The more I work with Sonar, the more buggy I'm finding it

Say I'm working on a simple small looped section of a track with just a Stylus RMX loop and a midi piano riff, the timing seems to drift occasionally so they're not in sync with each other.

There's no massive sample libraries here, just a simple looped section with a couple of tracks. The loops are perfectly programmed (in terms of timing) and sometimes they play OK, just randomly drifting. This is Sonar X1 Producer on a new PC that was custom built by a specialist audio PC builder late last year. I upgraded from Sonar 3 to X1 and despite the jump in features, it seems buggier than it ever was before and more of a PITA to work with.  I seem to spend huge amounts of time troubleshooting when I just want to be writing music...

I haven't really read up on X3 but have seem some positive feedback - has the audio engine been rebuilt? Is it more stable generally? I just don't know whether it's worth upgrading again or to just call it a day with Sonar and switch to a platform that might be more stable.

Grrr :(
 
 

more info here man.
are you saying your using sonar x1 ?
if so have you installed the patches, they go all the way up to x1D
and they take care of a lot of problems,
 
what are your specs there ?
soundcard ?

ps- sonar x1 has become solid, with those 4 patches it was very solid indeed.
so have some faith. no worrys.

+1
 
http://www.cakewalk.com/Support/product.aspx/SONAR-X1
Definitely get all the patches to X1d if you do not already have them.
 
As for X3, I think the general consensus has been a very stable release for SONAR.

Hi Charlie,

Yep, I installed all the patches as the first thing I did, so I'm all the way up to X1D Expanded. Soundcard is a Focusrite 8i6 with all latest drivers. PC is an Intel i7 3.50 GHz, 8GB ram, 64 bit Win 7.

An upgrade to X3 is another £160 (about $250) and I paid £200 about a year ago to go from Sonar 3 to X1. It was a big jump forward in terms of extra features but feels like a step back in terms of stability and workflow. So I don't know if it's worth sticking with Sonar - it just doesn't feel stable to me to warrant throwing more money at it.

Guess I'm just having a rant really but feel a bit let down with Cakewalk.

James 

You might have more luck getting help if you put in the title trouble with X1 Pro and Stylus RMX timing.
 
How many outs are you using in Stylus RMX (each loop /channel in RMX takes ram loading samples). 
 
Do you have the latest eversion of RMX installed?
 
Do you have sync tempo checked in RMX?
 
understand your frustrated but what is "drifting"???  Latency issue?  randomized notes?
 
hard to help someone when most of their post is a rant about how much frustration they have using a product and aren't considering upgrading to newest version - without detailing the original problem more.
 
X1d Pro was very stable for me.  Rock solid, no trouble with my Saffire 24 Pro interface or Stylus RMX.   X3b has been faster and even MORE stable for me.

As others have said, X1d is generally quite stable.  Can you provide more detail about your configuration?  What are your MIDI buffers set to, etc?

Could this be another case of needing to run the metronome to prevent MIDI drifting out of sync?

Hi,
I'm not sure if this is the same problem I had, but from what you say it sounds like it might be:
 
I noticed a similar problem when using Isotope iDrum, but only when using multiple outputs.  The drums seemed to gain a beat or two after each loop iteration.  I didn't get a great deal of help from Cakewalk at the time, but through trial and error discovered that it was, or seemed to be, due to not using the separate outputs contiguously.By that I mean using, say, outputs 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 rather than 1-5. Using a single output, or consecutive additional outs cured the problem. I thought it was a problem with the VST at first, but have seen a couple of similar posts since so think it may be Sonar after all.
 
I'd be very interested to find out if this works for you or not
 
Cheers,
Dave
 

OK, I appreciate all the help - I'll try and clarify it more but to be honest, this particular problem is just one of loads of little issues I get with Sonar, which is why I didn't give every last detail. Even if I can fix this, there are still so many things that slow down my workflow and mean I'm trying to work around software issues rather than composing.

On this particular issue, I'll give the simplest example:

First, everything is patched to its latest version - all soundcard drivers are most recent, all updates to Sonar applied, all Win 7 updates applied, all updates to Stylus applied. I even have new shoes on.


Let's say I have a simple 2 bar loop which contains 1 track of midi piano (say Truepianos, but it's not specific to that VSTi) playing a simple repetition of 8 quarter notes (quantized exactly on the beat). Then on another track I have a 2 bar loop of a generic Stylus RMX loop (again, it's not particular to any loop). I set the loop region to those 2 bars and start playback. For the first few times it plays the loop around, the 2 parts will be perfectly in sync, but slowly on successive cycles the timing starts to drift so they're no longer in time with each other. The Stylus loop will now be out of time with the piano loop (maybe a few split seconds behind) and it gets progressively worse.

* this example is with one midi channel being routed to one stereo audio output in Stylus
* tempo sync is checked in Stylus
* tried various midi playback buffer sizes including 100/250/500/1000 milliseconds

scook - thanks, I tried your suggestion of switching on the metronome and if I do that, they do seem to stay in time with each other. Strange but not really something I can (or should have to) do in a real world example. 

Yet another issue this reminds me of, looping is rarely seamless - I'll often hear pops at the start/end of a looped region. Even if there are no effects/reverb tails to cause it and the audio (or midi) has perfectly trimmed loop points. Sometimes it will loop without clicks, other times it won't, using the exact same source.

All these 'sometimes', 'ifs' and 'buts' are frustrating just make it a complete pain to work with. I just want something solid to work with so I can get on with my job of composing :(