Do Themes Not Work in Sonar Now?

[johnegenes@gmail.com]

Hello,

Just getting my feet wet with Cakewalk Sonar Ver 2025.07  I'm a longtime user of Cakewalk, going all the way back to floppy disks. My go-to version has mostly been Sonar 8.5, but I do have X2 and Platinum, along with the Bandlab version. My new version, 2025.07 is the full subscription version, so I have the Cakewalk Product Center installed and have installed various plugins, etc. 
From what I've read, I should be able to import Themes into Cakewalk, but it doesn't seem to be able to do that. I see no listing for "Themes" in the Preferences area (under "Customization"). I've attached a snapshop of my Prefs window. 

I can import Colors, from my old Sonar 8.5, but the results aren't very good. I really don't like the themes that come with this program and would like to change them. I do have the Cakewalk Theme Editor, which works in Bandlab, but not in Cakewalk Sonar. I guess at this point I'm just a bit confused. I thought I was UPGRADING from Cakewalk Bandlab to the paid version of Cakewalk Sonar, but I don't really see much improvement, except for some plugins (most of which I already had). 

So, my question is: how do you re-skin the paid version of Cakewalk Sonar? Thanks. 
--john

[Colin Nicholls]

Hi John, unfortunately that is correct. Themes are not supported in the new Sonar. It uses an entirely different graphics/display engine (vector based, not bitmaps) as part of the High-DPI support.

It's early days, though, and BandLab/Cakewalk haven't ruled out bringing back some form of user-customization for colors in Sonar. 

I fully expect to see some kind of theming back in the product in the near future but it won't be based on the previous theming engine, and those Cakewalk themes will not be compatible. 

The built-in themes (more than just Tungsten and Mercury!) do a good job and being generally acceptable to most people but of course there's always something that, if only we could tweak slightly, would make it perfect 🙂

I hope that helps.