stickman393
This worked for me, at a setting of 15 ms. That was sufficient to pull the MIDI notes back to where I think they should be, even considering my erratic performance timing.

Thank you, Jackass.

Finding a workaround and getting someone to say "Thank you, Jackass." That's pretty awesome.

I also see this and wish it would get fixed.  I see this when I connect a external midi drum machine and set Sonar X to use midi clock/sync, I see the midi data written early.  When I record with internal clock, monitoring audio tracks its also early?  In this case I usually edit the midi manually.  I must admit I have run these tests in X1 but also own X2.  Given my limited time in the studio, I choose to create over test and calibrate.  If I had the time I would gladly do both. 

And the monster is back.
Despite switching to DAWS that actually work, I have too many clients that keep working projects in the SONAR realm and leave me to have to open these projects in SONAR X3 to continue work.
So, after years of battling with cakewalk regarding this issue, I finally have seen where the center of the bug is: It's not that SONAR is recording too early (not really) it's that the METRONOME is firing too early. Since it fires early, and we play along to the click... the recordings LOOK like they are recording too early.
The click is firing about a 64th note earlier than the measure.
I ran two tests on video to prove the point. One is a high speed video showing the click banging just before the measure.
The other is a simple STOP after the metronome fires and the cursor is sitting there, about a 64th note space, before the measure.
Now, with all of the changes at Cakewalk, it appears they no longer support any of the Sonar products. (!!)
So, there is nobody I can contact to get this paid attention to.
Has anyone been able to figure out how to repair this bug or get around it so the metronome fires ON the beat?
 
 

This 12 year old chestnut takes exactly 30 seconds to disprove in Sonar Platinum thanks to Aux tracks. If you create an Aux track and directly record the output of the metronome bus it is precisely in time. 
 
Sorry dude -  12 years on and either there is something askew on your system or you are still playing ahead of the beat:)

steplander
I ran two tests on video to prove the point. One is a high speed video showing the click banging just before the measure.
The other is a simple STOP after the metronome fires and the cursor is sitting there, about a 64th note space, before the measure.
Now, with all of the changes at Cakewalk, it appears they no longer support any of the Sonar products. (!!)
So, there is nobody I can contact to get this paid attention to.
Has anyone been able to figure out how to repair this bug or get around it so the metronome fires ON the beat?

 
I suggest you create a support ticket attaching those videos.
https://www.cakewalk.com/Support
 

tenfoot
This 12 year old chestnut takes exactly 30 seconds to disprove in Sonar Platinum thanks to Aux tracks. If you create an Aux track and directly record the output of the metronome bus it is precisely in time. 
 
Sorry dude -  12 years on and either there is something askew on your system or you are still playing ahead of the beat:)

He is writing about Sonar X3 though.
 
@steplander:
Does this also happen with a brand new Sonar X3 project?
Back in the day I found a few unusual differences between a new Sonar X3 project and Sonar 8 projects opened in X3.

Grent

tenfoot
This 12 year old chestnut takes exactly 30 seconds to disprove in Sonar Platinum thanks to Aux tracks. If you create an Aux track and directly record the output of the metronome bus it is precisely in time. 
 
Sorry dude -  12 years on and either there is something askew on your system or you are still playing ahead of the beat:)

He is writing about Sonar X3 though.
 

Yes,  but it seems extraordinarily unlikely the metronome has been playing out of time for 12 years and they left it until now to fix it. 

As best I can tell from trying to help various users with this issue over the years, this is an interoperability issue with certain system/interface/driver combinations that affects a relatively small percentage of SONAR installations and is not peculiar to any particular version of SONAR.
 
I'm inclined to advise that you bite the bullet and get a new interface as I don't recall anyone ever completely resolving this by changing settings, though I would say changing driver modes is your best bet, and you should definitely check Playback and Record Timing Master assignments, etc. Setting a Timing Offset as suggested earlier in the thread is a workaround that should not be necessary, and will cause other problems, especially if you use both software and hardware synths.
 
My current system, and every system I've ever owned will record simultaneous MIDI and audio from a keyboard synth with near-perfect sync affected only by uncompensated MIDI transmission latency that inevitably causes MIDI to be recorded a few milliseconds late relative to perfectly compensated audio (including SONAR's metronome if patched back to an input) - never early. So I'm confident know there's no inherent fault in SONAR independent of hardware it's running on.

I've had good luck using a dedicated midi interface that is completely separate from my audio interface. Some audio interfaces have fairly poor midi interfaces.
 
Regards,
Dan
 

I have a feeling vst's Plugin Delay Compensation has to do with this....I had an issue once but can'take remember exactly what it was.