhancements become visible.

A probably not hard to implement feature request: right now we have adjustable time delay for MIDI tracks in ticks, there were numerous requests to make it possible to also adjust it in milliseconds and the developers replied that it was not that simple and pretty hard to implement, that's understandable since they sure know better, plus there's now the articulations adjustable both in ticks and ms. But! Why not add an option to simply _display_ this time delay in ms while still adjusting in ticks, taking in account the current tempo? It will be all irregular numbers like 2.416 ms and you won't be able to set it to be exactly 2 ms, but you would still get an idea of the actual delay in ms.

This is so obvious thing to add, not sure how many times I've instinctively clicked there expecting the full EQ to show up, to no avail.

I do know work arounds but they all are less than optimal when you constantly add/remove notes so you need to keep track of what has already been shortened and what needs to be shortened manually again. I think it's a fair request to be able to separate in time the note on/off messages automatically if needed.

Please consider adding a global MIDI option to shorten all midi notes by a few ticks so "note on" and "note off" don't have the same timestamp when the notes are connected. I believe Cubase has this. Those messages having the same timestamp is giving problems with Halion's Megatrig module (used in almost every patch) in the way that connected notes are simply won't sound.

All settings are the same, but you're right, it maybe because there's lots of debugging code inside which will be later removed. My system is very similar to yours too, looks like.

For some reason the performance has been actually downgraded with Sonar taking significantly more CPU here compared to CW, in every project I've tried, from 10% up to 80% depending on the project.

Hi, I have a certain eye condition where light on dark text is basically unreadable to me, with white on black being the worst. Luckily there's good old Mercury to the rescue. However there's a major design inconsistency where menus such as "Insert FX" have white text on black background (used to be dark on light grey) even if you choose any light color theme. Same goes for export and articulation dialogues. If one chooses a light theme for a reason it makes no sense to give them the opposite in quite a few places. The question is, will it be fixed for the final release?