ericyeoman
Concerning the Generic ASIO Driver, this got installed (I hadn't seen this post at the time) and Sonars driver did get switched to it. Switched it back to my preferred driver and all has worked fine since.

That Generic ASIO Driver is something to watch out for.  This happened to me when I installed the Elements demo.

abacab

ericyeoman
Concerning the Generic ASIO Driver, this got installed (I hadn't seen this post at the time) and Sonars driver did get switched to it. Switched it back to my preferred driver and all has worked fine since.

That Generic ASIO Driver is something to watch out for.  This happened to me when I installed the Elements demo.

More DAWs are coming out with their own ASIO driver.  I do believe ASIO4ALL is open source and that's what it is just a different name.

kitekrazy1

abacab

ericyeoman
Concerning the Generic ASIO Driver, this got installed (I hadn't seen this post at the time) and Sonars driver did get switched to it. Switched it back to my preferred driver and all has worked fine since.

That Generic ASIO Driver is something to watch out for.  This happened to me when I installed the Elements demo.

More DAWs are coming out with their own ASIO driver.  I do believe ASIO4ALL is open source and that's what it is just a different name.

This caused Sonar to stop working.  I already have a dedicated ASIO device.

Indeed - The Cubase generic ASIO driver does interfere with Sonar. I found that out when I was using Sonar and Cubase next to each other. However, you do not have to jump through hoops to disable the Cubase generic ASIO driver. Just make a directory on your harddisk with a simple name, and go to C:\Program Files\Steinberg and move (thus move, not copy) the directory "Asio" to the backup directory. After that restart your computer, and Sonar and Cubase will work in perfect harmony. So - No need to dabble with the registry or something like that (I would even strongly advise against it).
 
Do not forget to move that directory back when you do an Cubase update, otherwise the installer will complain about missing files. You can move that directory out of the way again after the update.
 
I have noticed that only Sonar seems to have this problem. Other DAW's on my computer work normal with the Cubase generic ASIO driver in working order.
 
Hope this helps.

tenfoot
Thanks for the great summary David! 
 
One of my concerns with Cubase is that it may suffer the same legacy of decades of layered code, updates and convoluted behaviour that plagued Sonar. I was used to its quirks and they were never be enough to drive me away. Now that I have to change, I really want to strike that balance between deep features and young and snappy. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated!

This is a concern of mine as well as I select a new DAW. Sonar had a ton of really hard to pin down bugs and quirks that I'm convinced were caused by legacy code and new code not getting along.  Legacy code wasn't necessarily written to be future proof, and I can't imagine developers enjoy reverse engineering code that perhaps isn't documented sufficiently. Apart from anything it's a drain on resources. 
 
Many of Sonar's oddities were impossible to reproduce with a recipe, which meant that unless the Bakers had an "a-ha!" moment of enlightenment, the chances of them being fixed were small. I must have brought up dozens of issues on the beta forum that never ended up as bug reports because they could not be reproduced at will. Sometimes I would attach projects along with a bug report, in the hope that the project would demonstrate the behavior even if I couldn't come up with the steps. Oftentimes I would hear back "we're not seeing this at our end," which suggests that some bugs were peculiar to specific machines or installations - even harder to track down. A couple of times I heard "we're aware of this but we're not going to fix it because to do so would break another part of the program" (in discussions in the public forum no less) which again suggests a problem caused by legacy code that would have taken too long to get to the bottom of - the Bakers obviously had to manage their project resources frugally and taking the engine apart to find something that was more of an annoyance than a showstopper was probably deemed to be an inefficient use of their budget. So, many of the annoyances stayed across versions without any hope of a fix. 
 
An example of this is that 3 years ago I reported a problem with automation envelopes becoming misaligned when looping a section. A horrible problem which means that you cannot always rely on your automation playing accurately when a loop is enabled. The bug was never fixed, and looping in general has a ton of related problems in Sonar. I suspect that the looping code is an example of the core legacy code which made problems so hard to pin down. Some of the program probably needed a rewrite but they didn't have the budget to do this alongside the pressure to add new features and the like. 
 
So one of my main attractions with switching DAW's is to start with a fresh young program that has a modern, coherent code base. That's why I'm looking at Bitwig and S1. I know that Cubase is probably one of the most powerful, feature rich DAWs in comparison with Sonar, but when I think about it I didn't use half of Sonar's features. Do I really want a bunch of functionality that I'll rarely need, at the expense of potentially dealing with a set of hard to fix, hard-baked bugs in ancient code? 

The biggest problem I am having is that there seems to have been a huge terminology change in 9.5 so almost everything I see online -- INCLUDING Steinberg documentation -- does not match the product.  It is almost as if they just went in an renamed functions randomly just to confuse people.
 
Like the OP, I have not found anything that is a complete show stopper, but I really wish they would deliver ARA support for Melodyne.  Steinberg's alternative is pretty good, but it is no Melodyne.
 
I find Steinberg's chord support very powerful and wish they would do something similar to "Follow chords" in their Dorico notation product.  If you are a person who tends to think in chords wile composing or arranging, block out 4 hours to really understand what Cubase does in that area.

Our problem was to find a DAW that has all audio features like SONAR or better, becaue we have to work with thousends of tapes and have them to restore. Therefore we bought now Cubase 9.5.
Things that are very easy in SONAR, are very complicated in Cubase. For example to set a simple marker. You have to insert a markertrack. Then you must click on an icon and then go into the markerwindow to name it !!!
Cubase can not render an insert effect to a clip - like in SONAR "applying effect". Instead of this Cubase 9.5 has a powerful feature that can render effects offline to thousends of clips, each clip with his own backup-history. So you can always go back to the original, for every single clip individually.
I always wished that we can name the audioclips in the Eventlist of SONAR. Cubase has a list (audio pool) where you can autoname the clips and batch-export them to autonamed filenames.
 
So we can not use a "fresh young" program. Because we would miss a lot of audiofeatures.
The learning curve will be very hard for Cubase.
 

cparmerlee
Like the OP, I have not found anything that is a complete show stopper, but I really wish they would deliver ARA support for Melodyne.  Steinberg's alternative is pretty good, but it is no Melodyne.

 
You don't need ARA for Melodyne. I always inserted Melodyne as a VST-plugin and did all editions in the Melodyne-Editor (inside SONAR). This is because I worked with Melodyne years befor SONAR had ARA.

The Melodyne Essential license is portable as well, not tied to Sonar.

ericyeoman
Concerning the Generic ASIO Driver, this got installed (I hadn't seen this post at the time) and Sonars driver did get switched to it. Switched it back to my preferred driver and all has worked fine since.

Good to know.
 
Just FYI, I'm told that the Generic ASIO Driver isn't meant to replace your audio hardware's purpose-built ASIO driver, if you have one, even in Cubase.  Steinberg offers the generic driver in case your audio hardware didn't come with an ASIO driver.  Unfortunately, they don't make this clear in the installation dialogs, so it's difficult to make an informed decision.  So, if you installed it, in addition to correcting it in Sonar and other audio applications, be sure to choose your audio card's ASIO driver in Cubase > Devices > Device Setup... > VST Audio System > ASIO Driver.  You should see improved performance.
 

JClosed
So - No need to dabble with the registry or something like that (I would even strongly advise against it).

 
Good advice.  If you're comfortable disabling it rather than uninstalling it, that's the safer approach.  The failures I noticed after installing the Generic ASIO Driver - and not just with Sonar either - put me into a panic, so I jumped to the conclusion that an uninstall was the only thing that would restore my confidence.  For the record, I was successful but, yeah, dabbling in the registry is risky business.
 

sharke
So one of my main attractions with switching DAW's is to start with a fresh young program that has a modern, coherent code base. That's why I'm looking at Bitwig and S1. I know that Cubase is probably one of the most powerful, feature rich DAWs in comparison with Sonar, but when I think about it I didn't use half of Sonar's features. Do I really want a bunch of functionality that I'll rarely need, at the expense of potentially dealing with a set of hard to fix, hard-baked bugs in ancient code? 

I think that's an accurate synopsis of the Cubase situation.  And, one hopes, a fresh, young team of enthusiastic developers will be more inclined to address our bug reports and feature requests.  Playing the Devil's Advocate, I suspect that those young developers will also target loop-based producers more so than traditional composers.  If Native Instruments is any indication, that's where the buzz (and money) is.  Remember when NI's product line consisted of just vintage keyboard emulations?  <sigh>  Now, it's all about the EDM.  Devices like the Roli Seaboard give me hope that support for full-featured keyboard controllers will make a comeback, but I doubt they'll ever fully support the old-school MIDI features of my trusty ol' Kurzweil MIDIBoard (ca. 1987).  That's the trade-off some of us face.
 
BTW, I would love it if somebody demos Studio One, Reaper, etc., and proves me wrong.  Maybe one of the young upstarts supports the full MIDI spec after all?  Hope springs eternal.