Hi Folks
 
New to the forum, and of course i'm going to grace you all with a problem! I've been a cakewalk user for years now, and I've rarely encountered any problems until now. Out of the blue, it seems that none of my sessions are exporting true to my stereo mix. For example, in my mix guitars panned hard left or right are switching to straight up the middle when I export and playback, everything is fine inside the session so it must be a rendering issue.

I've tried exporting directly, bouncing to a track and then exporting, and even recording straight to a file with the Voxengo Recorder plugin, but nothing is fixing this issue. I'm exporting in stereo, and I have no mono plugins on any bus so I'm not really sure whats going on. I've tried to search for similar threads on here but it seems the search function is working correctly. I'm using Sonar X2 Producer if that helps. 
 
Any help would be much appreciated as this is driving my nuts. 
 
Cheers
Calum

Check the interleave on all your busses, in case one of them has been accidentally set to mono.

Thanks for the reply! Everything on the busses are set to stereo, removed all plugins from my master bus to see if anything there was causing it, still the same problem. Really bizarre, and I have mixes to get back to people this week. My interface died last week, so I'm only working on my machine with ASIO drivers at the moment, i'm not sure if that would affect cause the problem?

Do you hear the mono-ness during playback, or only when listening to the exported file?

In my travels I have found a lot of stereo issues are due to hardware (not all but more often than not)
What is your set up with ASIO4ALL. have you opened the settings up and looked to see what's going on behind the curtain ?
 
Also could possibly be a send from/to a bus with an FX.
I've seen and had happen to me where I send my guitar tracks to a stereo bus but also have a send for an FX feeding a bus with FX in that bin. some FX / stereo FX can change the imagine.
Example: what was a panned guitar, now has a send to a stereo bus, thus not panned anymore.
 
Are your panned guitars going to a stereo bus or the master ?

Assuming you've been exporting Entire Mix or Main Outs, try setting Source = Buses, and de-select everything but the Master bus.
 
And, of course, make sure the Channel Format option is Stereo.

Thanks for all the replies.

Sadly I've ran into another error when opening the project. Cakewalk Fault Reporter pops up and the project won't open. So I'll try all the suggested ideas when I move machines/use a backup session.

To address the above questions, the mono-ness is non existent in the session, I can only hear it on the export. I currently have no FX sending to my guitars and all my panned guitars are going to stereo bus before going to the master.

Well you've got 2 things against you. Using on board audio and X2 which was a very buggy release. 
 
I would recommend to get your work done, downloading the latest version demo. 
Or even better,  purchase Home Studio for $35. Home Studio uses WASAPI drivers which gives better performance with on board audio. 
All your plug ins from X2 will load into Home Studio. It is pretty much identical to a full version of Sonar minus all the fluff.  You'll be working in a stable environment and your issue will be solved. 
 

farkymwell
 I can only hear it on the export.

How are you playing the export. Are you re-importing the export back into SONAR to test playback or using a different program?

scook

farkymwell
I can only hear it on the export.

How are you playing the export. Are you re-importing the export back into SONAR to test playback or using a different program?

Thanks for this, we are now closer to finding the problem. I loaded a mix back into Sonar, and the stereo image is absolutely fine. I was testing my exports on Windows Media Player and VLC player. When I check both mixes on either player, the stereo image is majorly skewed, with everything heading towards the middle. Perhaps something to do with my system audio? Or maybe this is just the norm on some systems? I'm using a different machine than usual as I'm away from home at the moment. Any ideas?
 
Cheers for the help, glad to know it's not stamped on the actual export.