Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]

...wicked
But I'm still baffled that we can't get better diagnostic tools that are obviously already present as part of the asset mgmt arsenal. 

It shouldn't be that baffling. SONAR is a DAW, not a database management program. While its completely possible for us to do what you suggest, writing utilities to salvage data from a project file, there are at least a hundred other higher priority features that are ahead of that in our todo list. We a small team and finite resources. Writing software takes time so its inevitable that we have to prioritize what we do. AFIK no other DAW provides features that pull arbitrary data from a project file. I might write something like that in my spare time :)

They still haven't supplied my hover car yet but told it is coming soon...

...wicked
Go spare time!
 
Who was that chap who was doing SONARPlus or whatever the heck that was called? Maybe they can whip something up.
 

 
SONAR Plus: That would be BenStat, and, yes, Cakewalk has him on their team, now. 
 
Noel gave the OP something good to try. I'd like to hear how it goes after he tries it. It is a very sad story to loose so much work on a patch.

Cactus Music
What I see here is a simple case of using a flawed method of saving your work. If anything Calkwalk is at fault for offering the auto save function which 90% of us know is not reliable and we use "save as" instead. Sorry you trusted the auto save. 

I'm curious what beef you have with Autosave. Autosave is one of the few features in Sonar that has worked incredibly well for as long as I can remember. Try coming back from StudioOne, where autosave interval can be specified only in minutes, not changes, and autosave is modal and will lock out your controls while it happens, even during playback, Sonar's autosave may be the first feature one could really fall in love with.

emwhy
I also have had experience with certain older DXis where if you have "Zero Controllers" and "Patch/Controller Searchback" enabled it will reset the synth and wipe out any edits or tweaks you've done to the presets. Used to happen all the time with the old Pro 53 synth....also from Native Instruments. But fixable by disabling those options.
 
 

I have had lots of problems with NI stuff resetting their controls to zero, but it's had nothing to do with those two options (I've experimented). I've had Guitar Rig effects chains, the Solid Series bus compressor, the Supercharge compressor and some Reaktor FX ensembles reset all of their parameters to zero when hitting play for the first time after a project has loaded. The settings are there when the project loads, but they are wiped out when the transport starts. I've seen this at one time or another in X2 and X3.

Usually the only thing I can do when this starts happening in a project is to insert a new track and new instances of the effect. If I just delete the effect and insert a new one on the same track, it starts happening again.

I strongly suspect there is an elusive clash between Sonar and Native Instruments but I've never been able to come up with a recipe despite hours of trying. I don't hear many other people complaining about the same thing but I did manage to dig up a couple of old posts with people saying they've seen it on Guitar Rig and the Solid Series plugs. I've also seen people complain about Kontakt volumes being messed with in Sonar projects.

yevster

Cactus Music
What I see here is a simple case of using a flawed method of saving your work. If anything Calkwalk is at fault for offering the auto save function which 90% of us know is not reliable and we use "save as" instead. Sorry you trusted the auto save. 

I'm curious what beef you have with Autosave. Autosave is one of the few features in Sonar that has worked incredibly well for as long as I can remember. Try coming back from StudioOne, where autosave interval can be specified only in minutes, not changes, and autosave is modal and will lock out your controls while it happens, even during playback, Sonar's autosave may be the first feature one could really fall in love with.

+1 here.  Auto Save works flawlessly here.  Very grateful that it is there.
 
Always have it set up here, along with version-ing.

I don't trust auto save probably because of the early days with MS Word that offered a similar facility. Also windows has a tendancy to lock files unnecessarily. So really I don't trust Microsoft that handles the saving (via OS) not Cakewalk. It may work perfectly but I prefer 'save as'. With 'save as' you can also write the history as it goes along. Like : 'Song1 vocal overdubs' so you can see each stage. Works for me anyway.

@Sharke - With regard to the notion of NI software and volumes having a mind of their own and all that - I JUST had that happen in the current project I am working on - AND I finally figured it out.
 
What was happening was that for Battery 3, its master volume kept jumping back to some lower value than what I would set it to, as soon as I would hit play.  Drove me NUTS.
 
It turns out that it is tied to the MIDI track volume fader.  If I move the fader up or down while the Battery 3 UI is open, I can watch the master volume for Batter 3 rotate higher and lower.
 
This behavior does NOT go the other way around - in that if instead of moving the channel strip slider up or down to adjust volume, I rather go to the Battery 3 UI and rotate the master volume up or down, Sonar's midi track channel strip slider does NOT move with it.  The movement of the Battery 3 master volume ONLY occurs by itself when the channel strip slider is moved.
 
THIS is why the Battery 3 Master Volume appears to JUMP.  Because it is tied to the midi track channel strip slider, but does not move that slider when the master volume knob is rotated in Battery 3, as soon as Play is commenced, the Battery 3 UI Master Volume knob 'jumps' back to mirror the setting from the channel strip slider at the time Play was started.
 
Additionally, the Battery 3 UI Master Volume knob is operating at a different scale level than that of the channel strip slider.  The midi track channel strip slider represents midi parameter values of 0-127, and the Battery 3 master volume knob represents volumes between about -128 DB and about +12 DB.
 
SO, I have not figured out if this can be disconnected, or if that DOES get figured out, will the volume then behave as it should, but at least I now KNOW what is happening.
 
Bob Bone
 

People need to read the reference manual because it usually explains what the features do in great detail.   Freezing only freezes the audio just like processing effects does.  Synths are different from audio effects in how freeze works.  Ultimately as many here have said, if you don't back things up before you start freezing tracks, you will get in trouble.    There is no limit to how many version you could have of a project so when you create a new CWP file, just name it descriptively so if you need to go back ever, you know where.   It works just like it is supposed to work and I freeze tracks often and only got in trouble when I try to take a shortcuts or get lazy.  You'll notice that synths are not really on the actual audio track and freezing a synth track doesn't freeze the synth itself but the audio that is output from it, unlike plugins where ARE on the audio track and whos settings do  get frozen along with the track

I think that there is a general misunderstanding of how Auto-Save works with Sonar.  It does not affect normal saving of projects.  It saves a separate file called something like "Autosave_copy_of_filename#x".  It only saves when a project is "idle".
 
I also use "Save As", "Save" and "Version-ing".
 
If a project crashes just before I use "Save As" or such, then "Auto-save" may well just prevent losing some work.  It doesn't cost anything, doesn't interrupt workflow, and works perfectly well here.  I can't speak for how a similar-ish feature used to work in an early version of a different program.
 
 

Noel, and others, I have a old project that I have brought up through different versions if Sonar.

I last saved it in X3d. I opened it recently with X3e and the VVocal clips didn't behave as expected and when I was finally able to get the VV interface to open to work on these clips, the UI was huge and chopped in half.

Also when I unfroze the track, the VV adjustments I made were gone.

Don't know if this is related but thought I'd mention it.