A personal thanks to Noel - who made sure I stayed as a Sonar user.

Some of you guys know I am pretty serious about what I do, and I like to do it on Sonar. I do MASSIVE projects sometimes - those are mostly DVD concert mixes, 80 or 90+ tracks, 3+ hours, 20+ busses, sidechains and plugins up the yinyang. Needless to say those are also normally under big pressure, and when things go wrong I have pretty big clients tapping their feet and looking at their watches. You don't tell a TV channel with several million viewers to wait while you try to debug your DAW..
 
Thus recently it came to a point where I nearly had to get rid of Sonar as a project was becoming so unstable that it was 20 computer restarts per day, 30 SPLAT restarts a session etc etc. Random crashes, closes and errors all the time. And my projects started taking up to 3 minutes (yes, you read correctly) to save every time I hit save.. which I had to do a lot due to the instability of the system.
 
To cut a long story short, Noel Borthwick, CTO of Cakewalk and a guy who certainly has a fair whack on his plate, personally looked through my Crash Dumps and project files and spotted the one common denominator between all of the issues: Melodyne Essential 4.0 (yes, some of you guys did suspect that in my early cries for help - but hard to bounce clips when you're not done tuning right?)..

Once it was identified as the culprit and I bounced all the tuned clips down to wavs, all of the issues magically disappeared. It leaves me not so impressed with Melodyne right now, but has restored my faith in the Bakers. I really really hope that Celemony will sort out their troubles asap, but that's another email I'm about to write to them.
 
The lesson Noel taught me is that it only takes ONE plugin to wreck an entire DAW. Keep that in mind if you can, I certainly will :O)
 
Hope this little post helps some of ya'll.
 
Ludwig

Awesome. You don't get that treatment on other DAWs.

I might also mention that a good few of Noel's emails were sent to me on Saturday and Sunday - at VERY odd hours..

  I love good news.  Thanks for sharing.

anxiousmofo

dcumpian
That's always the risk with any plugin, but it seems often to be more prevalent with "giveaway" plugins, like the cut-down version of Melodyne or TH3. It's one of the reason I buy a plugin if I want to use it rather than rely on "freebies", even though we know they aren't really free. The plugin vendors don't seem to test the "free" versions as well, unfortunately.
 
Dan
 

I do believe Melodyne Essential normally costs $99.00.  Not free.

Free/included to those that bought SONAR Platinum (maybe Producer too? I dunno).

bapu

anxiousmofo

dcumpian
That's always the risk with any plugin, but it seems often to be more prevalent with "giveaway" plugins, like the cut-down version of Melodyne or TH3. It's one of the reason I buy a plugin if I want to use it rather than rely on "freebies", even though we know they aren't really free. The plugin vendors don't seem to test the "free" versions as well, unfortunately.
 
Dan
 

I do believe Melodyne Essential normally costs $99.00.  Not free.

Free/included to those that bought SONAR Platinum (maybe Producer too? I dunno).

This is true, and that's how I have it.  I was just pointing out that it is normally an independent, paid product. As such, it should presumably be tested as well as the more robust, polyphonic-processing-capable version. Or perhaps be easier to QC, given that the feature set is more limited and straightforward.

+1

Noel has reached out to me directly on a few occasions and been very helpful. A top notch engineer and company bloke

LJB
 
The lesson Noel taught me is that it only takes ONE plugin to wreck an entire DAW. Keep that in mind if you can, I certainly will :O) 
Hope this little post helps some of ya'll.
 
Ludwig

Worth a bump.

Some of us had projects that were corrupted and would no longer open if we dared save with melo 4.04 in there until we uninstalled Melodyne . I'm glad that didn't happen to you. I was working on getting some data to support for an unrelated issue and the morning after updating to melo 4 from 2 the test project would no longer open - for a few days, while what was wrong was determined. I remember that Saturday in the spring like it was yesterday. Been using V-Vocal all summer since.

Now this is a feel good thread, giving Noel some credit for his amazing dedication to making Cakewalk the BEST DAW.
Both Melodyne and Cakewalk are very complex programming, I enjoy using both, and the fact they work together with ARA just takes it to another level. Yes, I've had some Melodyne issues inside Cakewalk . . . but all were solved eventually.
 
And . . . it continues to be developed (I haven't checked it out yet, but I see there are more Melodyne/Cakewalk improvements in the latest SONAR 2016.09 update !)
 
Ludwig, thanks for sharing the story . . . you're much more a "power user" than me, and if I ever get to "DVD concert mixes, 80 or 90+ tracks, 3+ hours, 20+ busses, sidechains and plugins up the yinyang" . . . I'll know I have the right DAW for the job.

bapu
And here I thought the OP was gonna say Noel shipped him his CW Coffee Mug (washed of course).

Washed?  That would be washing off all the good juju.  Would you wash Elvis' Jeans too?

Thanks for the kind words guys. There are several folks at Cakewalk (including support of course) who routinely help out customers on forums and social media when we can.
Although we are now close to normal with incoming support issues, we still have backlog to deal with so more of us are pitching in to help with that.
I'm glad Ludwig's issue is resolved. The last Melodyne Betas have been pretty stable so I'm hoping these issues will all be gone when it ships. 

I've seen Noel around a lot lately helping other users (asking for crash dumps, exc)
that's very cool. you typically don't see the CTO interacting with other users as much as he does.
I believe this is where you build a good relationship with your users. Like he is just another user...like we are.
I respect that a lot.

Yeah - Piling on.
 
I reeeally love the Sonar Platinum workstation, and very much appreciate the support of the bakers and Noel, and this forum.
 
Sonar (and all the very cool instruments out there) has taken my mind places I never knew existed.
 
Thank you!