H.M.S. Sonar....Man Overboard

I'm right on the brink of abandoning ship. I've had one of those nights. I use a lot of Waves plugs and Guitar Rig effects chains and both of them have serious problems with Sonar, at least on my machine. Some time ago I had a problem with Sonar resetting these plugs every time I open the project. It went away for a while and now it's just randomly come back, without me changing anything. I've opened a bunch of projects tonight and every single one of them had all of the Waves EQ's screwed with, either completely zeroing out the settings or turning off the bands or changing hi pass filters to band pass filters. Some of the settings I'll never get back and it's basically kicked my mixes back to square one after weeks of work. Same thing with Guitar Rig effects chains....all settings zeroed out. I am so freaking mad right now....this and many other oddities, bugs, corruptions and plain design flaws have just left me too sour to rule out a change to Cubase or something else. I wouldn't have minded so much had the Bakers kept us in the loop regarding bug fixes, update plans etc, but they're not going to bother are they. No amount of protesting on this forum is going to make one of them chime in and say "listen guys, we know there are issues, we're working on it, you should see an update in before the fall" or anything like that. So I think we've gotten the message. 
 
I can't work like this. And it's just a hobby for me at this point! I cannot imagine what it must be like for those of you whose livelihoods depend on it. I opened 6 projects tonight and the mix is ruined in every single one of them. Last night I bought a couple of Waves items in the sale and spent most of the night trying to get Sonar to recognize them.  Anyway, I'm about done. 

Man! I'll tell ya what..... I'm close to bailing, myself. I just keep hoping I'll get it all sorted out and that Cakewalk sees fit to fix all the things wrong with a free update.
Right now, I'm too afraid to actually record paying clients with X2a. I gotta revert back to 8.3.2. It's always rock solid, stable for me. X2a truly is the most painful upgrade of Sonar I've personally ever had to deal with. 

one thing i learned about using Guitar Rig fx in Sonar, through much toil & struggle, is that time-based Guitar Rig fx acts weird with mono tracks. convert the track to be affected to stereo and that problem goes away

JSGlen
I rely heavily on Waves plug-ins, and have similar experiences. Sonar X2 was rock solid for me, as were previous versions. This was prior to using Waves.  I do not rely on my audio work for my income, as I am retired. However, I still do commercial work when I want to, but, I use Pro Tools for this work - and it is rock solid and just works all of the time.
 
I still use Sonar, but, I have to forget about using Waves Plug-ins. My issues with Waves, like yours, is infrequent. But when it fails all work is lost. Otherwise, Sonar X2 is a great DAW, and does have more features than PT.
 
Oh, and I do not mean to imply the Waves issue is caused by Sonar. I have no idea.
 
Edited for clarification.

I contacted Waves some time ago regarding the problems with Waves GUI's in Sonar, and they acknowledged the problem and said that they would contact Cakewalk to try an establish whether the problem was with Waves or Sonar. I've never heard anything more since, although the fact that Waves plugs seem to work fine in other DAW's (and I've tried them in Reaper) suggests to me that it's a problem with Sonar. I did find it strange that despite the obvious issues with Waves and Sonar, Cakewalk ran a deal on a Waves bundle recently. 

That's interesting sharke. I wonder if it's SOnar doing the reset or Guitar Rig. One would think that a SOnar bug would attempt to reset all plugs on exit, instead of being target specific. I use Waves and Guitar Rig in a few projects and haven't seen this. How might we compare our preference settings?
 
I'll do a bit of digging and report back if I uncover anything. Don't give up. I've drank the other cool aid and it tastes like s*h*i*t*e too.

I have seen Sonar X2a completely scatter my plug-in settings, but they were native plugs!  VX-64 I specifically recall going haywire.  I never mentioned it, and just got rid of all instances of the plug.  It may have been that they were pre-X2 projects?  Or they were created in 32-bit Sonar? 
 
If it is re-occurring, man, you can't really work that way, sorry.  Is Waves by chance running via BitBridge?  BitBridge always seems to cause problems for me.  I never use 32 bit plug-ins any more, and replace any I find to make sure BitBridge.exe is never running in windows processes.

ampfixer
I can find nothing out of the ordinary in my config. The only thing that may be different, is that I don't use the 64bit double precision engine. Ever since X1 it caused issues so I turned it off and left it that way. I was sure that there was a setting to zero all controllers on exit but I can't find it. I thought maybe that was the culprit. The controllers were still talking to the plugs at shut down and zeroing them.
 
I should note that while checking this out in a project I experienced a SOnar event. A track appeared with data in it. Data that I didn't put there. I opened a take lane to see if that was related, and the data jumped into the take lane. I closed the take lane and the data was gone forever. It's a good thing I like puzzles.

I have 64 bit double precision engine checked, but I don't think that has anything to do with it. I think the setting you're talking about is "zero all controllers when playback stops" and is in the MIDI preferences. I think if that had anything influence on the problem, it would be zeroing the settings every time playback stopped and not just when the project closed. The last time this was happening to me however I did try with this on and off and it made no difference. 

I'm almost there with ya. Sometimes you just get tired of fiddle @#$king around and just want to make music. Sure there's usually a work around or a way to track down issues but that gets old. I'm not so sure there is anything out there that is fool proof though.
 
Rocky

Sharke - instead of jumping ship why not just go back to X1?
 
In the current x2b thread I wonder the same thing.
no one wants to spend the $$$ and have to take the time to learn a new DAW, but X1d was pretty stable and it's still SONAR..
 
 

Probably a naive question - but have you contacted Cakewalk's tech support?  Have they given any advice?

sharke
The only thing I can think of at present is that Sonar has potential flaws in the way in which it saves plug settings with a project file, because everything is fine until I reload the project. Nothing is happening within a project session to zero out these settings, it's only when I save it and fire it up again.  

 
Believe me, I'm the last person (well I'm pretty sure I'm close to the end of the line) who'll defend Sonar/Cakewalk, but I'm not following your logic. You said you tried the Waves Plug-ins with Reaper, it worked fine, so you blame Sonar. 
 
Have you tried any other plug-ins with Sonar & have the same problem? Let's say there is a problem with the way Sonar saves plug-in settings. Why aren't you having issues with other plug-ins? 
 
So it's got to be a problem with the way Sonar saves the settings & the way Waves reads those settings. 
 
Have you tried saving your settings as a preset? Save your project, then open it & see if the preset is restored correctly. If not, load the preset & see if it's restored that way. 
 
Chances are this is a small problem relative to what the guys/gals at Cakewalk are addressing. But I agree with you. Why would Cakewalk host this forum if they aren't going to dedicate someone to at least look at these "small" issues & communicate what they've found. If that gets to be too much work for them, maybe that says a lot about their product. 

karma1959
Probably a naive question - but have you contacted Cakewalk's tech support?  Have they given any advice?

Yeah they told me to reinstall X2 which I did, with no luck. Maybe I'll try it again though. I'm a sucker for that "new install" feeling. 

thunderkyss

sharke
The only thing I can think of at present is that Sonar has potential flaws in the way in which it saves plug settings with a project file, because everything is fine until I reload the project. Nothing is happening within a project session to zero out these settings, it's only when I save it and fire it up again.  

 
Believe me, I'm the last person (well I'm pretty sure I'm close to the end of the line) who'll defend Sonar/Cakewalk, but I'm not following your logic. You said you tried the Waves Plug-ins with Reaper, it worked fine, so you blame Sonar. 
 
Have you tried any other plug-ins with Sonar & have the same problem? Let's say there is a problem with the way Sonar saves plug-in settings. Why aren't you having issues with other plug-ins? 
 
So it's got to be a problem with the way Sonar saves the settings & the way Waves reads those settings. 
 
Have you tried saving your settings as a preset? Save your project, then open it & see if the preset is restored correctly. If not, load the preset & see if it's restored that way. 
 
Chances are this is a small problem relative to what the guys/gals at Cakewalk are addressing. But I agree with you. Why would Cakewalk host this forum if they aren't going to dedicate someone to at least look at these "small" issues & communicate what they've found. If that gets to be too much work for them, maybe that says a lot about their product. 

Yeah I can save the settings as a preset. But it still resets sometimes. So I would have to manually load the preset every time from now on. That's something that I want to get away from  - there is nothing worse than having to load a bunch of presets by hand every time you open a project. 

sharke

karma1959
Probably a naive question - but have you contacted Cakewalk's tech support?  Have they given any advice?

Yeah they told me to reinstall X2 which I did, with no luck. Maybe I'll try it again though. I'm a sucker for that "new install" feeling.

 
Oh no! Is this their new go-to response?  It's like doctors prescribing antibiotics for everything!  This was my instruction last time I contacted them.  It even involved manual registry changes after uninstalling.  I imagine you got the same scripted steps?  Well, it sure does keep us busy for a while!
 
After going through all that (it's quite a process to completely uninstall/reinstall X2a), I replied explaining it did not resolve my issues, asked for additional ideas, and they stopped responded.  And no, I did not scare them into their hole by mentioning X2b.   It was a targeted support ticket that I bumped twice with zero response before I had to call to see what the heck was up.  Then they went with go-to response #2:  must be your interface drivers.