Jeff Evans
Most of you are far too emotionally involved with Sonar. And have been for too long as well. It is only a piece of software or the tools as we say. One chisel compared to another in the hands of a sculptor. There are many Daw's out there and the basic fact is they all do the very same thing and very well might I add. You should be able to realise your ideas in any Daw. If you cannot the problem lies elsewhere and not with the Daw itself.
As part of my work (as a music teacher) for the first time the other day I had to get involved with Logic. I sorted it in 5 minutes and then did a huge 24 track recording session with it without a single issue. It was painless in fact. The amount of training for that program is awesome.
Something to consider as well is get a Mac and get into Logic. It is one of the finest Daw's out there and has been for a very very long time. Longer pedigree than Sonar and most other Daw's in fact.
This poll is also irrelevant as well. Who cares what other Daw's people are switching to. The most important thing is what Daw are YOU switching to.
I totally agree Jeff, I think people are over sentimental about Sonar to the point where they refuse to take the rose colored glasses off. I understand getting a little sad when you've spent so many happy hours being creative in a program, but frankly once I came to terms with the idea that Cakewalk was kaput, the rose colored glasses came right off for me. It's a very problematic DAW and I've probably spent a good percentage of the hours I've logged in it dealing with its many quirks, bugs and all round weird behavior. I think that if you use Sonar as nothing more than a glorified tape machine to record a few tracks with basic processing (and there's nothing wrong with that), then you're not going to run into most of the problems that people run into when they use Sonar for large, complex projects with a lot of synths, effects, sound design and experimentation with arrangement etc. I deal with multiple crashes in every Sonar session, and I've found that the larger and older a project becomes, the more examples of bizarre behavior creep in. I've had to abandon more than a few projects and recreate them from scratch because they became so corrupted and unmanageable. And then the new ones develop problems. Having all of your EQ plugins reset themselves when projects load is just a huge deal breaking creativity killer for me. When you really get into large projects in Sonar, there are ways in which its problems will literally destroy your work and waste hours of your time. I'm really not surprised that it gets such a regular panning on forums like Gearslutz and KVR.
I suspect that the Bakers knew that they didn't have the time or resources to fix many of the problems, and some of those problems probably have their roots deep in old code and were impossible to fix without opening up a pandora's box of other problems, and the need to rewrite entire pieces of the program in order to make it more future proof and accommodate new features seamlessly. Some of the new development of the program was really excellent, which confirms that the Bakers were a very competent team, but I can't help imagining their frustration that they couldn't give the program the polish they needed due to both financial and technical restraints.
I've given Reaper and Bitwig trial runs recently and there is no doubt that they perform significantly better than Sonar under load. I'm sure Studio One is the same.
I can totally understand people sticking with Sonar as it is because they don't want to shell out the $$'s for a new DAW, and those who use the program professionally may well find the prospect of revamping their whole setup to accommodate a new DAW too time consuming and costly for the time being, but honestly, for everyone else, I would seriously recommend making the effort to switch. The grass really is greener.