slartabartfast
Does anyone have a good handle on how unreliable (not working as described or intended, workarounds and kludges aside) SONAR has been as opposed to competing DAWS? I have spent waaay too much time reading the SONAR forum to have any real perspective, since most of what we find there is fails and confusion.
Actually ever since the fatal news from the other week, I guess my rose colored glasses have slipped a little and it's really begun to annoy me how dysfunctional Sonar is in practice. It might have something to do with the unconscious thought that these bugs will now remain baked into the program forever....
For instance, I've just been playing with some MIDI tonight and it struck me that no, Sonar's MIDI is not all people crack it up to be. Very unreliable during playback, especially if you're editing stuff on the fly. When you move a MIDI note, the change takes a second or two to kick in, which means that if the playhead reaches the new MIDI note before that delay has passed, Sonar will still play the old note. Now that's just crap. I was using the MIDI to trigger gestures in Stutter Edit, and it made experimentation with different gestures a complete nightmare. I think the bottom line is that Sonar does not really perform well during playback. Turning plugins on and off sometimes causes tracks to go out of sync with each other. Turning sends on during playback will make the audio on the bus go out of phase with the tracks. Changing a MIDI input or output during playback causes the audio to cut out briefly.
And little things that have bugged me forever which NEVER got fixed even though I provided very clear bug reports, for instance enabling a loop causes automation to go out of sync with the track by a few beats, so that when playback returns to the start of the loop, automation envelopes from a few beats before the loop will trigger.
In the past, I soldiered on through annoying bugs like this because I had this eternal hope that they would be fixed one day - now that I know they never will, they're beginning to really get on my nerves. I think half the problem was that people who use Sonar as a sort of glorified tape machine and have a very conventional workflow (from reading the forums, I think this is quite a large % of users) rarely experienced many of these bugs. But if you're the kind of person who experiments a lot with synths and routing and complex automation and sound design and what have you, Sonar starts to fall flat on its arse and other DAW's leave it in the dust.