Could we be on the verge of SONAR 4 Producer Edition?

[jens]

Deeo inside I have this strong desire for sonar to become something I like... it's so close to my style.. but soooo flakey in my experience Not even usable in all the times Ive tried.

yeah the program itself is great to use but it is the most flakey of any i have ever used. catch 22

Care to offer any specifics? I haven't found 3 "flakey" at all. If it were, rest assured I would not be using it. I go back to Atari's and the earliest sequencers...I hate to think I don't know a "flakey" program when I see it. However, nothing is perfect I realize, so that's why I was curious what was so messed up. Everyone's experiences can be different I realize.

all versions of Sonar dissapear without a trace when something happens they don't like. It happens at lightning speed - one moment it's there and the next you're facing your desktop's dirty grin...

and no, it's neither my soundcard nor my computer configuration.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[Robert Randolph]

That's what happened when loading VST's it didnt like...


suddenly... poof.

Hey! Where'd it go!


Shit! it doesnt autosave!? ARGH.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[LoRez]

Deeo inside I have this strong desire for sonar to become something I like... it's so close to my style.. but soooo flakey in my experience Not even usable in all the times Ive tried.

yeah the program itself is great to use but it is the most flakey of any i have ever used. catch 22

Care to offer any specifics? I haven't found 3 "flakey" at all. If it were, rest assured I would not be using it. I go back to Atari's and the earliest sequencers...I hate to think I don't know a "flakey" program when I see it. However, nothing is perfect I realize, so that's why I was curious what was so messed up. Everyone's experiences can be different I realize.

Well firstly, never could get low latencies. Saw/tracktion easily get 64/92 samples depending on the card I use. Sonar was always above 5ms

I get 2ms...so do many other people.

Many VST's seemed to crash it.

---I use boat loads of VST's....no crashes. Too bad you had trouble.

If you did large multitrack editing functions (which are a bear in sonar), it would often turn to a slug.. or crash.

---Not here...or with anyone I work with.

Mixing? Everytime I tried to make a mixer thing in it, Id get all sorts of crashes... add something, slow slow... is it coming yet? nope.. crash.

---A mixer thing? Not sure what you mean. No problems with mixing here.

high cpu loads bring it to a halt. over 50% and it starts getting really weird... sequencers I use now are completely solid all the way to 100%, can barely notice a difference. Im spoiled, I refuse to accept less now.

---Again...not here. Why are our experiences so drastically different?


And well... it just crashed in the oddest times. I tried the demo for about 3 weeks. I love the look of the program, I like how it records. It'd be a perfect replacement for tracktion... if it was stable. So Im looking forward to trying v4. I strongly doubt it will though. All cakewalks products, even the rare ones that done crash.. still dont feel solid. It's hard to be confident using their software. Just something about the stock windows UI, and the overused window in window layout... so blatant.

---I have to respectfully disagree. I use it all the time with pretty hefty projects and I don't get crashes except on rare occassions...which is the case with almost all complex software. If it acted for me as you describe, rest assured it would be in the trash bin. But it flies for me. Oh well.

[Robert Randolph]

try using a plugin with a huge latency, for example waves linear, or pitchshift, and run a latency of under 5ms, and try and get the project to play back even at 20% cpu load. instant "audio dropout" "audio dropout" over and over and over again. i tried with three different soundcards between a pentium 4 3.2gig and an athlon3200+. i had to set latency somehwere around 30ms to get stable playback when using effects with large latencies that required pdc. simply not good enough.

I think that's because sonar tries to buffer the latency, rather than shifting the tracks, which is a great way to do it... but they neglect the need to incorporate both methods incase the buffer is smaller than the plugin latency.

just plain bad programming. Something cakewalk has often been accused of.

It really is a great concept, but they cant seem to execute it very well And it's saddening.

[sluggo]

Care to offer any specifics?

I found the demo very disappointing in the audio performance. The fact that the term "gapless audio" was used for Sonar indicates a problem. No other host uses this term because they've never had a problem - it's just not an issue. However, with Sonar I would get glitches and stutters whenever doing midi edits, loop stuff, etc. Other than that, I found Sonar to be pretty cool.

[Robert Randolph]

I don't get crashes except on rare occassions

rarely is too much. Tracktions only crashed once on me that I can remember. Saw has crashed due to faulty VST's... which isnt a problem, I simply deleted them.

My main problem with sonar and large projects was sonar becoming sluggish. UI slows down, meters slow down, everything grinds to a halt. Like I said, Im spoiled... saw takes 100% cpu use and everything is bright and cheery and reactive as if there's no project loaded with no need to bump up your buffers to some crazy amount. Tracktion's the same way... Except the meters slow a bit.

[LoRez]

That's what happened when loading VST's it didnt like...


suddenly... poof.

Hey! Where'd it go!


Shit! it doesnt autosave!? ARGH.

It does autosave if you tell it to. What VST's crash it?

[Robert Randolph]

That's what happened when loading VST's it didnt like...


suddenly... poof.

Hey! Where'd it go!


Shit! it doesnt autosave!? ARGH.

It does autosave if you tell it to. What VST's crash it?

It doesnt autosave on crash :-\ Id not normally ask for that kind of thing, but it crashed a lot Would almost be livable if it saved my work before it poofed away.


And Mostly it was either my waves plugins (which I no longer use, but did a lot at the time of the demoing), and synthedit stuff.

[LoRez]

I don't get crashes except on rare occassions

rarely is too much. Tracktions only crashed once on me that I can remember. Saw has crashed due to faulty VST's... which isnt a problem, I simply deleted them.

My main problem with sonar and large projects was sonar becoming sluggish. UI slows down, meters slow down, everything grinds to a halt. Like I said, Im spoiled... saw takes 100% cpu use and everything is bright and cheery and reactive as if there's no project loaded with no need to bump up your buffers to some crazy amount. Tracktion's the same way... Except the meters slow a bit.

Rarely is too much? What program doesn't crash on some occassion? I'm not talking daily or weekly or anything, but if you have a program that you beat on that has NEVER crashed...I want it.

[Robert Randolph]

I don't get crashes except on rare occassions

rarely is too much. Tracktions only crashed once on me that I can remember. Saw has crashed due to faulty VST's... which isnt a problem, I simply deleted them.

My main problem with sonar and large projects was sonar becoming sluggish. UI slows down, meters slow down, everything grinds to a halt. Like I said, Im spoiled... saw takes 100% cpu use and everything is bright and cheery and reactive as if there's no project loaded with no need to bump up your buffers to some crazy amount. Tracktion's the same way... Except the meters slow a bit.

Rarely is too much? What program doesn't crash on some occassion? I'm not talking daily or weekly or anything, but if you have a program that you beat on that has NEVER crashed...I want it.

Your experiences were different than mine. Rarely in sonar to me was once every day. Sonar seems to work for you (wish it did for me), so your idea of rarely is probabaly one a week or month.

In my experience, assuming you dont use badly coded VST's SAW never crashes... and Ive gotten tracktion itself to crash once in a year. And Ive only seen samplitude crash in the demo version... full version never crashed on me. Sequoia has crashed on me a few times tho.

[LoRez]

That's what happened when loading VST's it didnt like...


suddenly... poof.

Hey! Where'd it go!


Shit! it doesnt autosave!? ARGH.

It does autosave if you tell it to. What VST's crash it?

It doesnt autosave on crash :-\ Id not normally ask for that kind of thing, but it crashed a lot Would almost be livable if it saved my work before it poofed away.


And Mostly it was either my waves plugins (which I no longer use, but did a lot at the time of the demoing), and synthedit stuff.

I use Waves heavily! Never a crash as far as I can remember. Anyway, we could go back and forth on this. I'm not attacking you, just asking you to realize the possibility that others don't have the experience you had. I would really dump it if it acted the way it did for you. My experience is vastly different and I'm not a "light" user or newbie.

And just for the record, I have longstanding experience with SAW and Samplitude. I agree that both are powerful and unique applications.
BTW:I believe SAW actually had an influence on the name of "Vegas" I used to use SAW back in the day when it was just a 4-track. I had it synced up to Logic...bot those were the days...

[Robert Randolph]

Could you post your system specs? And your average uses? I wonder if they are drastically different than mine?


It seems weird that all the people who had problems Ive seen, were demoing it. And all the purchasers have had no problems? Ive yet to hear of someone leaving sonar because of these problems.. only people not buying it because of.

Is the demo severly bugged maybe!?!

[jens]

b.t.w.: Sonar is very good at crashing while trying to save when it is runnning meanwhile


I once tried to find out which of the ~30 plugins I used caused the crash - I first deleted a ll the vst'
s, one after the other - the most suspicious first - then, as that didn't help, all the dx-plugins, again one after the other - in the end I spent about one hour, all the plugins were gone and it still crashed.

Apparently it is like this: When it decided once that it doesn't like a project it stays true to that decision whatever may happen.

Better leave that song and start a new one until sonar decides that it also doesn't like this song.