I am punching out individual WAVs for songs from an hour-long concert.  I used the SPLIT tool to separate the songs.  And then I used the slip edit to start the sound right at the beginning of the music, and likewise for the end of the song. 
 
Issue #1, the resulting WAV file seems to have dead space for that entire slip edit space.  This is true whether I go to WAV or MP3.  When doing the File-Export-Audio, I have only selected the clips for that song.  I kind-of understand it working this way, but it really makes no sense.  What is the point of cropping the ends if they end up in the file anyway? 
 
Then I found the Clip - Apply trimming command.  I thought, "OK, that's the answer.  It does exactly what I want."  Per the SONAR doc, "This command lets you permanently delete any data from a selected clip that is hidden by a slip editing edit.".  Perfect, right?  WRONG.  When I export after the Apply Trimming, it STILL has that dead space.  I think nothing short of putting in a hard split will fix that.
 
Issue #2, I seem to get a little blip of sound right at the beginning of most of the exported WAV files, even though that is supposed to be silent.
 
I have looked at the various options on File-Export-Audio, and I don't see anything that would seem to address either of those problems.  So what I am doing now is going through a completely separate post-processing step of cropping each of those WAVs using Audacity.
 
Has anybody else seen this?

You need to set a time range to export in addition to selecting the tracks. You might to to add a slight fade on the clips if the audio was not cut when the wave was at a zero crossing.

scook
You need to set a time range to export in addition to selecting the tracks. You might to to add a slight fade on the clips if the audio was not cut when the wave was at a zero crossing.

Thanks.  When I select the clip to export (I have all the clips for that song grouped), it automatically selects the beginning and end as the time range.  And that is working as expected now.  I'm not even sure that Apply Trimming was necessary.  So I think what was happening was that I originally selected the track, which set the time range to include the extra space.  Sometimes I unselected and reselected before exporting (those worked) and other times I must have left the original time range in place (those had the extra space).  So if I am careful to always reselect the cropped song before exporting, issue #1 is solved.
 
And I seem to be making progress on issue #2 as well.  It is a strange thing,   It seems that there must be a playback buffer that contains some residue.  And that residue is being dumped at the beginning of the WAV file.  But the same residue shows up if I simply set the time cursor a couple of seconds in front of my song and hit the spacebar.  It should be silent, but sometimes I hear residue.  It sounds like the remnants of the last sounds that played.  If I cycle the spacebar 3 or 4 times, it seems to clear out this buffer.  Then if I export, my WAV starts clean (90% of the time, it seems).  This is clearly a bug.  There ought to be some operation to clear out that buffer before starting any new playback or export operation.
 
So I think I have an acceptable workaround in place.  Thanks for the tip.  That answered why my results seemed to be intermittent.
 

So, I know about the sounds you are talking about that end up at the beginning of bounces from where you last hit stop. Like the audio that was in the buffer just before you hit stop comes out of the buffer just after you hit play, even when you hit play in a new location in the tune.
 
In preferences you can set it to play tails after stop. This can help in a lot of cases. For some midi stuff, I usually click on a little icon near the clock in the control bar that resets the audio engine. This will always 100 percent clear your audio buffers.
 
When you are working with a very long project and exporting tracks, if you do File > Export > Audio > Tracks > Mono and uncheck most of the boxes about applying fx and automation etc, you can export the tracks of one tune to be imported into another project. It sounded like this was what you were trying to do.
 
Did you find that the audio buffer was an issue with this?
 
To avoid issues with the audio buffer, I often let an extra measure of nothing exist at the beginning of my project. Then if I bounce the project with audio in the buffer, I can just slip edit it out of the beginning of the track.
 
There are probably better ways. I think the main purpose of maintaining the audio buffer is to be able to restart from where you stopped and pick up right where you left off. Obviously it is problematic when you move within the timeline or execute a bounce to tracks where the audio in the buffer is written to the start of the new wav.
 
BTW, I never use Audacity for anything. I'm not sure why that is part of your workflow. You should be able to do everything in Sonar, unless you are changing to another OS (where Sonar doesn't work). On Linux I use Ardour.

yes, there can be some buffered audio messing with the beginning of your exports. If you want to do back to back exports you need to allow for the buffers to flush.

gswitz
BTW, I never use Audacity for anything. I'm not sure why that is part of your workflow. You should be able to do everything in Sonar, unless you are changing to another OS (where Sonar doesn't work).

Agreed.  I was only going to use Audacity in order to get rid of the garbage in these WAV files, but I got to a work-around, so Audacity is not in the work flow at all now, I'm happy to say.  I'll experiment with your ideas for clearing that audio buffer.  I don't really understand why the buffer would not be cleared in every case automatically -- it could never be helpful, could it? -- but if there is a setting that will have effectively purge the buffer, that will be great.
 
And just for clarification, I wasn't trying to re-import the tracks.  I was just trying to put out WAV files so I could convert them to MP3s.  I would export them directly as MP3s, but SONAR is EXTREMELY slow at that.  Exporting to my SSD as WAVs is pretty quick, and then when I have all the songs exported, I can just run them through WinLAME to turn them into MP3s.  That's a lot faster than using SONAR.  But other than that, my entire workflow is under SONAR now.  I'm elated.  My improving workflow doesn't take too much longer than what I had previously done with Audacity (to break a concert into individual MP3s for each song) and the sound quality with SONAR sounds so much better.  Thanks Cakewalk !!
 
Now I am ready to move on to 8-track recording of concerts, which is only going to add about 20% more time to this workflow with SONAR, compared to processing stereo recordings  :)
 
One final question, if I may.  Part of my workflow is to split any stereo WAVs into separate tracks so that I can apply effects to the channels independently if needed.  For example, in my latest stereo recording, the bass trombone was obnoxiously loud in the left channel.  The bass guitar wasn't high enough in the mix.  I was able to compress the left channel and then boost the bass guitar with EQ on the right channel.  Even though the bass guitar was playing from the left side, most of the material in the right side was higher frequencies, so it worked out well.
 
With Audacity, there is a simple command to split a stereo track into two separate tracks.  I can't seem to find a single command in SONAR to do this.  So what I did was:
 
1) Clone the stereo track
2) Use Process-Effects-Gain to make the first track 100% left material, and likewise to make the second track 100% right material.
3) Convert stereo to mono for each of those tracks to save disk space, and adjust the pan settings hard left and hard right respectively.
 
There must be a faster way.  Am I missing something obvious?

To convert a stereo track to two mono tracks from the Tracks menu in the Track view select Bounce to Track(s) with Channel format set to Split Mono

Scook's got great answers.
 
The reason to have the audio buffer remain loaded is if you are going to restart your listening from the exact point where you stopped listening. Otherwise, I don't see value in it. If you are restarting from the exact point where you stopped, you have reverb all loaded into the buffers etc from audio previous to your start point.
 
I also think that VSTs cache audio outside of Sonar's control. The VSTs don't know where in the program you are. IMHO, Sonar should reset the audio engine (forcing the VSTs to clear cache) automatically when you move in the timeline after stopping listening. This would resolve this problem forever. Does anyone know why they don't? (I'm asking for a valid responses... nothing snarky).

gswitz
Scook's got great answers.
 
The reason to have the audio buffer remain loaded is if you are going to restart your listening from the exact point where you stopped listening. Otherwise, I don't see value in it. If you are restarting from the exact point where you stopped, you have reverb all loaded into the buffers etc from audio previous to your start point.

Well, I guess I can see that argument, but in practice, how do you actually even resume where you stopped?  If you hit the spacebar, it takes up with where the cursor was last set, not where you stopped.  Unless you could precisely move the cursor to exactly the previous stopping point, that buffer has the wrong data.
 
It seems that SONAR should be able to tell if we are not resuming at that spot and purge the buffer automatically.

Where a project restarts depends on how SONAR is configured. Better get used to the buffer issue, I doubt it will ever change.
 
Also, if you know in advance that you are going to split tracks to mono, why not record them that way in the first place? Alternately, it is possible to avoid bouncing tracks, send the left and right sides of a track to separate buses for processing.