aj

I appreciate I am risking being flamed here but my experience has been that with exactly the same hardware and exactly the same plugins, I simply have never ever had even a single crash or dropout with Reaper.

I downloaded Reaper a few weeks ago. To my surprise it scanned my PC and found all my plugins including Dimension Pro, Guitar Rig, Sonitus FX suite (except it couldn't find Sonitus:Compressor for some reason.).

About 10 minutes in, Dimension Pro and Guitar Rig started crashing when using Reaper, yet they work fin in 8.5 and X1 for me.

I'm not flaming you, just letting you know my experience with Reaper.

10Ten, I have been on this forum for over 10 years, the chance of me trolling is slim. But the chance that your opinion of X1 is based on real usage of a high end machine is also slim. I would bet you are operating on a laptop, xp with minimal resources and complaining about X1 with little or no ability to make a real determination of what it can and can't do.

I might also suggest you change your forum name to 0zero. I asked a simple question and rather than provide us with an enlightened answer you started back stepping with arrogant responses. You are the typical person bashing X1 adding to the noise here on the forum which makes it difficult for other people, more sincere in their musical intent, to make an informed and reasonable decision.

I had to reset my soundcard or reboot to have sound in Sonar before-

Now I dont-

10Ten

Lanceindastudio


If I crash I dont need to reset my sound card driver or rebnoot- just start right back up cuz sonar "lets go" better now.

Big help for me

AFAIK Sonar has never been any different.

10Ten

I really want X1 to be a failure because I work for Apple. 

Now that does suprise me. I would have pegged you for a Reaper type.

Neither Sonar X1/8.5 nor Reaper has ever crashed on me.
Worst I have gotten was refusal to load due to a hosed VST.
Both have done that on occasion.

For the record I mostly use both like multi-track tape recorders with real musicians who know how to play.

Player

10Ten

Player


It really seems like people with little Sonar experience, lightweight computers and projects that don't push any envelope do well while people with mean computers, a ton of experience and projects that test the boundaries of what Sonar can do, don't.
I have a project I've been testing that is 50+ tracks, 100 or so effects, some synths, etc. In 8.5.3 it runs great at a buffer of 32 in X1 I have to run it at 128 or it stops every time I look at it.


This is a false assumption.  Granted, there are users who are having problems with X1; however, there are many others here who are having no problems with stability using X1 who, myself included, run equally large projects.

You'll notice that I said it seems, and you would be one of the few exceptions to the rule so far.

You will notice that I said granted.  I still disagree with your assumption, which is still an assumption.

It was, but it was based on posts from people that put their gear in their signatures. I also found it to be odd, but it still seems to be the case.

Funkybot

ould bet you are operating on a laptop, xp with minimal resources and complaining about X1 with little or no ability to make a real determination of what it

wormser


Neither Sonar X1/8.5 nor Reaper has ever crashed on me.
Worst I have gotten was refusal to load due to a hosed VST.
Both have done that on occasion.

For the record I mostly use both like multi-track tape recorders with real musicians who know how to play.

This is the absolutely most basic possible usage. It's not surprising that it's highly stable in that environment. The question is, how stable is it when you're running soft synths, doing extensive MIDI work, using some of the more in depth features like Audio Snap, etc. This is Middleman's point.


I seldom ever get to work audio only, and Sonar's just been extremely unstable for me. Reaper has been much better in terms of stability, efficiency, and a super smooth audio engine, but it's MIDI features are still not where Sonar's are, so it's far from perfect too. I'm beginning to think I may need to use Sonar for MIDI composition and editing, and Reaper for recording and mixing. Although, I'm going to check out Studio One soon. Maybe that's the happy balance I'm looking for.

All I can say is that I can run at a 32 buffer with more CPU usage longer with 8.5.3 than I can with X1. It seems to be worse on better machines. If that is the case, I'd like to know why so Cake or me can fix it.

snookerc


I'd still consider Middleman's Q8200 to be pretty high end.  I know 1-2 years is like 10 in computer years, but still...

It's a decent machine, but it isn't an i5 or i7. I would expect my machine to have no issues. I didn't bring up to start a pissing match, I brought it up because I found it to be interesting and wondered if there was a problem I might be able to fix on my system. 8.5.3 runs great on the same box.

Player


I have to presume that we disagree, for there are those,with great credibility, who have responded to say that X1 is stable.  We are now entering the realm of semantics.

I wish you well with your problems and hope that all is expeditiously resolved.

They really don't have any credibility unless you know their machines and the projects they create. It may be perfectly stable running w tracks and no effects but not so much with lots of tracks and lots of effects. We also don't know what stable means to another person or what they have their buffers set at. It's all a guessing game with too many variables and opinions to get to facts.

Player


Craig Anderton.  Jim Roseberry.

Rosenberry I'll accept but that is one guy and still doesn't cover the many other opinions out there.

g_randybrown


 I got around to installing X1 on my less than impressive laptop and I'm very impressed. Where I was seeing close to 40-50% cpu activity with SPE8 (in the Sonar display) I am seeing 15-20% activity in X1 (with same project). 

Why does X1 seem to do very well on lesser machines? I guess I'm going to install it on my laptop and see if it makes a difference.

Player


I wouldn't classify mine as a lesser machine.

I don't think anyone would.

Some very interesting replies, very helpful indeed. One question that arises, which I regret not clarifying in my original post, is what kind of workflow is involved when Sonar (a) works and (b) doesn't, so this is my experience (over releases from 2.1 onwards)

IN MY EXPERIENCE (and therefore I am not categorically stating this would be true for others, necessarily)

Sonar is rock solid when

• You are working mainly or exclusively with audio tracks and your system has 'settled down'. By this I mean you have loaded the project at least once after a reboot and played some of it, then shut Sonar down and reloaded it. If not, then there seems to be a reasonable probability on some projects - you can see this just with the Unified Tribe sample project, for instance, that even with reasonably high latencies (>50ms), you may get the odd dropout initially. Just maybe one brief glitch in the whole project, but this is enough to be a real nuisance. I've seen this with different machines - its not specific to a particular setup. You can fiddle all you like with cache and buffer size settings, make sure the OS isn't doing stupid stuff like prefetching and indexing as a background task, make sure Wifi etc. is all off, but the problem is likely to recur. (XP, Vista, Win 7, doesn't matter)

The faster your machine, the less chance you have of having problems but these projects are not huge and should work with reasonably modest CPUs such as the dual-core T7250 in my laptop or the AMD 6400 X 2 I have in one of the desktops. After all, when these projects (and the matching Sonar versions to go with them) were released, these kind of processors were pretty much 'start of the art' at the time. Note that CPU usage, nonetheless, is very small in these dropout situations.

Sonar starts to glitch when

• You use certain plugins for realtime softsynth playing. Particular offenders are Yellow Tools Independence Free and RealStrat, which in my experience will almost always produce the odd dropout even with latencies > 10ms (which is too high for realtime playing), but both of these plugins are absolutely rock solid under Reaper with similar latencies and in fact will work fine down to the point where the external USB audio interface becomes the limiting factor (about 5ms latency for the UA25).

Note: all the above are not affected by the choice of driver type either, by the way, and I have the latest UA25 drivers and have tried other audio interfaces as well, on a variety of hardware. I accept that others will have different experiences here.

Sonar will almost certainly glitch or drop the audio engine out when you

• Scrub large MIDI softsynth projects while they are playing (particularly if using a control surface to scrub)

• Set up loops in these kind of projects (yes, I am taking account of 'hanging' MIDI note offs etc when saying this)

• Set up multiple projects to be loaded at once and switch between them, even though not playing them when you do this.

Sonar will likely crash if you

• Use V-Vocal (as others have reported)

• Use some of the newer stuff like BeatScape. I'm still not sure this is quite stable yet

• Use either Amplitube or Guitar Rig in conjunction with other plugins. The exact circumstances are proving a bit difficult to pin down and it may be a 'historical' thing i.e you loaded a project using plugins A,B and C then later loaded a project using plugins D,E and F and this crashed, but when you load it from a reboot, it works fine.

• Add or remove softsynths using the synth rack several times in a medium to large project.

I believe that ON CERTAIN HARDWARE PLATFORMS Sonar is indeed potentially rock-solid. However, it isn't very resilient (IMHO) to variations from these platforms and I'm also suspicious about how well it closes down the audio drivers when it shuts down. Particularly if it crashes, as others have noticed, versions prior to X1 seemed to need a reboot to get the audio device working again.

So, in summary, I'd be interested in upgrading if

(a) the stability issues appear to be resolved, particularly for softsynths
(b) the long-standing bugs with instrument tracks are fixed. Could someone with X1 perhaps check this. Load a softsynth - any one will do - and insert some kind of amp sim, cranking it up so there's some overdrive on the sound, but not too much. Then save the instrument track as a track template. Now insert the template into a new project. Has the sound changed? (i.e probably most or all of the overdrive has vanished). This is because the levels have dropped by at least 10dB (although faders won't show this) - a ridiculous bug which afaik remains unfixed. Also, can the MIDI control parameters for an instrument track now be reached without splitting the track. I use these for example for B3 patches using Nubi (the B3 plugin) and Spinner (the Leslie simulator) so that the sustain pedal ramps the Leslie speed up and down, but with instrument tracks now, you can't get at these params without splitting the track into audio/midi, then adding them, then joining the track up again. This would be fine, because I could then save the track as a template except that the stupid level bug then kicks in. Arrggg!

10Ten

Player


I have to presume that we disagree, for there are those,with great credibility, who have responded to say that X1 is stable.  We are now entering the realm of semantics.

I wish you well with your problems and hope that all is expeditiously resolved.

They really don't have any credibility unless you know their machines and the projects they create. It may be perfectly stable running w tracks and no effects but not so much with lots of tracks and lots of effects. We also don't know what stable means to another person or what they have their buffers set at. It's all a guessing game with too many variables and opinions to get to facts.

Ha ha man! Get down from the pedestal before you fall down and hurt yourself

Don't drink and post folks.