ORIGINAL: dcastle
Well, I finally got Sonar working again. The only way I could do this--System Restore to a place before it stopped working.
This sounds more like a driver problem on your system than a SONAR issue. What did you change between the time of the system restore point and now? What new hardware or software? What new plugins have you added? Etc., etc.
Yes, and No.
Yes, it is a driver issue. But yes, it is also a Sonar issue. At the time, I had no trouble starting up (and using) any other music programs, only Sonar. There is certainly a problem with Sonar, when it absolutely won't start like that. (I don't know if such behavior has improved in version 5.)
It turns out it was an ASIO issue. When I switched the mode to ASIO, closed Sonar, then tried to restart, I would get this total lack of starting up. (I read a post on this board from someone else who had the same problem. This didn't matter which ASIO device I was using, this problem repeated with different devices. I could find no way to get out of it, other than to system restore to a time before I switched from WDM to ASIO.
In case this ever happens again, does anyone know where Sonar stores its setting for ASIO, WDM, or MME? I couldn't find such a setting in any .ini file or in the registry. Editing an .ini file or registry key would certainly be easier than doing System Restore (which makes other changes as well).
Sonar should include a way to change that setting offline, so if one is having a problem starting up in one mode, one can switch to the other before restarting. Or, for instance, if one is hit with a problem like I had, that Sonar won't start in ASIO mode, one should see an error message that says exactly that, and offers the option to start up in WDM or MME mode instead.
I finally fixed my ASIO problem, and now can use ASIO. (I don't have time to go into that now. It involved registry editing, not anything under Cakewalk in the registry, just under ASIO itself. By trial and error, I got it to work.)
But yes, I do consider it a bug in Sonar, that it couldn't start up, when all other music programs would start, using the same device. And that the error message didn't tell me the problem was ASIO-related, and didn't offer to start up in another mode instead. And that there is no obvious way to change the ASIO-WDM-MME mode offline when there is such a problem. (There must be some way to do it though, since that setting must be stored in some file or registry key. If anyone reading knows how to do it, please share the info to spare people the hell I went through with this.) (Is there a parameter switch Sonar can be started with to indicate the mode?)
Thank you.