Issues with freezing midi tracks in sonar

Hi all,

I am using sonar platinum 64 bit version 21.7.00 (purchased through steam) on windows 8.

I have been having several unpredictable things happening while doing mixing and decided to tackle them one at a time.

The first and most hindering problem is the issue with freezing midi tracks and exporting them to audio (.wav) file and finding that they don't sound the same when I playback in sonar. I tried to do the following repeatedly:

1) launched sonar with midi controller (midi start 3 prokeys) turned on
2) open a new untitled file
3) under edit->preference->project-> midi, I unchecked zero controllers when play stops and patch/controller searchback before play starts.
4) insert new vst - Play (version 4.2.38) and opened just one sound: east west Goliath, cs80 lead 1 mod.
5) I use the default midi track 2, assign output to play 1. Under inspection view, selected play channel 1. Then I armed the track for recording.
6) I then used the midi controller to record a series of notes spanning a couple of bars before disarming the track. I also unchecked my midi controller under edit->preference->midi ->device
7) I played back the track. So far so good.
8) I froze the track.
9) I played back the track again (point A)
10) I unfroze the track.
11) I played back the track again (point B)
12) from console view, I opened the "pro channel" of the play audio channel and edited the eq (quad curve equalizer) parameters. I can hear the sounds change as I shifted the various points.
13) I played back the track with the new parameters.
14) I froze the track. (Point C)
15) I played back the track again. (Point D)
16) i unfroze the track.
17) I played back the track again (point E)

I had the following observations:

Points A and D: sometimes I get exact same sound as when tracks are unfrozen. Sometimes I get notes cutting off (notes that were supposed to last for a bar became staccato notes. And these occur randomly). And other times I have the timbre of the sound totally different. When the timbre sounded different- sometimes it sounded different throughout the whole song, other times it sounded different for first few notes then suddenly reverted back to normal sounding.

I chose east west Goliath cs80 lead because the difference would then be easy to spot. This patch always has a minor secondary tinny sound that is a major third over the actual note that I played. When sounded normally I could hear both (the normal and the softer major third sound) when the timbre changed, this major third secondary sound disappeared. I may also have experienced the original note disappearing only left the major third secondary sound in my past trials which triggered this experiment.

Point A seems to have a slightly higher chance of behaving normally than Point D.

Points B and E: after unfreezing the tracks, if the timbre changed after freezing, sometimes it remains changed. Sometimes it went back to normal. But I didn't experience notes cutting off in unfreeze mode.

point C: this is quite frustrating. One out of three times when I pressed the freeze button, I got the message that sonar stopped responding and it closed and I had to restart the program again. This is weird because unfreeze is usually the one that uses more cpu but I didn't experience this during unfreezing, only when I clicked freeze.

I am currently using windows 8 64 bit, 16.0 gb ram, Intel core i7-3770k cpu at 3.5 Ghz. No major programs running at the background (except steam client). During this experiment the cpu and ram usage didn't exceed 15 percent, and cpu usage often stayed below 10 percent. Even at the point of freezing the cpu spike didn't go beyond 20-25% either. Not sure what's going on. I'm using an onboard Realtek sound card though.

Also as can be seen my experiment didn't involve any plugins - and only had the bare minimal of one midi track and one voice in the play engine track.

Sorry for the long mail- The above issue is hindering my working on sonar, as such if anyone can advise on how to resolve it will be greatly helpful to me.

In essence I am having three problems:

1) notes cutting off when freezing
2) timbre of notes changing when freezing (sometimes changes for whole song other times changed for the first few notes before reverting to normal)
3) sonar occasionally crashes when I clicked freeze

Thanks in advance.

Unfortunately I have not used other vsts enough to experience the same problem. But thus far it appears to be solely a play engine issue (I may be wrong though)

In fact I have used other sounds in the play engine and they appear not to have this issue (either that or the timbre change is more subtle for me to realize)

I have frozen tracks in the past on tracks (stormdrum , symphonic orchestra sounds) using the play engine and it was ok. I didnt freeze and unfreeze and freeze to such a frequent extent though.

With regards to the note cutting, today is the first time I experienced that. My experiment was originally intended to see if the timbre changed but I discovered another new problem.

Hi pwalpwal,

Thanks for replying. I took a look at the link you gave; indeed play is (or used to be) buggy. My issues however are not listed in there. Also, for sonar to crash when I click on freeze tracks is unlikely to be caused by the play engine

I just tried it using the older sonar x3 producer, and the problems are there too. Freezing track caused the sound to be different from when it was unfrozen. Clicking freeze track too fast caused sonar to crash as well. It may also not be an inherent sonar issue since if it is, people would've found out long ago. But regardless, I was hoping if there are some settings that can help in resolving or mitigating the problems I'm having. With these issues still happening it is quite close to impossible to work with sonar.

stantough, I don't know how Play vst works, but after reading what you've described, I can say that you are not right blaming Sonar. It is 99% issue with this vst (including crash when freezing), and there is no issue with Sonar that could cause this behavior.
Have you tried to disable fast bounce option when freezing?

If you can send a crash dump i can let you know if the problem is in the synth. From your description it seems very likely that its a bug with how the synth is handling bounce.