This explains a lot about Cakewalk/Sonar

[rocksmoot]

Sounds like a failing disk drive, they do flakey stuff when they don't just crap out all together. Maybe a new drive is warranted; at the least a reinstall is in order. I do hope you solve the issue, I'm a platinum user and am very pleased with the product. Incidentally, the tools menu is there on my installation and the default caching options are as others have reported.

[deastman]

No one is talking about a Windows setting that Sonar changed. The Windows cache setting being discussed is a Sonar settings that, in jens' case, defaulted to the not-recommended setting.

I just recently installed Sonar Platinum on a new laptop which has never had an installation before. I just went and checked the preferences, and those settings are not enabled by default on mine.

[trimph1]

Wait until something is done. Then watch how much you can see change.

On my 8 core 32Gb system it started up then crashola. 7x over one week. Different times as well. Different scenarios. It even lost files...and no...I don't have any failing hardware here. I can run Studio One v2 with everything loaded to the gills and have it run for a long time without crashing to desktop.

[jens]

Wait until something is done.

The default snap-setting already says a lot about what's the main target group of Sonar...

[trimph1]

Wait until something is done.

The default snap-setting already says a lot about what's the main target group of Sonar...

Don't they though.

Attempt #3 of getting on this board...2 times "board unavailable"

[whyterabbyt]

Also, Cakewalk has not remove the Plug-in Manager from the "Utilities" menu in Sonar.

I'd give you a goddamned screen shot to PROVE that it's missing in my 64-bit Sonar and present in my 32-bit Sonar (or visa versa), but my data drive died and the PC is half disassembled. No, that's not license to blame this reported weird Sonar behavior on me or my computer.

What's in the Sonar Utilities menus is set by registry entries, AFAIR. If your computer corrupted its Registry somehow, or you did something which altered those Registry settings, then it would not be Sonar that is responsible for the menu item being missing.

http://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Knowled ... Tools-menu

Sonar does not change Windows' write-caching settings. Cakewalk recommends you do this (as do other websites that offer tips on optimizing your PC for audio or video editing), but they do not change it for you, because they don't know what else will "break" if they change it during installation.

No one is talking about a Windows setting that Sonar changed. The Windows cache setting being discussed is a Sonar settings that, in jens' case, defaulted to the not-recommended setting.[/quote]

Unless it didnt default to that and was subsequently changed, or it inherited it from a previous set of Sonar settings that had been set that way, or the configuration file was corrupted in some way, in which case it would not be Sonar which that is responsible for the setting not being set to its intended default.

Your failure to comprehend what we say here doesn't make our statements wrong.

Your failure to exclude any possible reason for these things except 'Sonar did something bad' doesnt make your statements right.

Common computer problem discussion formula.

Aka 'The Jace-BeOS 'blame the technical guy' interpretation

The Standard first response from tech people to users that experience software problems said tech people are unfamiliar with: "you must be doing it wrong, because it's fine on my computer".

And noone ever does it wrong, obviously.

Second response: "your system must be messed up, because it's fine on mine." This is the fallback position after they're told to kindly piss off with their user-blame. It's still passive-aggressively blaming the user, but now they can say they're blaming the user's computer/configuration in specific (which the user is responsible for).

For someone who's so easily pissed off by people using phrases to mean things totally at odds with the actual definition, you might want to check the definition of passive-aggressive. Ho hum.

Of course, noone's system is ever responsible, obviously.

Almost never do tech people admit that, yeah, computers are inconsistent voodoo that screws some people harder than others for no sensible or measurable reason other than some untested mixture of unknown variables (and no one else cares to work it out because you're a minority situation and it's easier to blame you than admit to fundamental architectural problems inherent in this industry).

A really good tech will admit that, since there's so much that can go wrong with ten thousand variations of computer components and ten million lines of code in an OS, it's probably more impressive that some people have a good experience at all.[/quote]

And of course 'good techs' immediately point the finger at the rare wierd voodoo, instead of erroneously suggesting that the more common interactions, ie user intercession and system configuration specifics are responsible as all those 'bad techs' suggest.

Hence, I always start trying to solve computer problems by lighting some candles, and rolling out some healong chakra stones, so calm the voodoo, instead of trying to get the user to explain exactly what they did, exactly what they're seeing, and the exact set of circumstances which cause the unexpected behaviour, something which those users are always more than willing to provide carefully, honestly, and in meticulous, consistent detail. Because computer users dont ever do dumb stuff. Unless they're 'tech people' of course.

[jens]

Unless it didnt default to that and was subsequently changed, or it inherited it from a previous set of Sonar settings that had been set that way, or the configuration file was corrupted in some way, in which case it would not be Sonar which that is responsible for the setting not being set to its intended default.

On my machine it apparently defaulted to that on X3 - I never used X3 and (as far es I remember) never even opened the Preferences dialog just once. All I did was loading a few old projects I last saved with S4 - X3 failed to play them back properly and after wasting like an hour or so in X3 I didn't touch it anymore.

[whyterabbyt]

Unless it didnt default to that and was subsequently changed, or it inherited it from a previous set of Sonar settings that had been set that way, or the configuration file was corrupted in some way, in which case it would not be Sonar which that is responsible for the setting not being set to its intended default.

On my machine it apparently defaulted to that on X3 - I never used X3 and (as far es I remember) never even opened the Preferences dialog just once. All I did was loading a few old projects I last saved with S4 - X3 failed to play them back properly and after wasting like an hour or so in X3 I didn't touch it anymore.

That's not really what I was addressing, Im certainly not disputing that there's something awry. Its the false dichotomy of 'the user cannot have done this therefore the software did it itself' that I was concerned with; the logic posited, not the instance in question.

as for the instance, as far as I know, Sonar doesnt modify any of its preference settings at initial startup or 'on the fly' eg to suit different system capabilities; if it did, that's the kind of thing that you could attribute to the software, but that kind of tailoring still needs done manually. There is an 'initialising' step, but Im pretty sure its fairly dumb and basically just detects the first obvious soundcard device.
In fact I dont even think it picks up an ASIO driver by default or selects MIDI devices etc, you need to go into the Preferences and manually do that, set the recording bit depth to 24 bit and a few other things that I'd personally prefer had some sort of install-time smarts to it.

It doesnt seem like the kind of thing that should be inherited from the project file, but to me that smacks of a small possibility. A tickling in my aged memory suggests that way back at that (Sonar 4 is 2004 or so?) point read/write cacheing was actually desirable on that era's systems, given hard drive/CPU limitations.

[jens]

Yes, I know you weren't actually adressing me, but I wanted to clarify anyway - you might perhaps be onto something in regards to project-settings... actually I have no real idea anymore how it was back then in Sonar - I know though that realtime-monitoring, etc. always worked relative crackle-free for me - when they introduced ASIO in 2.2 it didn't really improve performance noticeably on my machine, so kernel-streaming always worked quite well in Sonar (I never did multitrack-recording though, the odd stereo-track aside) - UDMA of course made a huge difference however...

Oh, and my system was always running @512samples of latency...

[JoseC.]

Those options ARE disabled by default. It just looks like one of those moments when the clever user goes over the configuration menu turning on whatever looks good.

Of course a fanboi like you would come up with an calumny like this... how sad&predictable.

How would you know whether they are disabled by default in Sonar Platinum b.t.w.?

Wouldn't that potentially depend on previous installations, Sherlock, you great knower of Sonar?

It's part of aud.ini and as far as I know every new Sonar Installation is supposed to copy the settings of the previous Sonar intallation over, so without a completely fresh install you wouldn't even know what the default values are.... on my machine there's also X3 Studio and I just had a look at its aud.ini and sure as hell the caching is enabled there too. And why on earth would I tinker with these settings without ever even recording just a second of audio? Maybe you do it like this, but hey - it's never a good idea to judge others based on how you are yourself.

Hah! You call calumny (no less) after you have been bitching about how Sonar is coded in toilet paper just because your own install has wrong configuration settings that no one else has, and when you finally find it you keep on blaming others. I did't even put direct blame on you, I have no idea of how those settings changed, but you must admit that in spite of any finger pointing you make, you are the main suspect. The rest, name calling and such, I will let pass. Have fun and hate less, man.

[CTStump]

I was tempted to upgrade but fortunately for me I managed to fight off the impulse.

I thought about the instability I suffered in the past so I passed on it. After reading this thread where some have issues and some don't and those who haven't tell those who have that it's their fault I'm reminded of the daily reading I suffered years ago on the Cakewalk forum...

I am so glad I'm using Studio One V2. Even though I haven't even thought of upgrading it keeps running and running and running, oh well you get the picture.

[trimph1]

You know, we had gutter battles back around when X1 came out. It got to the point that anyone who had problems were seen as bashers and the one's who did not became almost fanboys in nature. That sort of carried on with the X2 release, although a little bit less of the aggro but X3/did not seem as bad.

My problems were very odd. GUI gltches galore...which seems to be a problem even now
And then my old bugbear...insert instrument in a MIDI track and poofda...
And some other bits of weirdness made me ditch Sonar Platinum for S1v3 carry on from there.

Funny thing this. Besides Platinum the other DAW that goes snaky is DP8 on this system. Yet others don't crash or do strange things...

[Jace-BeOS]

Also, Cakewalk has not remove the Plug-in Manager from the "Utilities" menu in Sonar.

I'd give you a goddamned screen shot to PROVE that it's missing in my 64-bit Sonar and present in my 32-bit Sonar (or visa versa), but my data drive died and the PC is half disassembled. No, that's not license to blame this reported weird Sonar behavior on me or my computer. Why would I make this shit up? Your unwillingness to believe it and your lack of personal experience with the problem doesn't make the problem a fiction.

Sonar does not change Windows' write-caching settings. Cakewalk recommends you do this (as do other websites that offer tips on optimizing your PC for audio or video editing), but they do not change it for you, because they don't know what else will "break" if they change it during installation.

No one is talking about a Windows setting that Sonar changed. The Windows cache setting being discussed is a Sonar settings that, in jens' case, defaulted to the not-recommended setting.

Your failure to comprehend what we say here doesn't make our statements wrong.

And why on earth would I tinker with these settings without ever even recording just a second of audio? Maybe you do it like this, but hey - it's never a good idea to judge others based on how you are yourself.

Common computer problem discussion formula.

The Standard first response from tech people to users that experience software problems said tech people are unfamiliar with: "you must be doing it wrong, because it's fine on my computer".

Second response: "your system must be messed up, because it's fine on mine." This is the fallback position after they're told to kindly piss off with their user-blame. It's still passive-aggressively blaming the user, but now they can say they're blaming the user's computer/configuration in specific (which the user is responsible for).

Almost never do tech people admit that, yeah, computers are inconsistent voodoo that screws some people harder than others for no sensible or measurable reason other than some untested mixture of unknown variables (and no one else cares to work it out because you're a minority situation and it's easier to blame you than admit to fundamental architectural problems inherent in this industry).

A really good tech will admit that, since there's so much that can go wrong with ten thousand variations of computer components and ten million lines of code in an OS, it's probably more impressive that some people have a good experience at all.

They're doing wonderful things with decaffeinated coffee these days, Jace-BeOS. You almost can't even tell the difference anymore.

I am a computer tech, and I know what can happen when menu items "disappear". And when people claim settings "change".

I am also one of the ones who believes there are so many variables involved that, as I have told my clients often (and usually to help them feel they did nothing wrong), "If you knew how much could go wrong, you'd be surprised it even works at all".

And I can show you a "goddamned screenshot to PROVE that Cakewalk did not remove the Plug-in Manager from the 'Utilities' menu", as you claimed they did.

I'm sure others could show you this too, but since you're getting pissed at me, I'll do it, as soon as I get home.

And while I could also offer possibilities as to why yours is missing (and how to put it back), I don't feel the need to do that anymore. I did not "blame" you for it being missing. I simply said (twice, since you ignored it the first time) that Cakewalk did not remove the item.

But at no point did I imply you were "doing something wrong".

And don't go for that Sanka crap. Yes, it's decaffeinated, but it's awful.

Steve

You make no sense at all. You say one thing (Cakewalk didn't remove a menu entry) and then you say that you meant the opposite. I said the menu entry disappeared and you state that I said "Cakewalk did it". Not only are you inconsistent with your own statements, you're putting words in my mouth to argue against. Strawman much???

BTW: I only drink decaf. I'm just fed up with tech geek arrogance. You never meant to make useful suggestions, just be contrary. Otherwise you could've made your suggestions straight away, instead of implying that we are lying about our tech issues with Sonar.

[trimph1]

^^^^Precisely.

[jens]

you have been bitching about how Sonar is coded in toilet paper just because your own install has wrong configuration settings that no one else has

No, absolutely not just because of that... that was just the most recent episode