Sonar 2025.08 Feedback

[Jonathan Sasor]

Hi all - please use this topic to post feedback specific to the Sonar 2025.08 release. Release-specific feedback is valuable to us, and consolidating it in a single topic is extremely helpful.

We request that  discussion in this thread be restricted to issues directly concerning this release, to make it easier for us to assist users. For other topics, kindly use the feature request section or create new posts.  Off topic messages will be deleted.

Thanks in advance!

[exitse7en]

One thing that has driven me crazy about Sonar since migrating is the auto save - it's fantastic on one hand and has already saved me tons of work, but INCREDIBLY irritating on the other, because whenever it happens it closes whatever context menu you have open at the time, interrupting your workflow. If you could fix that issue I would be so very happy. I know I can just turn it off, but again...it's fantastic on the other hand, I just want it to quit shutting me down if I'm adjusting a curve or something, hahah.

[Noel Borthwick]

There is no change in behavior in Sonar in this regard. Make a different thread for this.
Is it only context menus that are interrupted? Which specific menus in particular?

[Greg Wynn]

Thank you for the plugin color changes for vst2 and vst3 !!


 

[IgoRr]

Good day to all!

Yesterday night I installed the latest version - build 08.004, opened my last project, which I worked with before, and immediately noticed an increase in the audio engine load. Sometimes the load indicator exceeds 280-300%. Artifacts and even slight slowdowns appeared during playback. I installed it over the previous version, the settings remained the same, but the audio engine load increased noticeably even in the idle mode of the project. For many years I have been working on the audio system settings of 48 kHz 24 bit 386 samples, and even in the most difficult projects the audio engine withstood such settings without problems. I opened the settings in the panel of my audio card - Steinberg UR22-C, and increased the buffer size to 512 samples, now it has become better, but sometimes, still, small artifacts in the sound are heard. This is very strange, because the project has very little processing - no more than 10-12 plugins in total (none particularly heavy), 5 activated ProChannel, one audio track, and 8 MIDI tracks with sending to Kontakt (strings groups).

Can you check the loading status of the audio engine and the system as a whole, so that I can understand why Sonar's behavior during playback has changed so much? My system runs on an Intel QuadCore i3 8350K, 24GB RAM, and before this update, I did not experience any noticeable problems with projects in either Cakewalk by Bandlab or Sonar. I understand that for the new Sonar it is desirable to have an 8-core (or more) processor, but everything worked quite well on the same hardware before. Or maybe there are some tips on setting up Sonar itself or the audio system that can fix the situation.

Thanks in advance!

[Noel Borthwick]

There are zero changes that would have changed anything with the audio engine. The only changes between the prior version and this are whats listed which are mainly crashes and stability fixes. Something else is going on with your system. Load can be affected by background processes or Windows itself. Try rebooting and ensure nothing is running that would consume CPU resources. Run DPC latency checker etc to troubleshoot. Any system or driver changes can impact streaming performance in Windows.
You could also validate whether you see the same thing in CbB.

[IgoRr]

4 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Any system or driver changes can impact streaming performance in Windows.

Thanks, Noel, for your reply!
No (at all) changes in the system since yesterday morning, there were no changes in my computer, I did not install, uninstall, clean the registry, etc. I checked everything very carefully several times - in the complete absence of any other running programs, processes and services (I used the "Task Manager"), nothing changes in the behavior of Sonar - the audio engine load is noticeably higher than before in the same projects, I opened 5-6 different projects to check. I have several very heavy projects with 120+ tracks, including 10+ audio tracks, about a dozen different VSTI, and quite a lot of different processing, these projects slow down very much in this latest version, which was not observed in the penultimate one. And the same projects, in Cakewalk by Bandlab, work practically without anomalies, and with a noticeably lower audio engine load - about 15-20% down in peak values. Moreover, for the purpose of the experiment, I installed the previous version (build 109), and nothing like that happens in it. To completely exclude any coincidences, I again reduced the number of samples to 386, as it was before, and everything works without any problems. And when I reinstalled this latest version on top, a higher audio engine load is observed again. In principle, I can work with even higher sample buffer values (768, 1024, etc.), since I do not directly record audio or instruments, but the very fact of increased audio engine load forces me to ask these questions.

I fully admit that the problem is in my computer, but I would like to understand what it is in order to try to fix it. And one more question: it seemed to me that in the previous release it was already stated that the initial screen with the counter was removed when Sonar was launched, but in both the previous version and this one, it continues to appear, did I misunderstand you?