Hi, I'm a new X2 user. Everything works OK, but when I load a project it takes forever, literally minutes! It's very strange. Not a very heavy project, few tracks, no audio so far, 4 or 5 vsti, a few plugins in inserts and master. I can't figure out what's going on. I tried with several freshly created projects - always the same long loading time, but usually just first time after bood. If I close Sonar and open it again then loading seems a bit faster although still not very fast by any means. Is it normal to wait for 3-6 minutes to load a project? Any ideas on how to fix it if it isn't. I'm running a decent system - Core i7, 6GB Ram, good HDDs, Win7 x64 and Tascam FW-1082 audio interface/control surface. I know that Cubase AI loaded projects very fast on this machine - in 10 seconds or so. Any advice? Thanks.

Defragment all your hard drives.  While this probably will not solve your problem, at least you can eliminate it as a suspect.

That is not normal. Projects like yours but with the addition of several audio tracks usually load in about 10 secs here. 

I think the defrag tip was a good place to start. You may want to look at the vsts you're loading. Maybe one of them is delaying your startup. Maybe start a new blank project and save it. Then try duplicating the vsts you have on this long to load project and see if one of them is causing this... 


The other thing that comes to mind might be the tascam or midi interface driver needs to be replaced. 

I really haven't looked into this in X2, but in earlier versions there was an option to scan for VST's on startup that used to cause this problem.

edit: looks like it is still there:

http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation/default.aspx?Doc=SONAR%20X2&Lang=EN&Req=Dialogs2.064.html


If the box to scan for vst's on startup is checked, un-check it and see if that helps. At any rate, your problem is probably not due to disk fragmentation or another disk IO problem. If that were the case new files would be more seriously affected, and if it were bad enough to notice slow loading of projects it would render the disk virtually unusable for most real time IO activity.

I seem to remember one of the Cake staff saying it's worth leaving the scan on start up on all the time, as it takes very little time nowadays, and makes life easier.

On my system (Windows 7 Professional), Sonar X2a booted slowly, the VSTs loaded slowly and Sonar crashed often! Dan Gonzales, with Cakewalk, had me remove any "Legacy" drivers (not your problem, I think) and said to run Sonar "as Administrator". Since making those changes, Sonar & the VSTs load noticeably faster and have not had any crashes (or other issues) for three days.
 
Doug

On my system (Windows 7 Professional), Sonar X2a booted slowly, the VSTs loaded slowly and Sonar crashed often! Dan Gonzales, with Cakewalk, had me remove any "Legacy" drivers (not your problem, I think) and said to run Sonar "as Administrator". Since making those changes, Sonar & the VSTs load noticeably faster and have not had any crashes (or other issues) for three days.
 
Doug

Run scan disk, then windows update, then defrag. Also consider updating your motherboard chip set drivers.

Running Sonar as Administrator is always a good idea.

I seem to remember one of the Cake staff saying it's worth leaving the scan on start up on all the time, as it takes very little time nowadays, and makes life easier.

Maybe so. And if un-checking the scan on start up makes the OP's startup faster, maybe the question should be "why does scanning on startup on my machine take so much longer than it should?" If it does not then he can rule out that as the cause of his problem.