dave2007
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RE: Why Does Sonar Not Get The Respect Of Other DAWS?
2007/08/01 13:17:43
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interesting issue - Ive used CW home studio 1 and 2 since 2001 - and now i have Sonar HS - I think Sonar does nt get the same respect for several reasons - 1) Cakewalk seems to not boast as much as some other product companies 2) As I have read lots of magazines, there have always been referrals to Sonar "cant do's" or Sonar bugs, etc. This has brought down the respect level - however, an analogy could be a good movie that was rtashed by critics before it even came out for various reasons - example: Jim Carrey in Cable Guy - the first $20 (10?) million dollar salary put a dark spot on that movie which , even tho it was a good movie, it never recovered in the public eye. Waterworld, too. Just bashed so bad, it never recovered. Back to subjecy of Sonar: I like it!!!! I also have ProTools M-powered and Cakewalk is WAY light years ahead of PT in haveing an 'intuitive' feel to it. PT is awful!! But I use both programs for various reasons - Cubase gets less respect also it seems.
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DSandberg
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/01 13:20:00
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To John T., I'm not necessarily advocating a rewrite of any portion of Sonar, as I don't know the state of Sonar's code (obviously), but I am forced to disagree with your assertion that old code is always better. The problem with aging code is that it also has to be tweaked over time to interface with more recent code being written to implement new features. Eventually (over a number of years) this results in an unsupportable and increasingly unreliable rats nest of spaghetti code that at some point simply must be scrapped and re-written for the overall application to both remain solid in its operation and accommodate the new features needed to continue being competitive.
post edited by DSandberg - 2007/08/01 13:27:25
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droddey
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/01 13:45:24
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It depends on how well it was written to begin with. But most code that is written under commercial pressures over a long period of time is going to have its problems. You cannot really make radical changes to the foundation unless you are willing to commit to a LOT of retesting, and you better have a comprehensive set of unit and regression tests (something most companies also don't do like they should because of commercial pressures) to help insure that you've not broken anything. If the team is small, skilled, and highly motivated, they can re-tool an existing large code base over time to keep it ahead of the grim reaper. But I think it's all too rare that that happens.
The problem with the software business has always been that you can't really sell quality. We say we want a more stable product, but we whine all the time about new features. Those two things are diametrically apposed, when it comes to a company assigning resources for development. You can't continue to relentlessly pump out features without stepping back for considerable efforts periodically to work on things that can't go on a check list and be used against your competitors. So if your competitor is willing to sacrifice a little quality to get more features, and therefore get's ahead of you, then you sacrifice a little quality to catch up. It can become race to the bottom in some cases. Obviously there's a point at which it becomes unacceptable, but generally commerical pressures prevent companies from dealing with those little niggles and quirks and failures that bug us because there are lots of them and dealing with them all would require giving up probably a whole major release in terms of big new features.
Our company was lucky in that I started in like the early 90's building a general purpose code base, and worked on it religiously for all that time, refining it under non-commercial pressures, so that if it took a week to re-do the indentation on the whole code base, I'd do it if I felt it improved the maintainability and readability of the code. So we now have a foundation that most multi-million dollar companies would kill to have for their proprietary advantage. I had no idea I'd start a software company one day, I was just interested in building a big general purpose development system. But in the end it's been an incalcuable benefit because we can ride this code base for a decade easily before it even starts to show strains.
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dappa1
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/01 15:13:13
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if the audio is now fine tuned in Sonar the only thing left is the awful midi and if that takes new code that is accurate it only can be a plus for cakewalk. If I am correct just like in the game of chess they should be looking two three moves ahead. If hip hop producers rely on midi well there should be a market there for them. Cubases' midi to me seems quite tight. I have even tested workflow on midi on the two platforms and Cubase won that hands down. The only reason I use Sonar is that you can tell that the developers are forward thinking. But now they just need to be brave and henceforth groundbreaking.
What say thee?
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DSandberg
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/01 16:52:03
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ORIGINAL: droddey
It depends on how well it was written to begin with. But most code that is written under commercial pressures over a long period of time is going to have its problems. Yep. During the years that I was involved with the development of Paint Shop Pro, there were two complete rewrites of the app. We essentially got four major versions out of each code base. Part of the need for that was exactly this (time pressures preventing the type of refactoring that we always wished we could do). So if your competitor is willing to sacrifice a little quality to get more features, and therefore get's ahead of you, then you sacrifice a little quality to catch up. It can become race to the bottom in some cases. Yep, the pressure of competition was another contributing problem. When each new code base was written, we had no way of anticipating some of the things that we'd be called upon to make the application do four versions later, either because our competitors began doing them or, in some instances, because we came up with something original in the interim. We would still preserve our graphical processing algorithms during a rewrite, of course, but not all that much actual code would survive, because the representation of the data we were processing was different. Not to mention that we ended up changing the fundamental framework of the application during each rewrite (Win16, to MFC, to COM). Our company was lucky in that I started in like the early 90's building a general purpose code base, and worked on it religiously for all that time, refining it under non-commercial pressures, so that if it took a week to re-do the indentation on the whole code base, I'd do it if I felt it improved the maintainability and readability of the code. You were indeed lucky. :)
post edited by DSandberg - 2007/08/01 17:00:10
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droddey
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/01 17:47:19
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Not to mention that we ended up changing the fundamental framework of the application during each rewrite (Win16, to MFC, to COM). That's one of our biggest advantages. We have our own. We have everything from wrappers around the OS services (no language or OS headers are seen except inside of these, so we are completely clean other than in a few core DLLs), to all the fundamental stuff (strings, memory buffers, collections, net stuff like HTTP and SMTP, digital audio extraction, graphics and image processing, we have all our own window controls other than frames, etc...), our own ORB and IDL language and compiler and standard servers, our own XML compiler, our own object oriented macro language with virtual machine and compiler and IDE, our own build system, our own loadable resource language and runtime loading system, our own implementations of PNG and ZLib, etc... It's a huge chunk o' code. It's 725K lines currently if you include the product specific stuff, which is probably only about 100K of those or so. I wrote it all, so it's completely consistent in style and architecture, which is very rare for such a big system. There's never been random engineers who worked on something then left and orphaned it, so everything is completely maintained and fully understood and completely integrated with not redundant systems. It's refactored as required, but not a lot is required because that happend through those many years of non-commercial development. The product and general purpose parts are completely separate code bases, to keep them cleanly separated. Anyway, the goal is to use as little of the OS and any third party code as possible. That gives us a very high level of control over the quality of the product, and we have almost none of that "I installed X and now your program dies" stuff that is endemic to products that are based on lots of high level OS and object model features. We have a little of the standard JPEG libraries, since that was too big a chunk to bite off just to support JPEG. And we wrap a couple COM things, such as the WMP engine and it's metadata retrieval stuff. And we have a wrapper around some DirectShow stuff so that we can implement an embedded audio player. But otherwise, we use nothing but the most basic OS services.
post edited by droddey - 2007/08/01 17:56:22
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samson7842
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/07 17:05:18
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I'm going to say something that could get me killed in mixed company; I want to go back to Mac. And, I wish I could take Sonar with me. I spend as much time troubleshooting as I do making music on my PC. My Mac just worked and I didn't have to be a "Techie" to get through a project. I have very limited time and energy and I hate having to waste them figuring out why my PC keeps acting up. If I cared to learn that much about how computers work, I would take classes. I want create when I want to create. End of story. If Cakewalk started making Sonar PE for Mac, I'd be the first one buying it.
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CJaysMusic
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/07 17:16:18
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ORIGINAL: samson7842
I'm going to say something that could get me killed in mixed company; I want to go back to Mac. And, I wish I could take Sonar with me. I spend as much time troubleshooting as I do making music on my PC. My Mac just worked and I didn't have to be a "Techie" to get through a project. I have very limited time and energy and I hate having to waste them figuring out why my PC keeps acting up. If I cared to learn that much about how computers work, I would take classes. I want create when I want to create. End of story. If Cakewalk started making Sonar PE for Mac, I'd be the first one buying it.
They do (kinda, sortsa) with bootcamp you can run sonar on a mac. To your point, what kinda problems are you having. If you just do alittle research or ask questions about soundcards and pc's before you buy (and graphic cards) Your pc should be running great with Sonar. In the past 14 months, the only thing that went bad in my pc was a hard drive and a sata cable and this just happened a few weeks ago. So, from my experience with soanr and a pc, its very very stable. Maybee you just have a few things that are conflicking with eachother and is probably easy to fix. Im no pc geek, what i learned came from this room. The only thing i change every now and then is my latency and I/O buffers, thats the only thing i play with (with my computer) Cj
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soundrage
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 13:06:04
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ORIGINAL: samson7842
I'm going to say something that could get me killed in mixed company; I want to go back to Mac. And, I wish I could take Sonar with me. I spend as much time troubleshooting as I do making music on my PC. My Mac just worked and I didn't have to be a "Techie" to get through a project. I have very limited time and energy and I hate having to waste them figuring out why my PC keeps acting up. If I cared to learn that much about how computers work, I would take classes. I want create when I want to create. End of story. If Cakewalk started making Sonar PE for Mac, I'd be the first one buying it.
I completely agree PC's have gotten quite reliable but the Mac heads will never let that die. If Cake ever wants to play in the Digi (Mac) sandbox Sonar will have to run natively on Macs...period. For me? I don't care if they ever run on Mac's but I've got to say them new iMacs look pretty cool!
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Ognis
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 14:27:58
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I'm going to say something that could get me killed in mixed company; I want to go back to Mac. And, I wish I could take Sonar with me. I spend as much time troubleshooting as I do making music on my PC. Odd how for some problems like that can be a constant hassle. And for others, there is nearly never problem one. I for instance haven't had a "PC" problem, in an extremly long time (I don't even remember how long ago it was), and even then it was no big deal. I haven't had a problem with Sonar in a long, long time either, and even when I did (other than that damn save "button"), it was my fault for changing a setting or something. As far as stability goes, I couldn't ask for anything more. In all honestly, my computer/sonar, simply couldn't be more stable. All I've done is, 1) installed XP SP2 fresh from scratch (with internet unplugged). 2) Installed every music ap / soft synth I own + controler and interface drivers - and thats IT - NOTHING else. 3) Go into system services, and turn off EVERYTHING not needed (which would be well over 3/4 of the listed items). 4) Make sure everything internet related is OFF, and plug the ethernet cable back in (for when I might need it - but, in 2 years, I havent turned the net on yet). 5) NEVER, and I mean NEVER - did I say NEVER, get ANY update from microsoft - NEVER.... Maybe if you follow those 5 steps, your system can be a rock solid tank like mine.. - not trying to say "hey, mine's better than yours", I hope I don't sound that way, I'm just trying to help.
post edited by Ognis - 2007/08/08 14:39:57
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themidiroom
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 14:45:54
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ORIGINAL: Ognis
not trying to say "hey, mine's better than yours", I hope I don't sound that way, I'm just trying to help.
I knew you were a snob, just admit it. 
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Ognis
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 14:47:52
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lol midi, I'm really not, I just have a "bad way with words" 
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aaronk
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 15:20:55
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All I've done is, 1) installed XP SP2 fresh from scratch (with internet unplugged). 2) Installed every music ap / soft synth I own + controler and interface drivers - and thats IT - NOTHING else. 3) Go into system services, and turn off EVERYTHING not needed (which would be well over 3/4 of the listed items). 4) Make sure everything internet related is OFF, and plug the ethernet cable back in (for when I might need it - but, in 2 years, I havent turned the net on yet). 5) NEVER, and I mean NEVER - did I say NEVER, get ANY update from microsoft - NEVER.... Maybe if you follow those 5 steps, your system can be a rock solid tank like mine. XP is indeed quite stable, even without your precautions. My system is a Dell PC, XP SP2 pre-loaded, connected to the Net, every MS update installed automatically, a few minor system tweaks for audio, a few services turned off simply because they bugged me, various promos and freebies from Dell taken out, again simply because they bugged me. I only use software/drivers from reliable companies. XP itself has never crashed. I've gotten exactly ONE BSD (most likely a looping bug in SONAR, not an XP problem). I use XP at work, as well, and that computer hasn't crashed a single time. Your note about the Net points to one problem: people who use their PC to connect to the Net, and download lots of crap or visit less nice websites, are probably clogging their machines up with all sorts of viruses, spyware, etc. One needn't live like a monk to be healthy, but if you spend your nights in smoky bars picking up anything that'll go home with you, you should expect some coughs, sneezes, warts and itching.
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kubalibre
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 15:47:15
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I´m a Nuendo User, and I use it for composing and Sound Design for a living in Germany. I think about crossgrading to Sonar and have been testing for over a week every now and then, and it is just great. Everytime I try something new, I´m getting flashed by "Wow, Sonar can do THAT?" or "I have been requesting this feature in Steinberg Forums for years".
Actually I don´t care about if Sonar gets the respect of the "professional" audio community or not, first I also didn´t know anything about Sonar, just thought well another "B-List" Sequencer... but if you come to the point where you are just not satisfied with the Sequencer you use (in my case Nuendo) you take a look what else is out, and I want to stay on PC platform because it performs perfectly well as I can configure and build my own killer system, also at a fraction of the price of a decent Mac.
To come to Sonar again, if Cakewalk (or we as users) care about respect of the Software, Cakewalk should probably spend more attention on a fancy Software interface, fancy Sonar Logo, more professional and structured looking Website (this one is a rather badly structured, good enough for me but probably not as good as Digidesigns or Steinberg´s site), and put just more ads in Pro Magazines.
But: I rather have company spending money for development (which must be the case, because Sonar is really really good, and I´m sure Sonar 7 will be great) than a company wasting too much money for marketing.
2 things which could be improved at Sonar are 1) Midi features, and 2) the overall ergonomic Design (menus look to me a bit more "Office 2003", like, but it works, so just a nice to have feature)
cheers!
A Sonar 6 Fan
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kubalibre
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 15:49:53
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BTW, I think Sonar 7 will be a Cubase4 Killer
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boseyman1
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 15:52:00
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ORIGINAL: samson7842
I'm going to say something that could get me killed in mixed company; I want to go back to Mac. And, I wish I could take Sonar with me. I spend as much time troubleshooting as I do making music on my PC. My Mac just worked and I didn't have to be a "Techie" to get through a project. I have very limited time and energy and I hate having to waste them figuring out why my PC keeps acting up. If I cared to learn that much about how computers work, I would take classes. I want create when I want to create. End of story. If Cakewalk started making Sonar PE for Mac, I'd be the first one buying it.
I rarely have to troubleshoot my PC setup. I used to waste hours on my Mac. I am surprised to hear you are having such difficulty. Sonar is a basket of fruit compared to Logic, Digital Performer or Cubase on the Mac. This forum usually answers all, why not be more specific about your problems......
Intel Core i7 3.07Ghz, 12 Gigs RAM, 64 bit OS, Sonar Producer 8.52, RME Multiface II and PCIe interface, Maschine, Fractal Axe-FX, Sonic Implants Library, TC Fireworx, Voiceworks, BFD2, SD2, Stylus RMX, Trillian.
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kubalibre
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 15:58:45
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Agreed. If your PC is configured well, it runs rock solid. You have to have a little more knowledge which components to put togehter, but hey... for me, better than having an overprized non customized out of the box thing where I don´t even know how to fix all the bugs.
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kubalibre
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 16:03:26
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Just don´t buy the cheapest RAM and board.. I personally go with Server class hardware (Tyan Server Boards, Multicore CPUS, ECC RAM) which equals hardware on the expensive Mac Pro´s - the result is a stable machine. After all, since Macs are running with Intel CPUs and Bootcamp, Mac seems to me like a PC in a Mac costume anyway ;)
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Ognis
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 16:04:20
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ORIGINAL: kubalibre
I´m a Nuendo User, and I use it for composing and Sound Design for a living in Germany. I think about crossgrading to Sonar and have been testing for over a week every now and then, and it is just great. Everytime I try something new, I´m getting flashed by "Wow, Sonar can do THAT?" or "I have been requesting this feature in Steinberg Forums for years".
Actually I don´t care about if Sonar gets the respect of the "professional" audio community or not, first I also didn´t know anything about Sonar, just thought well another "B-List" Sequencer... but if you come to the point where you are just not satisfied with the Sequencer you use (in my case Nuendo) you take a look what else is out, and I want to stay on PC platform because it performs perfectly well as I can configure and build my own killer system, also at a fraction of the price of a decent Mac.
To come to Sonar again, if Cakewalk (or we as users) care about respect of the Software, Cakewalk should probably spend more attention on a fancy Software interface, fancy Sonar Logo, more professional and structured looking Website (this one is a rather badly structured, good enough for me but probably not as good as Digidesigns or Steinberg´s site), and put just more ads in Pro Magazines.
But: I rather have company spending money for development (which must be the case, because Sonar is really really good, and I´m sure Sonar 7 will be great) than a company wasting too much money for marketing.
2 things which could be improved at Sonar are 1) Midi features, and 2) the overall ergonomic Design (menus look to me a bit more "Office 2003", like, but it works, so just a nice to have feature)
cheers!
A Sonar 6 Fan
Great assessment! I agree with all that. Esp about how the website doesn't look very good, and Sonar's menu's "look" outdated. Actually, the website looks outdated too. But, like you say, I'd rather have the money go to dev, than to a fancy website, and buttons, but then again, I'm already a user. As to Sonar 7 killing Cubase 4, it's already started 
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kubalibre
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 16:26:56
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Well, so we all agree that the features are not the reason Sonar would not get the respect. First of all (if I´d be in the Marketing division of Sonar) 1. Polish the whole Cakewalk website -> you have to give your company a good looking face for your potential customers. more than 70% of possible customers research via the web. Think about first impressions! 2. Create an own Sonar Site, clearly divided from all "homestudio" and "semiprofessional" products. Very important! You´re paying a special price for this piece of Software so you want to get a special info/support/user community. 3. Target your client group and coordinate with your competitors in all areas of advertisement 4. Know the right people to put the right infos out into public... at the right time 5. (DONT´T HATE me for that) Put the pricing a little up, right between Logic and Cubase 6.-99: well no more insider Infos, have been working for a Games Company having done the very same thing for a completely different product...hey CW if I would live in the US I´d probably apply for a job...
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themidiroom
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 16:27:32
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ORIGINAL: Ognis
Great assessment! I agree with all that. Esp about how the website doesn't look very good, and Sonar's menu's "look" outdated. Actually, the website looks outdated too. But, like you say, I'd rather have the money go to dev, than to a fancy website, and buttons, but then again, I'm already a user. As to Sonar 7 killing Cubase 4, it's already started
Interesting comment. I'm not sure about the other apps, but Pro Tools has had the same look for many years. I think their tarket market hasn't been concerned about looks.
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kubalibre
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 16:37:58
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ProTools never had to care about looks, I guess. They were on the market first with HD recording and become a kind of "standard". Well, I think the interface is not that bad, it´s not "pretty" but when I started using it for audio mixing it was relatively easy to learn. PT is just a nightmare for composing/producing music. Practically no useful MIDI implementation. So the PT PC is getting dusty....
post edited by kubalibre - 2007/08/08 16:47:07
--------------------------------------------- all crash on the louspeaker
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hockeyjx
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 16:40:36
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Your audio PC should be for the EXPLICIT PURPOSE OF RECORDING! People always want one machine to do it all, but I have been of the mindset of having seperate drives: one for audio, one for everything else. And as other have mentioned - go to a site like TweakXP and disable everything you can! No internet, no print spooler ...no NOTHING! This is by far the best way to have a horse that's going to be stable and able to handle the burden of multi track recording with many software add-ins. Having a low end HP with 30,000 junk programs and services with a low-end audio card is only going to frustrate you and curse Sonar, when in fact, YOU are the ding dong. Sonar isn't Solitaire for God's sake man! And as to why SONAR doesn't get mad phat props, my opinion is a mix of what those have said previous... part marketing, part Windows stigma; it wasn't ever adopted as the standard because for a bit, they lacked behind. But now Cakewalk is, IMO, getting ready to lap the lead dogs. I think by SONAR8 (I know we haven't even heard about 7 yet), that they have a true chance to be the defacto leader and TAKE OVER THE WORLD! (or at least be the clear cut best DAW program!).
post edited by hockeyjx - 2007/08/08 17:25:41
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themidiroom
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 16:50:13
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ORIGINAL: kubalibre
ProTools never had to care about looks, I guess. They were on the market first with HD recording and become a kind of "standard". Well,
I think the interface is not that bad, it´s not "pretty" but when I started using it for audio mixing it was relatively easy to learn.
PT is just a nightmare for composing/producing music. Practically no useful MIDI implementation. So the PT PC is getting dusty....
I somewhat agree with you. They have improved the midi in Pro Tools, but I haven't cared to use it very much. I do all my sequencing and composing in Sonar on a separate PC. Everything seems to work better that way. The only problem I have with Sonar is getting it to sync via MTC. It almost always locks up.
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dappa1
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 17:16:16
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I have learnt 1 or 2 things in midi and hey it aint half bad. Mixing vocals wow! and thats on 6xl i used Cubase but Sonar does things that impresses me.
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sms
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 20:06:16
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Stability is so important...
I know many people have no problems. And many more do but decide politely not to go on and on about them here. But the problems are there. Maybe they're all the fault of evil plug-ins, or maybe they're all Sonar's fault - what matters is it's Sonar that crashes.
I have 61 versions of the song I'm currently working on. Not because I've made 61 mixes (God forbid!), or added 61 parts, but because I save projects with incrementally-numbered names every 30-60 minutes in order to minimize the effects of Sonar's all-too-frequent crashing. At this very moment I've faced 14 straight crashes, most when I try to save the project, due to a plugin (which has never given me trouble). Even worse, I can't remove the plug because when I try to delete it Sonar crashes again. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Sonar's audio engine also blows up frequently, exploding into ear-splitting machine gun noise for no apparent reason. The Stop Audio Engine button normally fixes that, but it's still unacceptable. And the audio engine also tends to go on strike occasionally, refusing to play audio for no apparent reason. Everything moves, but nothing plays. I'd go over my outputs, check my speakers, and so on and so forth, to no avail. Finally I realized that if I start and stop play quickly 10-15 times I can normally get the sound going again. But for goodness sake, it shouldn't act like my old '77 Toyota Corolla with the dirty carb.
I don't do much recording of other people, but today that's exactly what I was doing, and my God was it uncomfortable dealing with this instability with an audience. If I made my living doing this, getting rid of Sonar would be the very first thing I'd have to do. And that's a pity, because with the exception of the instability and the 1995 MIDI functionality I love the program. But this is a true show stopper.
If someone "big time" is trying Sonar out and it crashes on them just once, they'll probably uninstall it in short order. In any field, total or very near total reliability is a requirement for professional use. But reliability costs money, as has been pointed out here. Maybe Sonar's just not up to snuff for the big time, and changing that --at the expense of things like adding softsynths and thus attracting new entry level folks-- would not be a money-making proposition.
And please, don't get me wrong - I love Sonar (for the most part). But I also suspect that there are a lot more problems with things like instability than people admit to, just because we're all nice folks, we all love Sonar (maybe a little too much in this case), we think Cakewalk are stand-up guys, and we want Sonar to succeed.
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keith
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/08 23:47:35
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ORIGINAL: sms
Sonar's audio engine also blows up frequently, exploding into ear-splitting machine gun noise for no apparent reason. The Stop Audio Engine button normally fixes that, but it's still unacceptable. And the audio engine also tends to go on strike occasionally, refusing to play audio for no apparent reason. Everything moves, but nothing plays. It sounds like you have some serious problems there... I've never had anything close to what you describe with M-audio, RME, and even onboard audio. I've had pops, clicks, krispies, an occasional glitch or studder, but not total metldown. You should start a seperate thread to have people help diagnose your problems... Could be audio driver, plug specific, or something else entirely. Also, if you suspect a bad VST plug, you can simply move the plug out of your VST folder and SONAR won't find it the next time you start the project.
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droddey
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/09 00:28:14
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If you are having those sorts of problems, you definitely have a system stability issue. If it's not just an audio card hardware/driver problem, and it could well be or some other hardware issue, then it's probably a combination of SONAR with the particular set of plugs you are using. Unfortunately, given the state of all PC operating systems these days, OS X included, if the DAW isn't based on separate DSP cards, then it probably going load the plugs into its own process address space, and that's a recipe for problems. SONAR and all of the plugs all probably have bugs in them, but it's only when they are combined in some lethal combination that those bugs become a problem.
But clearly SONAR in and of itself is pretty stable. The thing is, if anyone has a very stable setup, then SONAR must be very stable. It won't happen just by accident. Given that quite a number of us have very stable setups, that's even more proof. If you don't, then it's probably not SONAR per se that's the problem. If the machine in general is completely stable, then it's probably audio card hardware or driver related or plugs. The only way you can really figure these things out sometimes in the end, is divide and conquer. Make a copy of your project that fails and turn off all plugs and use SONAR long enough that it would have normaly had a problem. If it survives, then clearly it's a plug, so start turning them back on until you get a hit.
It's painful and tedious, but mostly there's no other way. If you are a developer (and aren't using a product from some paranoid company like Waves) you can invoke the debugger when there's a crash and get a reasonable idea of where it happened based on the call stack. Cakewalk should implement a stack trace mechanism in the case of failures. This isn't terribly hard to do. We have done so in our product and the benefits are enormous for post-mortem diagnosis, and it has zero cost until it's invoked.
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droddey
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/09 00:31:02
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[quoteI have 61 versions of the song I'm currently working on. Not because I've made 61 mixes (God forbid!), or added 61 parts, but because I save projects with incrementally-numbered names every 30-60 minutes in order to minimize the effects of Sonar's all-too-frequent crashing. At this very moment I've faced 14 straight crashes, most when I try to save the project, due to a plugin (which has never given me trouble). Even worse, I can't remove the plug because when I try to delete it Sonar crashes again. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
The way that vst/dx type plugs work seems to be that the vst or dx interfaces provide a mechanism by which the plug can tell the host app that it's configuration has changed and which the host app can use to ask the plugs to save their state when it's closing down. SONAR seems to use some MFC based generic storage mechanism, which I think is a huge mistake but that's another whole discussion. Once that get's whacked, you can have these types of problems. If you can find out from the plug maker what file they save their config in, you can probably delete it and get back going again. If it's stored in some common Cakewalk provided file, you might have to delete the whole thing.
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sms
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RE: time to start over.
2007/08/09 01:46:36
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My system itself is quite stable - no blue screens ever, nothing but Sonar and a few system processes and services running, rock-solid drivers (M-Audio D44, which has been around so long that I doubt there's still a bug left in them). I get the very occasional glitch or pop, but only when pushing the system to its limits, so that's not instability but simply pushing the system to its limits.
This particular case had a happy ending - I uninstalled the plug-in and all was well with the project again. But that's not the optimal solution. And the saving crashes were happening during the save process (and not when initiating it), so every save corrupted a file (this was clear, since the files went from ~3MB to 800kb or 900kb.) That could have been a real nightmare had I not noticed it.
I do appreciate that the intermingling of so many technologies from so many vendors has to be a nightmare. Plugin-related crashes are all about that, and since many of the crashes I've had end with an error box that tells you what plug is at fault, I've been able to figure out what to nuke in order to work around the problem. That's still not good, of course, and I don't know if PT or Cubase or whatever suffer from similar problems, so I'm not making comparisons. I just wish it would stop!
The other instability issues --the audio engine blowing up or simply not kicking in-- aren't related to plugins, as they happen to me even in projects with no plugs at all in them (which is every project during the initial phases.) The blow-up might have to do with disk I/O, since it mostly happens to me when loop recording a part - after a fair number of loops, sooner or later the machine gun effect kicks in. Then again, maybe it has nothing to do with I/O - under those conditions, you'd expect a drop-out and not this. And the engine refusing to start seems totally random to me, though it surely isn't. It's not a show stopper, and it's fairly infrequent, but it ain't fun.
Thanks to all for your suggestions, by the way.
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