My little SONAR X3e story

Little background: SONAR X3e Producer x64 is my primary DAW in my professional recording studio. I have produced TV series themes, jingles, radio programs, ads, commercial pop, rock, metal, jazz, gosbel etc. albums with SONAR. So here's one more 'yes' response to the question 'Does any commercial recording studio use SONAR?'. :)

First some issues I had today:
- One crash: I bounced two little stereo clips and tried to apply region fx (Melodyne Editor). Crash happened before Melodyne was opened. Manual save just moment before saved all work and nothing was lost. I re-opened project, bounced clips again and now all worked smoothy.
- Another project: upon open I heard a low pop coming out of my speakers. Playback. No sound coming from drum bus but meters are all way up. Channel Tools had crashed (again) sending +99 dB signal. Close project. Re-open. Problem exists. Close SONAR. Re-open. Works again!
- Take lanes: I dragged a clip from non-muted take lane down to create a new track. But I got no sound from the new track. After few minutes of troubleshooting I noticed that new track had incorrectly copied mute status from the bottom lane of the source track.
- Step Sequencer issue: I created a simple one bar drum beat and stretched it to last at least five minutes. Perfect during playback but no sound during recording. Workaround: I bounced step sequencer to normal MIDI clip. --- Could be some kind of buffer size problem I'm not aware of but I wonder why SONAR did not notice it's not playing step sequencer pattern.
- Off-sync recorded clip: create a track during playback. Start recording. Result: clip may be up to 80 ms late. Sometimes I forget this issue.

...and today's minor issues:
- Drag & drop clip to the bottom of the TV to create new track: Why track icon is not copied from the source track if almost all the other track parameters are?
- I'd like to edit automation lanes during recording (to save client's time) but it's not possible.
- Sonar always reminds of "new" ASIO interface. Dear SONAR, I know that my Fractal Audio AXE FX II has ASIO driver and you have told me it 500+ times already. Could you please just find it yourself next time? How about checkbox [x] Don't warn if ASIO drivers found during runtime?
- Show/hide Take lanes and Automation lanes buttons are poorly placed. What if I want to collapse all track/automation lanes on all tracks at once? (I use my own utility but that's not the official answer.:))
- Moving tracks up/down in TV is tricky.
- Track folder + and - icons are often not in sync with the actual data.

Then the good news... All the listed problems represent only 1% of my SONAR user experiences. 99% of the time SONAR does its work perfectly.  SONAR is reliable, powerful and beautiful (because I use customized GUI) DAW with more features I will ever need. Thanks to easy to use and advanced editing capabilities people say I'm the fastest recording engineer in the city. Today my client asked if I have any clavinet sounds available. Five seconds later he was ready to test clavinet! (I had saved Native Instruments claves as track template in Track Templates/Keys.)


I was not entirely happy with SONAR X series looks and dropped features. Cakewalk loves gray and cyan. Well, those are the two colors I hate most. :( And Skylight interface's low contrast on/off buttons made me wonder many times if a buttons is enabled or disabled! For example, the FX on/off button in the Control Bar. I remember staring at the button and wondering "Does THIS gray mean it's on? No, it's off. No, let me click it. Color changed. Is it now brighter or not?  <-- That moment ignited me to do something that is now called Duckbar. It has been an useful project because I had never programmed in Windows and had 15 years break from being a professional programmer (I started coding at the age of 14 with Sharp MZ-821 home computer!). Now my skills are again up to date and I can earn some extra $$$ by coding.  OK, now things are getting too off-topic. It's time for the summary part:
 
Pros:
+ SONAR is easy to use yet powerful DAW that fulfills all my audio production needs
+ X3e update is very reliable. Those days are gone when I had to restart SONAR in the middle of busy recording sessions.
+ No hardware dongle needed. My iLok plug-ins stopped working once again last month but SONAR kept on rocking.
+ ARA. Melodyne as region fx is SUPERB. THANKS CAKEWALK FOR THIS FEATURE!!! Thank you! Thank you once more!
 
Cons:
- Minor issues exist here and there (and always will).
- 100% bug free DAW is not possible in a world with limited resources and time but I can live with it.
 
Stars: ****+
 
This is my truth. Yours may vary. :)

Oh, except the Duckbar part. 
 

panup
^ Because you obviously have coded Bapubar to complement your SONAR. ;)

It's officialy called NagBap..

Thanks Panup for sharing your experience with Sonar. A lot of us could probably relate similar experiences using sonar over the years.

I want to thank you because your frustrations lead to you doing something about it: Duckbar and I love it. I hope future Sonar versions don't destroy your Duckbar programming.