Off-topic, but is that your VW in the avatar?

I admit to being nervous about the updates too, basically because Sonar has recently been (at least for me) more unstable than it has ever been, and that's with the same OS and hardware and workflow. Having been a pro developer for decades I suspected Sonar might have gone Agile at some point, instead of using the waterfall model of one big release a year, and that's now used as the basis for the subscription model. But count me unhappy with the stability so far.

The ability to rollback is the one saving grace. I've yet to run into any show stoppers, but I've run into a goodly share of smaller issues that do make me cautious about keeping up with the latest release. That being said, I've only ever had to rollback once, and the issues all had workarounds that were able to keep me going.
 
I am hoping that the bakers will get better at the process, because I otherwise love the direction and responsiveness we are seeing from the company.
 
Regards,
Dan
 

PhilW
I admit to being nervous about the updates too, basically because Sonar has recently been (at least for me) more unstable than it has ever been, and that's with the same OS and hardware and workflow.

Can you quantify what you mean by "unstable"? It would be helpful in order to find out why you don't have the same experience as those who say SONAR is more stable than ever. I'd also be interested in what OS you use. I don't know code, but I've always wondered if something designed on, for example, Windows 10 might cause issues with older systems. 

Anderton

PhilW
I admit to being nervous about the updates too, basically because Sonar has recently been (at least for me) more unstable than it has ever been, and that's with the same OS and hardware and workflow.

Can you quantify what you mean by "unstable"? It would be helpful in order to find out why you don't have the same experience as those who say SONAR is more stable than ever. I'd also be interested in what OS you use. I don't know code, but I've always wondered if something designed on, for example, Windows 10 might cause issues with older systems. 

I've been with Sonar since 3, so I'm not new to this. I get more crashes now than with 8.5 or X3. I got one yesterday from the simple act of deleting a plugin, and the project wasn't even playing. Two days ago I did a bounce to clip with a Melodyne Studio 4 edited clip and it crashed.  I played back a track the other day with no waveform shown but there was sound playing - that was a mystery.  I should keep a log of them all, but in general the crashes and other issues seem to be mostly with plugins - adding, deleting. A Sonar error capture dialog came up the other day, never seen that before, it wanted a description of what I was doing to send the crash data to Cakewalk.  I have a separate thread open about UAD plugin UI, one commenter there implied that the UAD folks seem to regard Sonar as "different" somehow with plugins. There is a free plugin called ADT that worked fine in 8.5 but now not with X series or Platinum, the UI does not respond, and that's eerily similar to the UAD issue I'm having, as well as with another plugin that displayed invalid data because Sonar is different in some way compared to other DAWs. In one case I was told that Sonar opened the plugin as an 8 channel plugin but only the first two channels have reliable values, the rest being random data, this for a plugin that works fine with other DAWs. So the general problem area that I see is adding/deleting/interacting with plugins is rather crash-prone, and there maybe something unusual in Sonar's UI interaction with plugins that causes intermittent problems with some plugins.
 
This is Windows 7.

Hmmm, that definitely seems to quality as a pattern...which conforms to Cakewalk support's experience that the greatest number of stability issues relate to third-party plug-ins.
 
Unfortunately there are many ways good plugs can go bad, the main one being the existence of 32- and 64-bit plug-ins in the same project. Don't know if that's the situation, but bridging is a kludge. One of the better decisions PreSonus made when they introduced the 64-bit version of Studio One was to increase stability by not including any way to run 32-bit plug-ins. When someone at PreSonuSphere asked Wolfgang what he recommended for running 32-bit plug-ins in SOP, his response was "Tell the manufacturer to make a 64-bit version."
 
Again, I don't know much about your system or even whether you're running 32-bit or 64-bit, but I will say that when I made the decision to use 32-bit plug-ins only as a last resort, I pretty much stopped having issues with SONAR once I also stopped using an audio interface with problematic drivers. Since then crashes are virtually non-existent, and I use SONAR almost every day.
 
Furthermore, SONAR sticks very close to the VST spec, and some older VST2 plug-ins may have taken liberties that didn't matter prior to the spec change to VST3 but show up now. Of course, there are also plug-ins that weren't designed very rigorously in the first place. Sadly many of these are one-of-a-kind, cool plug-ins designed by mad scientists, and I've had to wave goodbye to several of them over the years.
 
As to UA, their attitude toward SONAR changed a while back and I think you'll find that current versions work well with SONAR...at least they do for me. But remember that some of those plugs use a lot of sample buffers, like the Manley Massive Passive. 
 
[Just noticed this thread, which expresses sentiments similar to mine]

Agreed, yes, and I'm completely 64-bit now. While it's no doubt true that good plugs can go bad, we're talking about UA here, a reliable company with a lot at stake, and Celemony, VoxenGo, SIR2, Acon Digital Verberate, they should all be ok. I just don't see this instability with my other DAW.
 
 

I have Voxengo (Mfree bundle) and Melodyne (4) in many of my projects, but have experienced zero issues in the latter part of this last year. I cannot think of anything (on my system) that has gone bad, except running an unstable version of UAD. I really hope you get this figured out.
All the best.