99 Problems, but Paying Cakewalk Ain't One

Had I in front of me a button that, when pressed, would instantly incinerate all Cakewalk staff, it would require a monstrous feat of self control to refrain from slapping it ten times. Over the past three days, I have worked exclusively on a single orchestral composition, and in that time, I have made exactly zero progress due to Sonar falling apart over and over and over. In one day, I had five crashes which lost me several hours work -- well, actually one hour of work repeated five times. I am now auto saving every forty-five minutes, a safety measure which, itself, sometimes crashes Sonar.
 
I see posts where people complain about Sonar being buggy and replies from others who claim to have no problems. My guess is that the people with no problems are using relatively few tracks or samples as I, myself, have no problems in similar situations.
 
My latest crippling issue is that for some odd reason Sonar refuses to record expression (Ch. 11) data and inserts errant data into tracks arbitrarily. I called support about this, and the tech replied "yeah, that can happen. Don't know why." He advised me to delete the midi track and create a new one, which worked until the issue cropped up again. Now, I can't do anything without some track becoming similarly corrupted. The result is that I have close to zero control over balance, and my violins are launching a spiccatto insurrection against my solo soprano while the bass seems to always be announcing the imminent arrival of Jaws on stage.
 
Also, all my other lanes get changed and become uneditable. So channel 7, which I used initially to set volume is all out of whack and unchangeable. Also, key switches disappear and, in the case of my trumpets, linger from long ago and resist all attempts to eradicate them. (It's always a pleasant sound when a trumpet doubling a lilting soloist suddenly decides to start playing sforzandos with his tongue wagging out the bell of his horn.)
 
I'm using quite a few samples from East West, but my computer is nowhere near taxed. It seldom reaches over 60% cpu. My ram hovers around 50%, and all samples are on an SSD. I'm using legit plugins, i.e. not pirated, with a new Windows installation approximately one-week old. The only questionable thing I'm using is tencrazy's channel switcher, which covers a gaping hole in the functionality of Sonar.
If anyone has any advice that doesn't involve starting over yet again, I'd love to hear it. My suspicion is that Sonar just can't handle what I'm throwing at it or I'm missing something completely obvious.

WI typically use 100 or so tracks with dozens of fx and sometimes a score or more Synths (VSTIs) with generally no problems. On the rare occasion that problems occur it's invariably been tracked back to a plugin or some mixture of Windows and Sonar settings that have come into conflict.

Of the problems you see here many are due to user error as there are many new users with little experience here. Others come presenting errors and we collectively help them sort out the problems. There are also a lot of post enquiring of the best way to do something as there are many new features.

Certainly don't deny you're having problems but if you can be more specific about the process that brings them about, maybe we can help.

You could help us by listing your entire system spec, configuration, interface etc.
 
I have absolutely no problem running EWQLSO Platinum in a 135 track project with multiple key switching drum maps, extensive use of Midi controllers and about seven instances of Play.
 
So from my experience, it ain't Sonar that's causing your problems.

I have certainly had my share of mystery controller changes and key-switches being ignored.   Unfortunately haven't been able to pinpoint why and how, but I sympathize with your feelings.   In trying to adapt to Sonar (since it doesn't adapt very well to me) I've gotten more and more methodical to make sure my key strokes and mouse clicks are where I think they are ... unwanted track and clip and event selection, and unintended modification, are very very very frequent.  

I can confirm the picture you give of the controller ("one expression lane superimposed over the other", as you said).   I see that very frequently, and have never identified how to avoid it.   I usually fix it by re-selecting the appropriate controller using the selectors on the left in PRV controller pane. 

Oh, I'm using 64bit windows.
 

Audio from the graphics card. what is that?

mudgel
Audio from the graphics card. what is that?

some cards with hdmi allow you to use it as an audio output.

None of my hard disks are green. I know the SSD is the very latest performance drive from Samsung, considered to be the leader in SSD tech. I just looked at the box for the Toshiba HD, but it wasn't helpful. It just said "Toshiba 3.5 Hard disk." However, I know for certain it's not a green drive since when selecting parts initially I chose two substandard drives based on price, and a buddy (an engineer) explained to me the bit about the green drives. Thus, I went with his recommendations, both of which were considered high performance.

In the Nvidia control panel, all devices for sound are grayed out and listed as unavailable, which I take to mean no sound is coming from the graphics card.
 

Good, that you are now looking into another direction,
doesn´t mean that Splat can´t be the reason for your probs,
but I´m editing here projects with 78 and more tracks ,4-8 synths aso  and
heavy duty fx per track-works  smooth as butter- you know?
good luck 

And:
If I understand  right, you are running 2 audio interfaces at the same time,
the presonus for recording or so and a focusrite for playback..........?
I so, try using one !
regards

I have the Focusrite and an onboard soundcard which I am not using. The focusrite is running at 96k 24 bit depth with 512 samples.
 

Stuntpickle
for some odd reason Sonar refuses to record expression

They don't include this feature.

A couple of things.

MIDI. Going on your first post your problems seem to be MIDI rather than audio related, so the audio interface doesn't seem particularly relevant.

The piano roll view screenshot. Are you certain it only contains data from a single MIDI track? If you're viewing more than one track at the same time then that might explain the brown MIDI CC events you can't edit and why you can write over them but they are still there. The new CCs you write being in a different track to the ones you want to alter.

Secondly issues with MIDI turning up in unanticipated or unintended places would seem to indicate a problem with MIDI routing somewhere. Possibly a hardware issue, possibly recording to more than one track without realising it. Possibly related to MIDI channels where data on different channels is being sent to different tracks other than the intended one.