I'm getting a weird noise now and then during playback of a 7 minute long midi piece for orchestra. It's an electrical-sounding noise, like a brief zapping sound. It lasts about a half second. Kind of like you plugged the speaker into wrong outlet, but not that loud. I never got it with Sonar 8.5. I have set all the 256 values to 512 but that didn't seem to help. This happened also with Sonar Home Studio, which I recently installed. Did not happen with 8.5.

Sounds like the type of noise some manufacturers add to their product demos. Not something Cakewalk ever did and I doubt BandLab does either.

Imageline use this on both FX and Synths, so if it's not a synth, check and FX isn't in demo mode.

Interesting. If it's a synth, I may be able to configure it and solve the problem. I'll have to watch my synths while it's playing, and see if I can narrow it down.

If the noise happens in the exact same spot that narrows it down. 
If it's Random that's a little harder. 
 
Same spot: 
Solo each track in turn and loop play that spot  to find. 
 
Random:
Same but now it will take longer as you'll have to wait it out. 
You can try bypassing all effects and play. 
If you have sub busses you can try soloing those instead of each track. 
 

My suspicion is on the free Kontakt Player, although I'm not sure why. Just a hunch., So if anyone has any info on that, please let me know. Like, how to configure it and such.

Well, I decided to update all my VSTi (Play, Aria, Kontakt, Vienna). I still had the weird sound during playback. So that didn't solve it. I then switched the Kontakt Player's multicore support off. That may have helped, no noise so far. If that holds up, that would be the answer.

Unfortunately the problem remains. I stress again that this did not happen with 8.5 Studio, only Home Studio (the freebie people were recently downloading) and CbB. So this would tend to argue that it is some setting in these newer programs that is the culprit. Or possibly an incompatibility between these program and one or more of my synths.

michael diemer
Well, I decided to update all my VSTi (Play, Aria, Kontakt, Vienna).

Did you check your VSTs too. Is an FX running in demo mode

Good thought Kamikaze, will do. (Why didn't I think of that?).