Hi, I have sonar 8.5 and when burning a project to disc from final mix, there is a very obvious volume drop in the final recording.
any idea what could be causing this?  I have used several generations of sonar and this is a new problem for me.  Maybe a setting of some kind?
 
thanks
dennis
 

Welcome to the forum!
How have you verified this drop? What do your Master Bus meters show for levels and what are the levels on the CD?
I don't remember for how many generations SONAR has had CD-burning feature before 8.5, but I've never heard of this kind of issue.

Hey Kalle, thanks for the reply--the volume drop is verified by my ears--when I play the burned project back over the same system with exactly the same settings, there is an obvious drop in volume.   In the past with cakewalk pro audio 9 and then,  sonar 3, I used pyro to burn my files to disc but I did not like the latest version of pyro so I found this "burn cd" under "tools" within the sonar 8.5 program.  At first is seemed to work ok but now the volume comes out much lower to the detriment of the project and I was wondering if there was some kind of setting I accidentally
set wrong----
 
dennis

You can not compare the volume of the CD (played by Win Media Player?) directly to what you hear played by SONAR.  The only way to compare the absolute volume level is to compare the meter readings or, if you compare by ear, A/B compare the two versions coming from the same source. 
 
If you import the song from the CD back to the same project in SONAR, is the volume the same as that of the project? It should be, if the level of the track and Master Bus are the same. (You are routing everything in the project through Master Bus and use that as the source for burning?). I assume you burn as audio CD, not data CD (MP3)?
 
 

Hi, as I have fooled around with this I have found a solution for my particular complaint.  I find that if I burn the file to disc using the  windows burning program as opposed to the on-board burning program in sonar, the resulting cd is much closer in observable volume to the volume of my mixdown.  So that is what I have started to do and it solves the problem for me-thanks very much for your input---
 
dennis

Well this is all very well , but I'm sorry, A CD will burn a WAVE file at exactly the volume that the wave file is set. 
 
If you do not actually know the RMS volume level of your wave file then your only guessing. 
 
This is why Mastering is so important. 

You're fooling yourself Dennis. Check the RMS levels of the two. IMO, even if you are not very serious about your music making, you do need to know  (and understand) the levels of your tracks/projects, what you export etc.
 
What you hear from your loudspeakers/headphones does not tell you all you need to know. The most common situation, perhaps, being a load of low frequency energy tthat you can not hear with you gear, or high peaks that "keep" the RMS level so low that the whole track sounds very quiet.

Sounds like either a routing or selection problem to me.
 
Are you routing all of your tracks & busses to a master bus? If not you should be.
Muting the master bus should result in silence IF you've got everything routed to it.
 
As stated above, the best way to check your mix is to import the export back into the same project and route it's output directly to your Main Outs/Interface (you don't want to double up the contribution of any Master Bus plugins)