Sonar 5 effects under Platinum

You cant seriously be complaining about backwards compatibility projects from Sonar 5 ?
That Version came out almost 13 years ago. In 13 years from now I wont expect my projects to open in anything unless I keep on top of them by updating them every version (which is what I do now).
 
If a project is that important to me, I load it and then "Save as" the project to keep it up to date.
I could see if you had an issue with projects from a few years ago but 13 years is a long time. It was Sonar 4 when Cakewalk introduced VST plug ins. Some good plug ins yes (like Lexicons Pantheon reverb) but those are gone to the wind like 3 or 4 versions ago.
 
your can still load those projects up in Sonar but you'll have to make choices about plug ins.
 

As a general rule, SONAR 5 projects should be compatible with the current version. That includes most of the effects bundled with S5 that are no longer supplied (e.g. Vintage Channel, Pantheon, Perfect Space). The exception would be DX effects such as the DX version of Dim Pro. If you have trouble opening a project because of one of those plugins, you'll have to find and substitute the VST version, assuming there is one. Fortunately, the majority of them do have VST versions (e.g. the Sonitus suite, TTS-1, Dim Pro). Only a handful were never ported to VST, such as Dreamstation.
 
I'm assuming you still have SONAR 5 installed. If not, then you'll be missing a bunch of stuff and will have to follow Steve's advice above and re-install S5 (or just the plugins).
 
BTW, I disagree with Chuck's assessment above. It would be a sad state of affairs indeed if digital music projects had a shelf life of less than 13 years!  I've loaded projects from Cakewalk 1.0! The hardest part was finding a floppy drive to read the disks.
 

Also you could probably get away with installing Sonar 5 along with Platinum. Generally speaking Sonar versions can coexist without problem, including both 32 and 64 bit versions. If you remember Sonar 5 was the first 64 bit version of any Windows DAW. Of course you may have to set some compatibility mode depending on your current ooperating system.

Here's a link to a spreadsheet with plugin details going all the way back to Sonar 3.
https://1drv.ms/x/s!Ahg7GEVUP0HfgZomRlkomgIPOnxNiQ Link is only good for a week.

bitflipper
...It would be a sad state of affairs indeed if digital music projects had a shelf life of less than 13 years!...

 
I agree.

Kev999

bitflipper
...It would be a sad state of affairs indeed if digital music projects had a shelf life of less than 13 years!...

 
I agree.

Are you guys serious .  Just read this one more time....
 

serauk
 I used a lot of the 'builtin' Cakewalk effects, and apparently those effects no longer exist.  
apparently "backwards compatibility" means something different to Cakewalk.  
In my world, it means the ability of a newer version to successfully process files created by an older version.

 
It sounds like that is the OP's issue, its not actually loading the project, but the plug ins themselves.
I wouldn't expect to open a 13 year old project in Sonar platinum and expect DXI plug ins to magically load up.
Is that what you mean by "Shelf Life" ?
 
What I have done from the beginning is open older projects and exchanging plug ins OR use the "Bounce to tracks" functions to make sure I always have a back up.
 
Do I expect 13 year old projects to load up ? of course I do.
Do I expect 13 year old projects to open plug ins with plug ins that were dusted years ago ? Of course not.
 
 
 
 
 

I save all my songs as MIDI files because that's where a lot of work goes. My files from my Atari 1984 still open just fine.   Audio files are audio files so will open too but then I can always play a part better, sing better etc. And as far as effects go why would I use an old outdated ( 32bit) plug when I now have my nice selection of up to date plugs that all do the same thing but much better. 
I have opened  CWP created with  Guitar Studio or 7 or 8.5 and they always load but with a list of missing plug ins, they even show in the bins but grayed out, so easy to replace. What's the big deal.  
I've never had a missing VST because I don't use anything strange and I still have 8.5 installed just for that one reason alone. 
 
I can see it's not good losing a synth sound that was a part of the song but the solution would be you should have frozen it if it was that important.