A Pleaa to the Cakemakers

I love Cakewalk, use it every day. I own expanded and have purchased a number of extras from Cakewalk. Most of the time it works well. But sometimes, especially when the musical piece has grown complex, with lots of effects and tracks, the thing just bombs. Randomly. The program seems to know when a song is nearing finality, and then it crashes. Not always, and sometimes I can go weeks without issue. But when it happens its devastating. My plea is simple, make X2 the most stable ever. Concentrate on that. Make that the first key selling point. Bells and whistles are wonderful, and I know Cake must keep up with the joneses, but you have no idea how frustrating it is when the damn thing bombs after spending a kabillion hours building a song up.

Which is why I'm sticking to X1 for now. It works like a charm on my system. So until X2 is deemed to be just as solid, I won't upgrade.

Since we don't know your computer specs, we can't speculate on why you're having problems.

I'm sure the developers at Cakewalk do their best to make Sonar as stable as possible, but there are so many hardware platforms out there (motherboards, CPUs (Intel, AMD)), desktops, laptops, memory (DDR, DDR2, DDR3), soundcards (built-in, PC Card, USB, Firewire, serial, S/PDIF), operating systems (Windows XP, Win 7 and Win 8 plus Windows running on MACs) and plug-ins (many of which are homegrown), its impossible to make an application that 100% stable with all these different variables. Cakewalk does publish a list of minimum requirements to run Sonar, but that doesn't stop people from trying to run it on lesser equipped computers. Yet whenever someone has a problem or a crash, they first blame Sonar. Maybe they should be looking a little harder at their equipment, other software running, plug-ins, and Sonar configuration to find an answer. More often than not that's the culprit. I'm not saying to say Sonar is perfect, but no one should be crashing all the time because of Sonar. 

Cakewalk, along with every other major DAW designer, Roland included, simply do not have staff available to do
full integration testing for every release. The programs have just gotten too big to test fully on a even a single system
configuration. So, the consumer's idea that every release should be "rock solid" is simply not realistic. A fact of life
is that software and hardware break down, and your only defense is to acquire the knowledge to work around those
eventual certainties. If you do that, there won't be a software issue that causes you to lose more than a few minutes of
work. Just ask the question, what do I do if this thing blows up? There are several answers, and once you have a plan,
you won't have to sweat over this stuff.

Latency is not something, "you setup once, and forget about it."  The bigger your projects get, the more you have to start thinking about latency, and track freezing.  

If you are going for weeks without a crash, and sometimes, "it crashes."  than it could be any one of a number of things, not excluding a bug in any third party plugin.

daveny5

I'm sure the developers at Cakewalk do their best to make Sonar as stable as possible, but there are so many hardware platforms out there (motherboards, CPUs (Intel, AMD)), desktops, laptops, memory (DDR, DDR2, DDR3), soundcards (built-in, PC Card, USB, Firewire, serial, S/PDIF), operating systems (Windows XP, Win 7 and Win 8 plus Windows running on MACs) and plug-ins (many of which are homegrown), its impossible to make an application that 100% stable with all these different variables.

Fair enough ... but ... how 'bout they publish the specs of the system they did test Sonar on and say, "Sonar is guaranteed to work on this setup because this is what we tested it on." Hmm ... maybe they can't because then they'd have to do the right thing and refund people's money when it doesn't work the way it was advertised. There's things wrong with X1 that just simply won't work on any system anybody runs it on anywhere.

Cakewalk does publish a list of minimum requirements to run Sonar, but that doesn't stop people from trying to run it on lesser equipped computers. Yet whenever someone has a problem or a crash, they first blame Sonar. Maybe they should be looking a little harder at their equipment, other software running, plug-ins, and Sonar configuration to find an answer. More often than not that's the culprit.

Cakewalk lists generic specs that are meaningless. They say it runs on x amount of RAM but no specifics on what type, how fast, which manufacturers they tested, it runs on XP/Win7 etc, but no specifics about service packs, system adjustments etc. Their list of tested sound cards is so outdated it's a joke. These are all critical in the performance of a DAW, yet all we ever hear is, it's your system, try something different. Well, wait a second ... Cakewalk puts in writing all we need is 4GB RAM and an XP or Windows 7 system. They need to step up and say, "Ok people, this is what we tested it on, it works great, go buy it, or you are on your own with no warranty." And THEN ... when it doesn't work on the system they 'tested' it on, give the people their money back.

I'm not saying to say Sonar is perfect, but no one should be crashing all the time because of Sonar.

I agree ... but it's happening. Do you really believe that myself, and the many many others who come here all have rogue systems? As Mike said, you can tell when Sonar is going to crash. You can feel it because things start acting sluggish, you click an icon or button and there is a delay from when you click to when they activate, the Pro Channel starts to become unresponsive, or enables itself, and many other things. My M-Audio Fast Track Ultra works flawlessly with Sony Sound Forge, CD Architect, Studio One, Reaper, yet all the 'boi's keep chanting, it's your drivers, it's your drivers. Well wait a second ... if the drivers work with 3 wav editors, 4 other DAW's, Winamp, Windows Media Player, Format Factory, my DVD playing software, why is 'my' drivers that are the problem when running X1? Maybe the folks at Cakewalk should check out why the problem leans toward X1 rather than dumping the issue on the 3rd party vendor telling them to dance around Cakewalks flaky code?

X1 has been the worst release of any Sonar they have put out. I can't believe that even a fraction of what's wrong with it will be fixed in X2.