New To Sonar X3 Studio And Having Issues

Hi,
 
I'm new to Sonar X3 Studio. I am learning but keep bumping into things that I do not understand. Some I could find back on the forums some I could not. Most of them were problems with workarounds so I will not mention them in detail here. The mentioned issues (except issue 4) are only the ones I could not find an answer to. So far I am not realy enjoying the expierience. I have been recording one song and it seems the further I progress in the song the more questions are raised. I was hoping maybe someone could explain or help me with the following issues:
 
1) When I use loop recording (recording mode comping) all lanes get split on the time where I hit stop. That is not a good starting point. How can I prevent this from happening? When I stop I would expect the last lane to stop at the stop time and leave all earlier take lanes intact. Am I doing something wrong?
 
2) I use EZdrummer and set up a drum track with multiple outs assigned to tracks so I can easily mix and adjust each part of the drumkit seperately. Using the solo buttons works just fine at this point. When you hit the solo button the corresponding midi track allso engages solo. This is how it should work!
 
For editing in the drum editor I set up a drum map. I assigned this drummap to EZdrummer and the midi track is routed to that drum map. The drum track is now played back fine but..... Hitting the solo button now only engages the output but not the midi track. This way you will not hear anything. You have to select the midi track manually as well. Now when you want to hear the entire drumkit using the mixer you need to press all solo buttons manually. I read on this forum this is something not implemented. Totally not logical! Or am I wrong here. Can someone confirm this or help me to get it working correctly?
 
3) Selecting a part of a wavefrom and applying region fx for Melodyne works just fine. A few times I was experimenting and wanted to remove the region fx to start fresh all over again. Removing region fx however leaves a gap in the clip and does not restore the original material as i would expect. You need to do manual work to get that right again. Totally unlogical. Am I doing something wrong here?
 
Allso when you select an entire clip and create a region fx it will first bounce the entire clip and disconnect the real Original clip. If you remove the region fx the Original clip stays disconnected and the bounced version is used. I would expect the Original clip to remain as the leading one. When you clean up your audio files the Original clip will be deleted! This does not feel right to me. Is then the bounced version 100% identical to the Original clip. Does anyone know?
 
4) More to share experience... SI-Bass Guitar sounds good. I was using the Fingered clean preset and noticed a terrible lag om on some of the notes. Checked the midi source but that was fine. Then I checked the samples and it appears that some of them have a lag of 80 ms. This you will hear and makes the instrument unusable for my ears! So far I could not find any complaints about this on this forum. I edited all samples manually and they are nice now. I thought it was worth to mention here.
 
All feedback is highly appreciated. Please keep in mind that I am trying to learn the thing. I came from Cubase but found upgrading the Cubase Artist version too expensive. They now charge allmost double de price since last time! However... In all the years I used Cubase I only bumped into one issue that I did not use anyway. The program would crash while closing a project with a video open. So first close the video and then the project. And that's all.... I wish I had the same smooth experience with Sonar. Not to go into detail but I had hanging midi notes on DXi, crashes on using DX FX on freezing mono channels, TTS-1 Tone control not working, several unexplainable crashes while browsing and adding plugins, hanging presets in sonitus modulator etc...
 
Best regards,
 
Rinie

I'm not well versed enough in the Region FX or Drum Maps features to comment on those but for your fourth question about the "lag" it just sounds like latency. Just increase your interface buffers to see if that helps. You could also try "Freezing" the track which will temporarily render the MIDI track to audio and disengage the synth. The Freeze button is the button on each track that looks like a snowflake. It can be used to freeze effects as well to save overhead or you can freeze synths right inside the Synth Rack. If you need to edit the midi data further just unfreeze the track or synth. Keep in mind though any edits you do to the audio (like splits, drag moves, fades, etc) will be lost when you unfreeze a frozen track.
 
Cheers.
 

rinie.huigen@kpnmail.nl
 
 The Region FX I need to sort out to be sure I will not loose my Original takes.

Clone the track before you start and work on the clone. The original can be muted and hidden and will preserve your orignal takes.

You know... I'm not sure because again I never use this feature but the Solo Overide feature might be the solution to the MIDI track being muted. I think that's how that works but I'm not sure how to set it up. Maybe I should learn. lol

aaaand just a note on why the Comping mode automatically splits takes like that. It's an integral part of the Comping workflow. Lets say I did a full take of a whole song then did a bunch of overdubs in various points. By having the auto splits there I can automatically audition/promote between the original and the overdubs without having to manual create the splits or messing around with the mute tool, etc. The auto splits mean nothing with a clip (they don't affect the audio or do anything unless you mess with them) so you can just ignore them. They are however handy to have there when you DO want to do something. It just gets annoying when things get auto promoted that you don't want like say I let Sonar record for a few seconds after an overdub that silence will be promoted along with the new take and mute the original part. In that case I'd just move the split (using the correct hotspot which takes some getting used to because there are a TON of different hotspots that do different things) to where it should be.
 
I always used to do my fades/x-fades manually and meticulously because I never liked the way any DAW did that stuff automatically but for some reason the way X3 handles the auot x-fades in comping mode ALWAYS sounds right. It's really weird but man does it save me a ton of time. lol
 
Cheers.
 

Hi Craig,
 
Wow... what a clearly explained. You are absolutely good at that :-) Thanks very much. I've got enough hints and things to play around with for now and no further questions. I'll get back to the forum if I have more questions. These were the most important things that needed answering.
 
Thanks very very much.
 
 

rinie.huigen@kpnmail.nl
Hi Craig,
 
Wow... what a clearly explained. You are absolutely good at that :-) Thanks very much. I've got enough hints and things to play around with for now and no further questions. I'll get back to the forum if I have more questions. These were the most important things that needed answering.
 
Thanks very very much.

Glad to be of help. As to your various MIDI issues, we can deal with those if they come up again but for now, choose Edit > Preferences > MIDI > Playback and Recording and under Playback, increase the length of the millisecond buffers to 500 ms if it isn't already set to this value. If that doesn't solve your problem, try 750 but bear in mind the longer the buffer, the longer it will take to begin playback from a stopped transport.