Yes, this nasty issue happens here as well in 4.03. The problem with reverting back to 4.02 [at least for UAD users] is the EVIL err=21 issue. The 4.03 patch seemed to almost wipe the err=21 issue out. [it still happens, but very infrequently].

Why am I ALWAYS in the minority
-Brian

Anybody got an idea of when 4.0.4 will be released? They are billing people for S5 and CW has never billed me till they shipped for an upgrade...........................JDW

Hey db,

That's what I figured...frustration and having to wait for 4.0.4 (and 5 if you pre ordered it)

The look elsewhere generally is very accurate...folks tend to go , look , try , scream is horror and beg Sonar to reinstall.

Best medicine is to go shopping, buy some new plug ins and learn how to use them ... get yer kicks of the new stuff and by the time you blink 4.0.4 will be here.

Decided to pick up Camel Space for fun and got around to buying the Voxengo mixing suite.

I've concluded that Software based studios are a bit like your footie team (I assume one of the Sheffields for you...or you may say there is only one team in sheffield)...every time a new version of the team and an upgrade to a new kit/manager is made...we have huge expectations...only to find that plyers randomly drop out through injury and lose games that they had no business losing.

Long suffereing Newport County supporter here...we are interviewing for a new manager.
So we are currently shareware !

Although I would compare:

Pro Tools to Man utd folk are catching up to and bettering..... since the MBox (Djemba Djema)and players falling like flies
Sonar to Liverpool...Won the Champions league but really need to concentrate on being top in the league (Champions league money will help that) With the Roland voice thing being the keeper
Cubase to Middleborough... always underperforming and full of bugs
Arsenal would have to be Project 5 or Reason ...totally swanky cool but not going to be the ultimate, bu the most fun to get engrossed in.

Yes there are others, but I don't know too much about them

Anyway, just hang in there shouldn't be too long now a couple of weeks probably.

Best medicine is to go shopping, buy some new plug ins and learn how to use them

What am I, your wife?

I know you mean well, bermuda, but damn, have some respect here. Now maybe Sonar is just another toy you can put away for awhile to go play with other toys, but for me it's represents my heart, soul, blood, sweat, and tears.

We don't play "footie" here in the heart of Illiniois, but we DO play FOOTBALL...American style...and I'm feeling like a beat up and bruised quarterback that's been sacked one too many times by this bigass 350 pound defensive tackle.

Now, to top it off, Sonar crashed my entire system (reboot required) TWICE last night! This is pro audio?

Sorry, I know I'm being reduced to dramatic, frustrated blabber here. I don't mean to offend anyone...but shopping? Excuse me while I go punch myself in the face.

db

ORIGINAL: bermuda

Hey Cake,

Would be good if some of the affected get to test the beta.

May help identifyany other issues. before Sonar 5 goes live !

Now that... Is an excellent idea.

Ahhhhhhh... Another day, another mysterious crash. Damn this recording is fun. I have not had so much fun in my 10+ years of doing DAW. Make's me reminisce of EMU/Creative drivers..............JDW

I talked to Ron via Email last week. He was collecting info on this very problem. Ona, I think we have the same problem. Db here and a few others do also. The reason they are having a bear with it. Is that it is so random. And for me anyhow not the same behaviour everytime. Same results, but I've been unable to make it crash. Only started after installing 4.0.3, I changed nothing else.. Ron said in another thread it was in Beta as we speak.................JDW

Best medicine is to go shopping, buy some new plug ins and learn how to use them ... get yer kicks of the new stuff and by the time you blink 4.0.4 will be here.

Great idea.....add one more variable to the puzzle

This thing is crazy random. I haven't had it happen in 3 weeks.
Still feels like I'm standing in front of a firing line waiting for it to re-emerge.

Truly bizzare.....

great thread! I was just about to post for help about this issue and it's good to find answers about the audio dropouts.

I've been driving myself bonkers the past couple of days with swapping out firewire cards and tweaking all sorts of settings. Never had any trouble like this on Sonar 3 recording at 96kHz but Sonar 4 is a major headache so far.

Recently got the upgrade to Producer 4.01, and patched it to 4.03, with free upgrade to 5 coming soon. I was beginning to think this was something to do with changes to my setup hardware wise. I got an external firewire drive which is where this issue happens at an obnoxious rate. But that's not it because I can still get dropouts to happen on the internal harddrive, just far less frequently.

On the external drive it happens about every 45 seconds during recording where there is some major churn on the harddrive and the audio sputters and the audio playback buffers are obviously being starved. I'm usually just working with 8 or less tracks and only recording one stereo track. Very limited amount of plugins. No matter how I tweak the audio buffer and latency settings, I cannot make the issue go away. Very similar to the way krizrox described it. Just sit there and play nothing and the other tracks puke all over the place.

I'm using Oxford chipset on the external drive and bought a TI based FW card the other day to see if that was it. Definitely not the hw setup I've got. Glad to hear its a Cakewalk acknowledged issue because it seemed like it might be something more fundamental like the OS/drivers and then we might never get a fix.

I guess for now I'll see how 4.02 works out.

ORIGINAL: C Hudson
You should read a little closer,

Ron said 1 or 2 out of 100 on only a very specific set of files.
IOW, 99.9% of the time those 1-2% never see it either.

Thanks for the tip, though I believe my reading abilities are just fine.
The frequency ( or lack there of) seems to play out in my experience.

In fact, the problem is so random ( or better stated..isolated to such a small group of factors), that I've chosen to live under that firing line. The gapless audio improvements have made a tremendous difference in my workflow, so that is what keeps me on 4.03.
The ability to do on-the-fly slip edits/deletes/etc...has really been a godsend.

So from a practical standpoint, the bug makes my workflow 100% bad only 1% of the time, but the other improvements make me smile daily

So I empathize, I wait, and I still prefer (bugs or not) 4.03 over previous versions.......
Choices are a beautiful thing.

I haven't gotten all the way through the first page of posts on this topic but I feel like I've got to reply because I DO HAVE THIS PROBLEM!!!

It came up yesterday when I had some people (actual paying clients) over and I was going to record some drum tracks for them.
I created a new project, inserted 8 tracks. On the first track I imported an mp3 of their song. The additional 7 tracks were set up to record from the drums:
1. Stereo overheads
2. Snare
3. Bass Drum
4. Floor
5. 12"
6. 10"
7. 8"

I inserted two stereo buses.
1. Main - with an instance of the Sonitus multiband compression
2. Drums - with an instance of Cakewalk Tape Sim. followed by instance of Sonitus multiband compression

I also added an instance of Sonitus multiband compression on the first track with the imported audio to boost that signal.
Armed all the drums tracks.

Recorded.
Music dropped out at about measure 45 (at 106bpm). This could be repeated every single time.
I've spent about 1 1/2 hours building the project over and over again trying to find the point at which it fails.
If I delete either the Tape Sim or Sonitus multiband compression off of the Drums bus, it doesn't drop out.

If I go down to only the stereo overheads, snare, and bass drums tracks, it doesn't drop out. But when a tom track (a fourth track) is added as an armed track, it drops out.
Everysingle time it does drop out it happens at the same exact time.

My machine is:
Dell Dimension 8300
Pentium 4
2.6 Ghz
1.5 gig of ram
Two hard drives:
1. Programs drive: Western Digital WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0 (120 gig)
2. Audio data drive: Western Digital WDC WD800JB-00CRA1 (80 gig)
RME Fireface 800
Windows XP (Service Pack 1)
Has never ever touched the internet

Like one of the previous posts, this seems like a pretty standard setup. I don't know how it could have slipped by beta testers and why it hasn't been able to be reproduced at Cakewalk. I would sincerely love to know the setups y'all are testing on and reproducing bugs on.

Sorry for the somewhat beligerent tone in this post, but I just about lost it yesterday. The one time I actually had paying people over the system fails in a totally miserable way. Shaking their (and my) confidence in PC recording. I've always been a proponent of recording at home on a PC and the weekend before this one, I met with these guys to go over the song and was raving about how much better it is to record on a PC using Sonar than some hard disk recording system with a tiny little screen and horrible AD/DA converters.

When they witnessed the recording yesterday and my subsequent meltdown the techie guy said, "Yep, that's why I don't record on a PC".

ORIGINAL: mistergarner

I haven't gotten all the way through the first page of posts on this topic but I feel like I've got to reply because I DO HAVE THIS PROBLEM!!!

It came up yesterday when I had some people (actual paying clients) over and I was going to record some drum tracks for them.
I created a new project, inserted 8 tracks. On the first track I imported an mp3 of their song. The additional 7 tracks were set up to record from the drums:
1. Stereo overheads
2. Snare
3. Bass Drum
4. Floor
5. 12"
6. 10"
7. 8"

I inserted two stereo buses.
1. Main - with an instance of the Sonitus multiband compression
2. Drums - with an instance of Cakewalk Tape Sim. followed by instance of Sonitus multiband compression

I also added an instance of Sonitus multiband compression on the first track with the imported audio to boost that signal.
Armed all the drums tracks.

Recorded.
Music dropped out at about measure 45. This could be repeated every single time.
I've spent about 1 1/2 hours building the project over and over again trying to find the point at which it fails.
If I delete either the Tape Sim or Sonitus multiband compression off of the Drums bus, it doesn't drop out.

If I go down to only the stereo overheads, snare, and bass drums tracks, it doesn't drop out. But when a tom track (a fourth track) is added as an armed track, it drops out.
Everysingle time it does drop out it happens at the same exact time.

My machine is:
Dell Dimension 8300
Pentium 4
2.6 Ghz
1.5 gig of ram
Two hard drives:
1. Programs drive: Western Digital WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0 (120 gig)
2. Audio data drive: Western Digital WDC WD800JB-00CRA1 (80 gig)
RME Fireface 800
Windows XP (Service Pack 1)
Has never ever touched the internet

Like one of the previous posts, this seems like a pretty standard setup. I don't know how it could have slipped by beta testers and why it hasn't been able to be reproduced at Cakewalk. I would sincerely love to know the setups y'all are testing on and reproducing bugs on.

Sorry for the somewhat beligerent tone in this post, but I just about lost it yesterday. The one time I actually had paying people over the system fails in a totally miserable way. Shaking their (and my) confidence in PC recording. I've always been a proponent of recording at home on a PC and the weekend before this one, I met with these guys to go over the song and was raving about how much better it is to record on a PC using Sonar than some hard disk recording system with a tiny little screen and horrible AD/DA converters.

When they witnessed the recording yesterday and my subsequent meltdown the techie guy said, "Yep, that's why I don't record on a PC".

Did you try increasing your audio buffer size?

Are you using Sonar's input monitoring for your cue mix or are you using an external console?

What sample rate and bit depth are you using?

Why are you using a multi-band compressor and a tape simulator for tracking? Software effects don't get printed to disk while tracking, and you wouldn't hear these unless you are using Sonar for input monitoring while tracking. Since they don't get printed to disk, hearing what software compressors and tape simulators are doing to the cue mix while tracking is only misrepresenting what you are actually recording. It's common to track with a little reverb in the cue mix, but leave the compression for mixing.

Tip1: Multi-band compressors are for fixing problems when you're sure over-dubs and retracking are not an option during mixing and mastering. They are resource intensive. Use a single band full frequency compressors while mixing and no compression at all while tracking.

Tip2: The Lexicon Pantheon Reverb is not resource intensive and you should have no problem tracking with that plugin engaged.

From what you've posted... it seems like you would have run a succssful session and impressed your friends if you had tracked without any software effects engaged.

Any reason you didn't test this scenerio yourself before attempting it in front of your first client?

Steve D,
I was not using any input monitoring for the tracks I was recording. Are you suggesting I should have? Are you suggesting I shouldn't have? Is this not one of Sonar's much lauded features: Being able to listen to tracks you are recording along with any effects patched to those tracks?

Do you disagree with the idea that a performer will play noticeably different when their instrument has certain effects on them? Are you suggesting that Tape Sim and the multiband compressor are not worthy enough to elicit better performances from a drummer who likes that sound?

For what it's worth, I did not hear these effects while recording. I have all effects that the performer hears while recording coming from a Lexcon MPX550.

However, I'm guessing you're saying just having these effects in the bin will cause problems. I believe my 2.6 ghz processor can handle four effects while recording. It's done so with many more in the past without any problems (pre 4.0.3).

I tend to find the multiband compressor "friendlier" to a broad spectrum instrument like the drums. Do you not agree?

Frankly, I'm baffled by your response. I'm guessing you're miffed at my original post because I had a somewhat beligerent tone. I'm sorry, it happens. I STILL love Cakewalk. Trust me. I do web programming on the side, so I have an idea of all the variables that can go wrong with programming. I don't envy the developers at Cakewalk at all, especially when they happen to read some of the p-o'd posts like mine. I was actually going to post a follow up since I got back from lunch and have calmed down a bit, but then I get to read this lovely response from you.

If you're upset with my original tone, then by all means call me on it, but do not talk down to me and my recording techniques because it seems you still have a bit to learn too.

ORIGINAL: jpkeys

I inserted two stereo buses.
1. Main - with an instance of the Sonitus multiband compression
2. Drums - with an instance of Cakewalk Tape Sim. followed by instance of Sonitus multiband compression

If I delete either the Tape Sim or Sonitus multiband compression off of the Drums bus, it doesn't drop out.

Just curious: why would you want or need these FX during tracking?
EDIT: I see SteveD (also from NJ ) beat me to it, and much more thoroughly.

but yours was nicely to the point

Agreed, the recording methods used sound suspect (certainly not typical), but he might have a repeatable bug with this particular file. The unusual work method may provide some clues to this bug. You may want to email tech support with that post and make it clear how repeatable it is with that file.
They might be interested in using it as a test file.

Hey Steve,
No real need to apologize. I think I started writing before thinking again and got much too defensive. Thanks for the tips. I do appreciate them. I listened to some of the tracks on your site and the production is definitely stellar.

BTW, there are some drum loops on the Material Science clips and sampled orchestral drums but everything else is "live" drums or looped live drums (for better or for worse ).

Thanks,
Greg