Getting sound out of Sonar 6

Hi,
 
I am a longtime Cakewalk/Sonar owner/user, having owned some form of Cakewalk for over 20 years, and have upgraded faithfully up to Sonar 6. My focus changed after that, and I've been more involved in composition, using primarily Sibelius, so I dropped out of the Sonar upgrade cycle.
 
Recently however I have need of some DAW mixing capabilities. Purchased a ZOOM R16 to multitrack record for videos we've been making (we'd been recording directly down to stereo live, but wanted more control). I like the R16, I feed it from a Mackie Onyx, so I get great preamps and a convenient, relatively inexpensive simultrack recorder. But then of course I have to mix it down. Nothing fancy, just levels and some compression.
 
The R16 came with Cubase 5 LE, and since I had not installed Sonar on my latest desktop, I tried it out. It loaded up the tracks fine. But when I hit PLAY, nothing. I fiddled and diddled, and then figured, what the heck, I own Sonar 6 Producer. Not the latest version, but a powerful piece of s/w nonetheless. I installed, downloaded all the latest updates (6.2.1), and imported the R16 tracks. Looks fine. Hit PLAY, it won't even move.
 
I'm running a new (since January) HP w/ AMD Phenom II quad, 2.8 Ghz. 6 GB RAM, 64 bit Win 7, couple TB of disk, NVIDIA GeForce graphics. Plenty of horsepower. The sound card is Realtek, probably on board. Not brilliant, but should be adequate. I have no idea why it won't play.  The Sonar Profiler doesn't seem to do anything at all.
 
Here's the kicker: I have opensource Audacity (suggested by a friend). I load my R16 files in, voila! It just works, plays fine. It offers only MME and DirectSound as audio options (works on either setting). Should I switch to MME with SONAR?
 
I just find it ironic that my high-powered SONAR, and even the CUBASE, want some kind of pampering and diddling to work, while the free stuff works without any prompting whatsoever.
 
At first, I thought about upgrading to X1, but now I wonder if I'm would just find more sophisticated versions of these problems. It seems to me that s/w should do all the hard work of figuring out what needs to be done in order to simply run. Playing a set of WAV file tracks seems like pretty basic stuff. And if it won't play, at least have the courtesy to tell me why not.
 
Any help moving forward would be greatly appreciated, including X1 commmentary and reviews. Thanks
 
Chuck Puckett
"I don't want to steal the show. I only want to borrow it for a while."
www.puckettpublishing.com
www.chuckpuckettsongaweek.com
 

Kalle,

Thanks for the informative and useful information. It lead to these findings:

NOTHING had been set as Playback  Timing Master (! Not sure why SONAR did not default to the only available sound card). Setting that to Realtek at least moved the Now-time when hitting Play. Still no sound. Also, when I restarted Sonar after making that change, it claimed to do Wave Profiling, but took no time to do it. When I attempted to start Wave Profiler manually, Sonar simply put me on the Advanced tab, as if I should "do" something, but no indication as to what. If I select ASIO again, same behavior. Clicking OK resulted in same behavior. I could only Cancel out of the Audio Options dialog. Weird.

MME is 32 bit (according to Audio Options), and I am running 64 bit Sonar (on 64 bit OS/CPU). At your suggestion, I cranked up the R16 and enabled it as the Playback/Recording Timing Master. Hit Play, Now-time advances, caret advances. No sound. Now, I only have headphones connected to the R16. I guess the next experiment would be to hook the R16 Output jacks to something, but I would have thought Output/Headphones were equivalent. I'll check.

Okay, I just realized I had left Sonar in MME mode, even with R16 hooked up. When I choose ASIO, I get the same behavior described above: will not do Wave Profiler, nor allow me to OK out of Audio Options. It will only reshow the Advanced tab. Btw, Advanced settings are:

• No cacheing enabled
• ASIO/Triangular
• Full Chase Lock
• NO share with other programs
• Use Multiprocessing engine
• Use MMCSS
• NO Play effct tails afte rstopping
• NO always open all devices
• NO remove DC offset

Somehow having set MME seems to have screwd lots of things up. I cannot change ANYTHING on the Advanced Tab. If I attempt itt, then going back to General tab and retrying Wave Profiler just puts me back on Advanced, with any changes I made there undone: I see the above settings no matter what (I was just trying this as an experiment).

"The variety of different setups and tasks is so huge that it's logical to leave it for the user to define." I appreciate that fact. But in the same vein, since the combinatorics ARE so huge, it seems incumbent on the DAW s/w to provide some useful feedback. Endlessly putting me back on the Advanced tab with no explanation whatsoever is terribly frustrating.