As I stumble into the next year, angry, confused, and ignorant. I wish Sonar a fond farewell, I've gotten to do some great mixes there, it's been a useful tool. Admittedly, I totally messed up my box, after a fresh install, things that used to crash, no longer do so. Even with a completely hosed windows installation, Sonar worked well enough to get the job done. Kudos to the Dev team.
I still have 100's of Sonar projects so I will probably use my currently frozen version for the foreseeable future, but I have no motivation whatsoever to purchase the next upgrade.
With a brand new windows 7 environment using a UAD Apollo Quad (FW 800) as a primary interface, and all hardware and drivers 100% in sync. DAWs like Live and Cubase, regardless of channel count, render perfectly in real time, while Sonar always seems to generate audio dropouts. Sonar renders OK for bounces.
It's more than that though, 120 measures of kick without Ctrl-D? If you object to things like VCA channels, have you ever used them? IMHO, the Windows centric implementation of Sonar is its undoing.
OK, fine, I'll go away quietly now. My apologies if I've pissed anyone off.