MarioD
I have noticed an improvement in load times with the new Play also and I am on a 7200 RPM HD. A SSD is on my wish list also.
 
But I do chuckle at myself when I say "it takes a lot time to load this file".  A long time now is about a minute.  Why do I chuckle?  Because many years ago the only way to get a program saved or loaded was on tape.  I used to wait 20-30 minutes for a program to load back then so in reality a minute isn't that long of a time.  It's all perspective.
 
 

And those were tiny programs. You probably wouldn't be able to carry the tape required to store a current day sample library, lol.
 
Dan

AllanH
I updated to Play 5 and it loads much faster than before.
 
I've run into a problem with rendering to WAV files (Files->Export). Even after adjusting buffers etc. I get missing notes from Play instruments. It's almost as if Sonar renders the project "too fast" for the improved Play to keep up with.

 
Welcome to EastWest Play and one of the reasons I hate on it so hard and recommend against using EW products: It doesn't understand what fast bounce is. Fast bounce is actually more properly called "offline bounce" where things are rendered taking as much time as needed. There should never be a dropped note or sample dropout because the DAW and plugins can wait on disks. A number of plugins will kick on higher quality resampling and so on when doing an offline bounce, things too CPU intensive for realtime. However modern systems are nice and fast so the normal side effect is that it bounces faster than realtime, sometimes much faster. Again, no problem as everything waits as needed for data from disks...
 
...except for Play. Their programmers just can NOT figure out how to make that work right. It probably isn't going to get any better either, since the owner of the company believes he has hired "the best programmers in the world" (seriously, he's said that) so anything they can't figure out is clearly impossible... even though Kontakt does it with no issue and has for years.
 
So when using Play you end up needing to do realtime bounces. However then you have to carefully go and listen to your bounced track to make sure you don't have any glitches or drops, as though can occur during a realtime bounce if there's a disk hiccup, or race condition on the CPU or the like. This and this are examples. Both were done using realtime bounce, with Play's samples on a dedicated disk.
 
Now some people don't seem to have issues, even with fast bounce. What's the secret? Nobody knows. It isn't super system performance or low DPC latency, as some of us (like me) have that and still have issues.
 
Either way realtime bounce is needed to reduce issues, but it won't necessarily eliminate them. Personally, I ditched EW because it was always walking on eggshells: Set up one track sounding good, freeze the track, listen carefully for problems, if present unfreeze and try again, etc. With Kontakt (and others like BFD3, Synthmaster, etc) I don't bother to freeze out synths. My CPU, SSDs, etc are powerful enough I just run everything and then when I'm done, fast bounce the whole thing. I don't have to worry as they all do a good job and when they do a fast (offline) bounce will take as much time as needed to ensure no glitches.

Ripwolf
I updated to Play 5.0 and the Standalone version won't open. Works fine in Splat and in VIP. Tried reboot and uninstall/reinstal same results. Anybody have this?

No, I updated last night,so far I have only tried the stand alone and it works fine.

I had the problem, ran the installer a 2nd time and that fixed it.
 
I did notice the my 32bit version did not update and won't.
Not a big deal since I don't really use the 32bit version but I do try to keep my 32bit library in sync with my 64 bit so I would like to fix it at some point.

Hmm... this seems like a really nice update. I don't know if it has been there before (since I rarely leave the Browser) but the performance controls are really nice! Same with the new effects

So what do you do if your sample cache doesn't list ANY drives?
 

My Composer Cloud sub expires Christmas Day (bought it last year).  When that happens I'll see if I can get this Sample Cache thing to work by reinstalling.  It's possible I have too many hard drives with Play libraries on them.  Or it might be the fact that a lot of the Composer Cloud is on a network drive (that does have a drive letter mapping). 
 
None of their FAQ advice for this situation helped or changed anything.  All my libraries are in the Favorites list (you can see in the screenshot) and everything works (you can see I loaded several patches).  The fact they have some (bad) advice for this situation means they know it happens. 
 
For a number of years they had a race condition with their iLok usage and iZotope Ozone, which they finally fixed.  I have no doubt that a few years from now this empty Sample Cache list bug will get fixed too.