ChristopherM
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Bad day - time for 7.2
Every so often, Sonar's "idiosyncracies" become a serious block to creative production and yesterday was one of those. I am used to dealing with Sonar's occasional disagreements with 3rd party software, whether it is audio drivers or incompatible plug-ins, but all of yesterday's woes were caused by issues that I strongly believe are flakiness in Sonar itself.
1 - Recorded audio never appears: During tracking, several times, this happened:- Playing back, with an audio track armed. Healthy input showing on track meter, track lane showing pink. Press R to commence recording. Wave trace shows in track lane. Press stop. No audio clip appears in the track. Incredible performance gone for ever. Repeat process - audio clip does appear this time.
2 - Bus automation erratic: Drew bus volume fader automation envelopes directly into track pane. Envelopes fine. Faders move on console view. Meter traces unaffected by envelope. Audio levels unaffected by envelope. Stop and restart playback, and it works as expected.
3 - Export audio overruns: In a "special" variant of the old "Sonar forgets to stop at the end" issue, I was exporting my final mix. It seemed to take forever. When I looked at the resulting wav file, I found that Sonar had tagged 11 minutes of silence on to the end of a 4 minute piece. Repeated the exercise with a specific time range selected, and it worked fine.
4 - Inability to cut and paste soft synth automation envelopes: Because of this ancient bug, I had to delete and re-record a series of soft synth automation envelopes, because I inserted four blank measures into the project and everything moved except the soft synth automation.
In isolation, none of these issues is disastrous ... but taken together and because of their "will they, won't they" erratic nature, the creative process becomes unnecessarily hard work. I haven't been aware of any on the forum commenting about issue 1, but all of the others are now long standing issues. For that reason, I don't think that the source of the errors lies behind my keyboard.
I sincerely hope that they are fixed in 7.2 and that it appears soon, but somehow I don't think that they will be. Thanks for listening to this rant!
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dreamkeeper
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RE: Bad day - time for 7.2
2007/11/16 08:43:31
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Agreed on all accounts.
As for 1: Are you sure that the clips weren't there, i.e. no sound on playback? Cause I've seen clips "disappear" myself a few times, even in S6. However they were still there, just invisible. They'd reappear when I was moving the mouse cursor over them, and saving/reloading the project seemed to fix it.
werner
"... must've been another of my dreams ..."
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Richard Brian
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RE: Bad day - time for 7.2
2007/11/16 09:11:09
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Item 1 can happen if punch record is accidentally engaged. Not that that's what happened, but the scenario is identical.
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Jose7822
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RE: Bad day - time for 7.2
2007/11/16 10:15:05
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Couldn't item 1 be also attributed to the Picture Cache Folder being full? I've experieneced all the others except for 1. But it could be because I don't really use the Punch Record function as I usually layer different takes of the whole performance and choose the parts/performance I like best. I've had the project overrun issue happen occationally for no apparent reason. I could have no automation and even look at the event inspector view and see nothing show up after the last bar so I know it's not user error. This is why I wanted Cakewalk to focus on bugs/workflow for Sonar 7. There's a pile of them old ones, and new ones being added with each new release. It might not be an attention grabber for new users but at least we know things will work as advertized. Maybe in Sonar 8? I doubt it. It'll just be another pack of new features with their own bugs attached to them. Anyways, I guess I added my little rant in there too  . Take care guys!
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Hawky
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RE: Bad day - time for 7.2
2007/11/16 10:54:24
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Well stated ChristopherM and I feel your pain. I sent an email yesterday to CAKEWALK asking when we can expect the next patch to be released that will fix all the issues stated above and the motorboating thing. I will post when I get an answer. I agree with what Jose said too, there are old issues and new ones are making things worse. Also, I sent an email to Noel last week letting him know that some of these issues apply to SONAR 6; like the motorboating. Noel did not respond to my email. It would be nice to get an update status from them soon.
Hawky
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ChristopherM
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RE: Bad day - time for 7.2
2007/11/16 12:19:56
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Are you sure that the clips weren't there Werner - Not entirely, but they weren't visible and they weren't audible. I wasn't particularly in the mood for thoughtful diagnostic steps, regrettably! I re-recorded the lost pieces, so I doubt whether I'll ever find out whether the originals were just hiding or whether they had truly been annihilated. Item 1 can happen if punch record is accidentally engaged Richard - No, that wasn't it. Recording Mode was Overwrite; Auto Punch unchecked; Store Takes in Separate Tracks selected; Create New Layer on Overlap checked. PS - I enjoyed your Christmas Smash, but I was disappointed to find that selecting "Norwegian" as the language didn't translate your vocals.  Couldn't item 1 be also attributed to the Picture Cache Folder being full? Jose - AUD.INI has PictureDir=C:\Cakewalk Projects\Picture Cache PicCacheMB=500 PicCacheZoom=128 PicCacheLevels=2 Presently, the folder contains 3,451 files totalling 164MB, so I guess that means it is not full by Sonar's standards. The HDD itself is not full either. like the motorboating Hawky - Oops, I forgot to mention that!!! Actually, I find that I experience much less motorboating in 7.01 than I did with any of the 6 point releases. I am sorry to hear that you are all experiencing some of these issues. I really hope that the Bakers get moving on these stability points. I am, however, guilty of failing to use the formal channels to report these things. Frankly, my experience of CW Tech Support has not been good. It is impractical to call from Europe and e-mails either get no reply, or the advice is so banal and basic that I feel patronised, not supported. Still, everyone tells me Steinberg is worse! Small mercies!
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Hawky
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RE: Bad day - time for 7.2
2007/11/16 12:56:38
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ChristopherM
I have had this problem when recording MIDI. I found that I have to insert a new track then it works okay. Also, I have the track trace disabled on mine to help lower the load. Glad to hear motorboating is down. The thing that bugs me now is this track automation thing. Anyway, good luck...
Hawky
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ChristopherM
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RE: Bad day - time for 7.2
2007/11/22 14:46:37
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In a bizarre new variant of bus automation malfunction, I had the experience today that a volume envelope inserted into a bus had no effect on the fader nor on the audio volume. However, when I write-enabled automation on the fader, it began to track the already existing envelope. Seemed like a fix until I realised that the sound from that bus and several others was missing. Only one bus was sounding (a different one to that with the automation envelope). It was as if that bus had been soloed (or all others muted) although there was no green/red indication that had happened.
As soon as I disarmed the automation write on the bus, all audio returned but the fader ceased to track the envelope again.
"Something is rotten in the code of Sonar!" as no-one said in Hamlet.
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...wicked
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RE: Bad day - time for 7.2
2007/11/22 15:09:55
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I feel your pain.
Item 3, when it occurs, is quite tedious to deal with. I personally think it's a bug, as so many people come up with that issue and all the usual fixes (looking for an orphan event in the Event List view or some such) never seem to work.
I think Cake could implement two easy fixes for this:
+ END Marker, that will signal the end of the project playback. This could be useful for doing tracking, edit, and remix work as well where you don't want to deal with a later part of the project but setting loops might not be the solution either.
+ CROP command. This would be easier to select the project from start to finish and basically crop it, so anything you know or don't know about past the selection is nuked.
However, in the interest of getting you running, what I do in that situation is CTRL-A to select everything and then I draw on the timeline to the end of the project and export a "selection" that is the full size of the project. Still a workaround, but hope it helps.
=========== The Fog People =========== Intel i7-4790 16GB RAM ASUS Z97 Roland OctaCapture Win10/64 SONAR Platinum 64-bit billions VSTs, some of which work
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bitflipper
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RE: Bad day - time for 7.2
2007/11/22 15:28:04
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CW has already found and fixed the automation bug. The fix will be included in the 7.0.2 fix release, which is still in testing.
This bug has been driving me crazy. I do ALL my mixing via hand-drawn envelopes, so when an envelope stops working I can't really do any mixing at all. I also like to automate effects, especially reverb, and because all envelopes are potentially affected, it also prevents me from fine-tuning effects.
But let's be patient, because we don't want them to rush out a fix that breaks something else.
By the way, a workaround for this bug is to avoid moving nodes during playback. It's a hassle, but if you stop playback before moving a node you won't have this problem. That's what's getting me by for now.
 All else is in doubt, so this is the truth I cling to. My Stuff
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pgw
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RE: Bad day - time for 7.2
2007/11/22 17:30:05
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Experienced all those "idiosyncracies" you described, especially the automation-bug drove me crazy - the only workaround I found was to save & restart Sonar, which is incredibly irritating.......
+ when using BFD "All" & "Ultra" VSTi´s Sonar stops responding - had to shut it down via XP´s taskmanager. Reproduced with the latest BFD 1.5.46.10 ( ? ) & 1.5.45Q - I went back to 1.5.45Q DXi´s & everything´s fine.
Per
Windows 10 (LTSB) - i7 8700 - ASUS GTX1060 -16 GB Corsair Vengeance - Samsung SSD´s - Seagate HD´s - RME FF400 - & too many geetars & amps
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