OK, maybe this is a dumb question and the answer is "don't use lanes, they suck" but on the off-chance I'm missing something:

I have a track with three audio lanes. I have existing audio material in lanes 1 and 2, and I am recording a third part in lane 3. How can I configure SONAR X2a so that I can *hear* the content in lanes 1 and 2 while recording the new part?

Thanks in advance.

Unless you have specifically muted the track you should be able to hear any previous takes unless you are recording into a specific lane. Just set the track to record and let Sonar handle the lane placement.

>> you should be able to hear any previous takes unless you are recording into a specific lane

BikerBoy, you are correct, and it seems that this is the key: 

If I record-enable the track header, I can hear all lanes and my take goes into a new lane when I stop recording.

If I record-enable an existing lane, I can't hear any of the material in any lane, and what's more, my new take will overwrite/replace anything in the current lane.

And this is with [x] Sound-On-Sound selected in Preferences > Record.

This feels like a bug to me. Do you (or anyone else reading) agree, or not?

IIRC I think it was said somewhere by someone from CW that it was "by design", or at least the overwriting of material definitely is.

I'm not sure about the other lanes being muted though. It seems a tad unintuitive to me but now I know the behaviour I can work with it.

Stickman, I had a thread about this last week. It is frustrating. Beepster helped me greatly. If you arm a specific take lane you will hear nothing from the other lanes when you hit the record button. The way that I could get around this (thanks again Beepster) was to use Auto Punch. For some reason you can hear the other lanes when you use Auto Punch. A tad bit more setup, but it gets quicker when you get used to it. It seems that you would be able to hear the other lanes and then mute the lanes that you don't want to hear. That would be genius really. If you are still not too familiar with Auto Punch; see if you have the coupon in your store account to go to Groove3 for the free trial. You can watch videos about Auto Punch and loop recording (and a lot of other things) that really make it click in your mind. FBB seems to have the perfect idea, too. I am going to try a few takes that way as well.

Thanks for the tip, CL20.

So you can hear the lanes when AutoPunch is used? Interesting. I've never used Auto-punch...

It definitely suggests that the muting is buggy behavior, I mean, it can't be "by design" to be so inconsistent and confusing.