Should I Upgrade Sonar 17?

[Kent Earl]

I have 40-track projects that are very stable.

But I know Sonar v17 is quite dated at this time and the updates look good.

Can anyone offer a vote of confidence in upgrading to v2025?

Great to hear that Sonar is alive & well!

Thank you
KE

[reginaldStjohn]

My question is why would you not go to the new version? Bounce your tracks to audio files and import them into the new Sonar. Or you can try to open the old project in the new Sonar. 

[David Baay]

2 hours ago, Kent Earl said:

I know Sonar v17 is quite dated at this time and the updates look good.

By "v17", I presume you mean the last release of SONAR Platinum, 2017.10.

In any case, the new Sonar will install to its own subdirectory of Cakewalk, just sharing plugin and utility directories with old SONAR which will remain independent and run just the same so you won't have to migrate projects if they don't open and run the same or better in Sonar, though they absolutely should.

Different users have had more or less success embracing the 'flatter' look and theming/colors/contrast of the new scaleable UI. Aside from that, I think Sonar is inarguably superior to SONAR in features, performance and stability. Very few users have had any issue running old projects in Sonar. The only other potential issu I can think of is that the sizing of various view and panes, track/lane heights and plugin UIs may change, depending on your specific display scaling, but that's fairly easily corrected  on a per-project basis, or globally if you use Workspaces.

Bottom line: It will take some time to get used to all the changes and get all your preferences synced up, but it won't 'break' anything and you can transition gradually. And you can try the free tier to start; it actually has very few feature omissions vs. the subscribed version,