An open letter to Cakewalk

Dear CakeFolks
 
I do appreciate receiving regular emails inviting me to various never-to-be-repeated deals on Sonar upgrades.
 
I hate to sound ungracious, having studiously ignored every last one of your appeals, but I think, finally, the time has come to have one of those heart-to-heart chats.
 
I first purchased Sonar 2.1 and I've since spent money to upgrade to version 3 (producer), then skipped 4 and 5 and then upgraded to version 6,7, and then 8. So, over the years, it's fair to say I've invested a reasonable amount of money in your products.
 
Some three years ago I left you for another. There's no need to be coy; it was Reaper. Reaper is far, far, far less sophisticated than Sonar. I miss a lot of Sonar's great features. But what Reaper offered me was something I never achieved with Sonar - bulletproof stability.
 
Now, like a long-ago partner, it's easy after all these years to remember the good times rather than the bad. So, when I recently upgraded the studio laptop and had to move all my old stuff across, I dug out my copy of Sonar 8 Producer and reinstalled it. To be honest, I had an ulterior motive - I do use some of the plugins like Guitar Rig 3 and Dimension Pro. I see this as at least recouping some of my substantial investment.
 
Now, some of the things I'm about to say might seem hurtful. So, before I start, a little background. I'm actually a software engineer in my day job. So I'm kinda meticulous about making sure everything's all set up just right and not doing stupid things and blaming everyone else but me. That said, let's talk about what happened next:-
 
First, the new DAW. It replaces an existing laptop and is an Acer V-571G laptop with 8G RAM, 1T 5400rpm disk and a core i7-3610 processor. It has both integrated graphics (Intel HD4000) and a dedicated GPU (Nvidia 640) which only kicks in when needed.
 
I think you'll agree that this is a pretty decent setup. While the hard drive isn't terribly fast, actually, it can cope with a pretty reasonable number of audio streams. I mainly use softsynths anyway. And it's been burnt in pretty thoroughly over the last week or so, after first upgrading the BIOS, all drivers and removing all crapware. I do not run AV software either so it's nice and clean, running Win 7 x64 SP1.
 
The audio output comes courtesy of an Edirol UA25 which has served me faithfully for a long time. And if there's a product Sonar should support, you'd think this would be it.
 
A week of testing, including loading some pretty big projects, revealed that even with the ASIO settings on minimum (buffer size = 96, latency 3ms), CPU and disk usage were waayyy down there. No crackles, no glitches, no crashes. But remember, this was with Reaper not Sonar.
 
So now, I reinstalled Sonar. This time, having a 64 bit OS for the first time, I obviously installed the 64 bit version, and then patched it sequentially with 8.0.1, 8.0.2 and then the 8.3.1 patch, all downloaded fresh from the Cakewalk site.
 
Time to play. Let's use the sample projects. I've never had much luck with these, but surely on something this powerful....?.
 
So, first, synth overload. Dark European Space Adventures. Loads fine. Plays fine. 20% CPU on Cake's meters. Get to nearly the end, press stop and then File/Open.
 
CRASH!. Rapture has stopped responding. Well, that's pretty much what always happened to me with this project, sooner or later. It'll play but do anything like scrub in the middle and you're heading rapidly for trouble. In this case, I didn't even need to do anything weird.
 
Moving on... Guilty, by Unified Tribe. Press play. DROPOUT!. Yup, that's an old friend from the past, too.
 
Well look, I want to be fair. So, let's just export the audio tracks without any effects etc. and then see what happens.
 
Select Export to OMF and embed audio. Wait a fairly long while.... and then, just at the very end, a cryptic dialogue comes up indicating the export has failed. I can't even remember what it said exactly, it was so user-unfriendly. Well, that's another untested feature, obviously. So let's export the WAV files and then reimport them.....
 
so now we have the WAV files... Press play.....  hmm, it's working.... scroll the bottom of the window up a bit and.... DROPOUT....
 
Right... But now we have a level playing field, don't we?. So start up Reaper and import the audio tracks. Press play..... CPU at 2%. Disk at somewhere around 100K/sec which is about 1% of it's available bandwidth - this is 38 tracks of audio we're streaming here at 44.1KHz. Resize, scroll and generally hit up the UI... nope, rock solid.
 
So here's the deal Cake. Why don't you try what I just did and see how it goes for you?. Can you do an OMF export on your own sample projects?. If not, why not?. You sold me that as a working feature. And why is Sonar struggling with the exact same 38 audio tracks with NO plugins....... am I being unfair?. Is my hardware somehow at fault?. How come this is the third machine I've installed Sonar on and had very similar issues?.
 
I've also been lurking on the VS700 forum. I lusted after one of those. But now you've left your users twisting in the wind, with no indication of when, or even if, you'll fix the myriad problems they appear to be having with X1 and X2.
 
So I'm sorry. I'm afraid your entreaties to lighten my wallet are currently falling on deaf ears. It's a shame, too. Much of Sonar is truly impressive but - and maybe it's just me - we just can't seem to get along together. At least,without regular crashes. And I'm afraid I have enough crashes in my day job. Well, that's not strictly true. My current company uses continuous integration, Test-Driven Design and various other 21st century software development techniques such as an extensive suite of automation and integration tests.
 
Frankly, they set a pretty high standard. Based on this current encounter, Sonar 8.3.1 wouldn't have survived it's first beta test and QA would have rejected it as unfit to ship. In fact, that OMF problem wouldn't even have got past initial QA handover.
 
From what I can gather, X1 and X2 aren't exactly a huge step forward here, not to mention the plugins (V-Vocal, anyone?). So it's time for some tough love. Frankly, you have a serious quality control problem and it's not getting better. You need to step back and think seriously about this. Because, right now, I think you're struggling. You have a codebase you probably don't fully understand anymore. Developers have left. You're trying to manually QA things with no unit tests, integration tests or automation tests. Or if you have them, they're not doing a very good job of catching the bugs. My test here isn't rocket science, after all.
 
So, over to you. Show me it's fixed and maybe I'll be back...... otherwise, I'll be sitting on my wallet, just at present.....
 
 
 
 

You might not have the same issues if you used 8.5 which is stable as a rock for a very large group of us. I think 8.3 was full of bugs which I believe they mostly fixed with 8.5. 
PS, Admin doesn't read posts here anymore as this is a quiet corner where a few die-hards who have not upgraded yet still lurk. 

Cactus Music


You might not have the same issues if you used 8.5 which is stable as a rock for a very large group of us. I think 8.3 was full of bugs which I believe they mostly fixed with 8.5. 
. 

I had very few issues with 32 bit 8.3. 8.5 is when they refined the 64 bit version and I was able to go 64 bit.
 
I won't say I have not had the (very) occasional crash in 8.5 but they were very few and far between. Most of these infrequent events were due my ESI Juli@ drivers. Since upgrading to X2 and Roland Quad Capture I have had one isolated crash. Generally its very stable considering X2, Kontakt 5 and 64 bit BFD Eco are frequently used and none of them are offically supported on my OS.

I never used 8.3 I just assumed that 8.5 was an upgrade to fix bugs which is par for the course with software, Excuse me If I was wrong. 
Dave , watch out, this guy is a software developer, they think they also understand hardware.... ::)  Just kidding. 

So here's the deal Cake. Why don't you try what I just did and see how it goes for you?.

They probably don't have anything running with 5400rpm discs.

This is potentially the cause of all your problems and until you upgrade to 7200 drives, your problems will remain.

As for 8.5. Well, if it fixed a whole bunch of bugs, it might be a nice goodwill gesture from Cake to make it available as a free upgrade for Sonar 8 users who don't want a fresh bunch of issues with X1 and X2.

Don't hold your breath for that.... and if they do, they owe me $100 because I paid for it. 

Yes some very good points, and I'm sure for every one of us that has no problems there are 5 who do. 
I still have problems with Word 2010, I hate it. Software is like that. Endless cycle of updates, bug fixes then ask you for more money every couple of years. So for now I am using Word 2003 and Sonar 8.5 and all is good. I'll catch up in about 5 years. 

Reaper is great except for midi editing which is vital for me.

To the OP - your laptop's HDD is a problem, from my experience 5400rpm drives are a fail for DAW systems.
SSD's have come down a lot in price...

aj

  
I do not run AV software either so it's nice and clean, running Win 7 x64 SP1. 
 
.....
 
 
 
 

This may be the source of some of the OP's problems.
 
Sonar 8 was released in September 2008 http://www.cakewalk.com/Press/release.aspx/09-22-08-SONAR8
Windows 7 was released in October 2009 so no amout of testing would have ensured the program would work with an O/S that did not exist at that time. the 8.3 patch also pre-dates Windows 7, so no compatibility issues could have been included in the patch.
 
8.5 was released around the same time as Windows 7 and was the first version with Windows 7 support, http://www.cakewalk.com/Press/release.aspx/09-15-09-Cakewalk-Announces-SONAR-8.5-Producer-and-SONAR-8.5-Studio-Now-Available 
 
No Anti Virus and not on the Internet does not guarantee "nice and clean". In my company there have been many cases of viruses on the machines not connected to the Internet. Removable media is a major form of virus transmission. The problem can be mitigated by controlling removable media and scanning it of a PC with a good up to date anti virus software before using it in an unprotected PC.
 
I am running X2 on a non-supported OS (Vista 64). If I get crashes (I have only had one isolated incident) I can only blame myself.

A quick update. Rapture is definitely not stable under Win 7 x64 - it took Reaper out the water after just a minute or so of browsing around patches.
(I think I was using the 32 bit version of Reaper at the time). Dim Pro seems fine, though.
That probably explains the crash I had loading Dark European Space Adventures, so it was unfair to blame that on Sonar. (although Rapture is their product, I guess).
 
Someone pointed out here that Win 7 wasn't released when Sonar 8.3 was done. This is certainly true but Vista was out already. Although modern history has been rewritten so that Vista was some kind of weird bloated abomination that Win 7 magically fixed, the actual truth is that the OS kernel is very similar between the two and much of the negative press Vista attracted was due to it being run on machines that weren't, in actual fact 'Vista-capable'. There's an interesting story about how that came to be, but I digress...
 
In penance for being a little hot-headed, I will DL and check out Sonar X1 (since there appears to be no X2 trial version).
Also, for any people out there running the BCR2000 plugin I made a while back, now I finally have a 64 bit OS, I'm adding a 64 bit version to the downloads as soon as I can figure out why it isn't saving the MIDI port settings when I add it to Sonar. (I know I could have compiled one earlier but I never had any way of testing it).