opera Posted July 1 Share Posted July 1 Hi from France. I use Sonar Cakewalk since decades and I have a lot of projects running. I see that the minimum requirements for the processor is nine cores. Actually CbB runs perfectly on my computer. It has a Intel Core I5 10400 with 6 cores. Does it mean that I have to upgrade the processor or to buy a new computer ? Or simply that Sonar will not react correctly with an heavy charge in case of a big project ? Rem : I have a 32 GO ram. Thank you for the answer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonathan Sasor Posted July 1 Share Posted July 1 17 minutes ago, opera said: Hi from France. I use Sonar Cakewalk since decades and I have a lot of projects running. I see that the minimum requirements for the processor is nine cores. Actually CbB runs perfectly on my computer. It has a Intel Core I5 10400 with 6 cores. Does it mean that I have to upgrade the processor or to buy a new computer ? Or simply that Sonar will not react correctly with an heavy charge in case of a big project ? Rem : I have a 32 GO ram. Thank you for the answer. If you're running CbB fine, you should also be fine with Sonar, so long as you're on Windows 10 or 11. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pedwal wally wally wha Posted July 1 Share Posted July 1 9 minutes ago, Jonathan Sasor said: If you're running CbB fine, you should also be fine with Sonar, so long as you're on Windows 10 or 11. so the minimum requirement is not 9 cores? so how many is it? (tbf is says 8 on the webpage https://help.cakewalk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021857753-What-are-the-minimum-requirements-for-using-Cakewalk-Sonar ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjoens Posted July 1 Share Posted July 1 (edited) I have 4 cores and 8 threads and it runs fine here. BTW, Windows 10 is about to lose support October 14 this year, as well. Edited July 1 by sjoens Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonathan Sasor Posted July 1 Share Posted July 1 46 minutes ago, loyal user said: so the minimum requirement is not 9 cores? so how many is it? (tbf is says 8 on the webpage https://help.cakewalk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021857753-What-are-the-minimum-requirements-for-using-Cakewalk-Sonar ) You can think of it more like a recommended minimum. Can it run with less than 8? Yes. Will it run as well? No. Does anything prevent you from trying it on a system below those specs? Nope. EDIT: Unless you're trying to run on an older version of Windows... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pedwal wally wally wha Posted July 1 Share Posted July 1 4 minutes ago, Jonathan Sasor said: You can think of it more like a recommended minimum. Can it run with less than 8? Yes. Will it run as well? No. Does anything prevent you from trying it on a system below those specs? Nope. EDIT: Unless you're trying to run on an older version of Windows... yep, it uses the word "suggested" 8 cores here https://www.cakewalk.com/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pedwal wally wally wha Posted July 1 Share Posted July 1 18 minutes ago, sjoens said: loose *lose Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjoens Posted July 1 Share Posted July 1 (edited) 5 minutes ago, pedant said: *lose loosen ?? o key must have stuck Edited July 1 by sjoens 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
opera Posted July 2 Author Share Posted July 2 Thanks for each of the numerous answers. I'm comforted. Nothing prevents me to try. In France Sonar users can say : "we are not alone". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TracingArcs Posted July 2 Share Posted July 2 I'm running both Cakewalk by Bandlab and the new Sonar free tier on an i5 - 10600. Without any issues. Infact it seems more efficient on the new Sonar. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starship Krupa Posted 14 hours ago Share Posted 14 hours ago My laptop has a 2-core i7 in it and runs Sonar just fine. Most of my projects consist of half a dozen virtual instrument tracks. I guess it's a good thing that my laptop can't read. A thing that I don't understand is why, if Sonar is more efficient than SONAR, the recommended system spec is higher for Sonar than it was for SONAR. 5 years ago, CbB ran fine on my old laptop with a 4 core i7 and 8G of RAM. 7 years ago, it ran fine on a Core 2 Quad Q6600 system. A couple of years ago, I set up CbB on a friend's Core 2 Duo 4G laptop. For all he wanted to do with it, record singer/guitar sketches, it worked just fine. Notably, the personal studio of Cakewalk developer Mark MacLeod is based around an i7 3770 system. 4 cores of Sandy Bridge goodness. The plug-ins I use have increased in both number and complexity in the past 10 years, and that's what's driven the upgrades I've made to my systems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starship Krupa Posted 13 hours ago Share Posted 13 hours ago On 7/1/2025 at 11:20 AM, Jonathan Sasor said: You can think of it more like a recommended minimum. I know it's not your bailiwick, but it would be nice if that wording were on that page. The reason I mention it is that I think that Sonar is a great option for people with older Windows systems and I wouldn't want them to be discouraged from using it. The minimum system I would expect to be able to run Sonar on successfully would be an i5/7 four core system with 8G of RAM and an SSD system/program drive. Although I built a CbB system that only had 4G of RAM and it didn't suffer too badly. I think that even with a healthy track count, such a system would do okay as long as you didn't expect to never have to do any freezing. AFAIK, Sonar itself doesn't require more horsepower than it did 10 years ago (I could be wrong). I think what's changed is our expectation of what's possible. Plug-ins use more resources and we use more of them. We expect everything to play back glitch free without having to freeze tracks. But does the DAW itself eat more cycles and use more RAM than it did 10 years ago? I think we just expect to be able to run 6 instances of Chromaphone with Neutron and Neoverb on every track, and Ozone on the Master bus.😄 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now