Pros and Cons of SONAR Play Lists

no one using this feature??? let's hope the bakers don't drop it because my tests over here look very promising for what I intend to do with it :-)

I have tried using playlists to play individual projects one after another. It works fine except that you have to leave a few more blank measures after the playback starts for the samples to load in to the vstis. As I'm sure you are aware, long load times mean dead air! That extra 10 seconds could mean the difference between a packed dance floor and the Sahara Desert. Once you've lost them, you have to start winning them back over again. That scenario can be plain exhausting and frustrating. Over the years of playing a lot of the venues over again, I have made lists that are assembled from files that are custom EQed and tweaked for certain rooms.
It is so much easier to convert mixes to mp3s and make playlists in Media Player than being bothered with Sonar. It's a lot easier to locate that one requested song in the middle of a set and insert it in there. I still prefer using the original project files but sometimes the show needs to move faster and more flexible than Sonar will let you. 

I did a gig with a guy that used it just a little while back and it worked flawlessly. There was no appreciable lag time for loading files or instruments that I could tell. And he was using X2.
I was so impressed with it I've started experimenting with it myself. I've noticed that as one file is playing the next file starts to load so there's no lag. But I'm only loading projects that have maybe 10 or 12 tracks maximum. If you were loading projects with huge track or vsti counts then YMMV.

Anderton
When playlists were broken,

... which leads to the first step when using them. You must be on X3E (OP's sig says X3c).

CakeAlexS
... well dead ones could be a logistical nightmare... (mind you they won't be going anywhere).

They're always late for rehearsal.

Sidroe
Due to the financial burdens on our country for the last several years, club owners found out they can cut their entertainment budget in half by replacing real musicians with one guy and what I call "Silicone Musicians".
 ........... I can safely say out of the numerous club and motel gigs around me, 90% of them are 1 guy, sitting on a stool with an acoustic under a 100 watt light bulb singing Midnite Rider! PLEASE! I'll take a bottle of Jack and a pistol at table 3!

+1
It's the same around here. A four or five piece band can't make a decent living around here anymore. You have to be able to travel, in some cases a couple of hundred miles, to find any decent paying gigs. And of course those are in the larger cities so there are 100s of bands there vying for those same gigs which also tends to keep the money lower. To make enough money to make it worthwhile to play live, and by that I mean cover expenses and have a little pocket coin left over, you have to keep the overhead as low as possible.
It sucks but that's the world we live in nowadays.

and just like here it (the wealth) just keeps going to the upper classes, who are, seemingly, impervious to anything and everything going on below them.

Anderton
[incredible temptation to get really political but I'll leave it at this]
 
Downsizing has a ripple effect. When the middle class shrinks, it affects everyone in the middle class. Real incomes have declined, so people who might have wanted to see a band can't afford it. So the person running the club has a drop in attendance, and the people who do come have fewer drinks. The club owner cuts back, which means that bands that used to make a living can't. So they don't go to movies any more, and the theater owners raise prices on concessions. People go out less, so they drive less, and the car dealers don't sell as many cars because people keep their cars longer, and the gas stations don't pump as much gas. It's a vicious spiral, because wealth is being transferred out of the middle class, and the middle class can't seem to be bothered to vote or be politically active. 
 

+1
Exactly! Hit the nail on the head.

"There was a time in my life that live performance was my main income and the studio was just extra pocket money and fun. NOW the studio is my main income and live performance is very occasional."
 
Wow, sounds like my story too! 
But I wouldn't blame the economy per say, Here in BC they started really cracking down on drinking and driving back in the 80's and we point our fingers at that being the turning point. 
Bar owners became liable for anyone killed in a car crash after leaving their premises, roadside checks every weekend and sometimes weeknights etc. 
It's a good thing for society bad thing for musicians,,, I guess people need to drink to dance to live music.   
People started staying home, people stopped drinking in bars. 
It totally killed the old weekend party scene. 
Almost overnight bars were seeing less and less business and slowly stopped hiring bands and asking if we could downsize. It was not them I ever blamed.  They started hiring duos and singles. 
When I moved here in 1981 there were 5 Bars and 3 of them always had live bands. 
An interesting note: over time they all burned down and only 2 rebuilt from the ashes neither included a stage or dance floor in the new designs, they focus on dinning. 
 
As the music scene changed a few of use "technically minded" musicians quickly learned how to operate drum machines. We quickly moved on to sequencing and spent thousands of dollars on the gear. Some younger folks just don't realize how spoiled rotten we are now and the next one who complains about spending $200 on a audio interface gets monkey poo thrown at them! 
So now 3 decades latter I have the best sound and equipment ever, but there is nowhere to play. 
 
Good news is all those years of learning how to sequence and create killer backing tracks pays off when working with clients. I have a good reputation for taking original songs and helping the artist bring them to  life. One man bands are very handy folks in a studio! 
 
I still play at a few repeat events each year and I am also working on a acoustic duo. We are focusing on originals and hoping to bust into the summer festival gigs. The outdoor festivals might just be the last stronghold of live music. But we are reluctant to use our backing tracks which is mostly to have a bass player as that seem sort of tacky for festivals. 
 
I would love to see a well thought out playback system brought to the market. I don't see it happening as there's just not much of a market anymore. In the 90's there was a huge demand for live performance gear. Now It's all this DJ crap. ( no offence intended to all you DJ's)  
I tried Sonars Playlist but loading is slow on my older laptops I use if I used my original projects as is. So your faced with dumbing them down and in the end might as well export the mix. 
 
 Win Amp  works the best of all players I ever tried. 
It's the only one I know of that will stop after each song. Drag and drop playlist. Hot keys for my X Keys foot control. Sonar has those features but it's also boring to look at. 
 
 

fwrend
 
I for one look forward to reading up on how you view playlists in it's current state Craig - perhaps another SOS article, Tip O' the Day, or perhaps some insight for Cake to possibly have a looksee possible update (if needed).

Well, I have been known to take requests 

One place where regulations had a definite impact was in choking off the EDM scene back in the late 90s/early 2000s. While it was thriving throughout the world, several state laws were passed (IIRC New York state was the first in a series) making clubowners liable for drug use on their premises. The joke at the time was every high school principal would have to be arrested, but the laws had a chilling effect on dance clubs.
 
Having seen what drugs can do I'm certainly not in favor of a drug culture, but I don't think it's correct to deprive the majority of people something enjoyable because of the actions of a few. In any event it was a crucial time in the evolution of EDM, and it was like slamming on the brakes.
 
I do think live performance will make a comeback within the next 10 years, possibly through unanticipated media (e.g., pay-per-view live streaming in movie theaters).

Sidroe
The good news is your kids are gone. The bad news is they're coming back.

 
The upside of this, from a purely selfish point of view, is that we get to keep our girls around a lot longer than would have been the case 30 years ago.  At their age (early twenties) I was gone and wouldn't have dreamed of going back, but they can't afford to  (and neither can we).
 
It's nice to still have them around.  Soon it'll be pretty empty.
 

Sidroe
I have tried using playlists to play individual projects one after another. It works fine except that you have to leave a few more blank measures after the playback starts for the samples to load in to the vstis. As I'm sure you are aware, long load times mean dead air! That extra 10 seconds could mean the difference between a packed dance floor and the Sahara Desert. Once you've lost them, you have to start winning them back over again. That scenario can be plain exhausting and frustrating. Over the years of playing a lot of the venues over again, I have made lists that are assembled from files that are custom EQed and tweaked for certain rooms.
It is so much easier to convert mixes to mp3s and make playlists in Media Player than being bothered with Sonar. It's a lot easier to locate that one requested song in the middle of a set and insert it in there. I still prefer using the original project files but sometimes the show needs to move faster and more flexible than Sonar will let you. 

I also mix my stuff down for use.  However, I send the tracks to an iPad, and use ForScore to play them back.  If you don't know it, it is primarily a lyric app ($7).  But, you can associate a track (or more) with each song, and it will also send out MIDI when you select the song, for me that means my POD, Vocal Live, Looper, drum machine and Keyboard(s) all get set up for me when I pick the song - huge time saver - no between song setup time.( I am a modern one man band - play guitar and keys and sing over tracks or loops etc.  The OP can use this to set his digital mix patch.  It will respond to bluetooth so it is easy to use a page turner for hands free operation.