Why is recording without an armed track not available for audio tracks?

Not trying to be argumentative, but what are you trying to accomplish by pressing the record button, but not sending/saving the audio anywhere?  Wouldn't play work for this?

dwardzala
Not trying to be argumentative, but what are you trying to accomplish by pressing the record button, but not sending/saving the audio anywhere?  Wouldn't play work for this?

I believe the OP is trying to accomplish simply a spontaneous recording. The question does not include any speculations about what is routed/recorded where, but simply the idea of being able to hit "R" on the fly and record on the track in focus.
 
I'd consider it a somewhat risky feature. I believe it's good we don't have that possibility. There's so many kind of damage I might do with it ( but I'm a pessimist  :o)

I think Brundlefly pretty much nailed it. One of the very few things I miss about tape is the ability to hit the "record" button at any time.

Thanks for the replies.

If you mostly do audio recording and don't record MIDI very often (and if you have the "Allow MIDI recording without an armed track" option disabled), I guess you almost always arm the track first before hitting R to start recording, so the steps to record are always the same between audio and MIDI. But for someone like me who mostly record MIDI (haven't done any serious audio recording in Sonar for some years now) and is accustomed to the convenient "record without an armed track" behavior, the steps to record in audio tracks one by one (i.e. having to manually enable and disable arming each time) seem somewhat a hassle.

I think it's best to drop the "record without an armed track" feature and then add an auto arming feature (as an option) to both audio and MIDI tracks. And, of course, the previous track that was auto-armed should be automatically disarmed. The reference guide says Sonar doesn't allow auto arming because you could unintentionally overwrite (delete) an existing audio clip by mistake. But I'm not sure. When you record into a track, the first thing you do is click the track to make it a current track, isn't it? Also, we have Undo, don't we?

And, ironically, the current implementation made me unintentionally overwrite a clip in the previous track because I FORGOT to disarm the track (used Undo afterwards, of course ). Another daw I use has auto arming for both audio and MIDI and it works beautifully, so I believe it's technically possible. Maybe I'll submit a feature request, if not already done by someone else...