Bitflipper,
 
I am not a disgruntled former anything Mate !!
 
I simply report as the chips fall, some here never really like to hear how that panned out for SONAR , both member and developers alike, and I pretty much got sick of the ongoing soap opera. I'm still a member, I simply choose not to interact with the remaining community after my well respected test partners who gave their time and energy contacted me around the time of X1 to inform me they had thrown their arms up in disgust and left the platform for greener pastures elsewhere.
 
Reading thru the assumptions and hyperventilations in his thread I am reminded of why I don't visit that much. I not going to enter into further discussion re the Win8 testing results on this thread , the results are well detailed , the test are in the public domain so anyone can test for themselves and report if they have differing results.
 
I actually entered the G.S thread to qualify whether the huge performance drop being initially reported by the O.P could be verified in my testing, which I couldn't. I found performance is the same, which of course runs contrary to the reports being circulated by Cakewalk.If by saying that there is no performance improvement in Win8 over Win7 is somehow construed as 'slamming " , then you guys need to get off the eggshells... :-)
 
I'll head over to the other thread now and continue there. 
 
V.

Bitflipper, I am not a disgruntled former anything Mate !!

Hi, Vin. Sorry if I mischaracterized you. But this is your first post here since 2008, and you did write on another forum that 

"I will no longer be participating over at the Cakewalk forum tho , there are some entities there that I really cannot tolerate , plus the underlying vibe of the forum is not one that I want to be part of."

I interpreted your long absence as the basis for my "former" adjective, and your unhappiness with this forum as being "disgruntled". My apologies if I exaggerated, and I hope I haven't become one of those entities you can't tolerate!

Cool.
 
The Sonar forum has entities.
 
(are they like moobs?)

I had actually posted this thread originally to get a feel for whether I should upgrade from xp to win 7 or 8. I appreciate all the responses to that original topic but was hoping someone from cakewalk might chime in since the gearslutz thread included a chorus of voices that implied that cake tends to exaggerate performance benefits of each new windows OS. And many of those posts were about as slammy as you can get. 

Mr Blint


I had actually posted this thread originally to get a feel for whether I should upgrade from xp to win 7 or 8. I appreciate all the responses to that original topic but was hoping someone from cakewalk might chime in since the gearslutz thread included a chorus of voices that implied that cake tends to exaggerate performance benefits of each new windows OS. And many of those posts were about as slammy as you can get. 

I'd say Jim's post #45 covered it about as well as it's likely to get covered.

Is the fact I joined the forum in 2008 relevant or is it just coincidence that people left then?*






*No need for the head boy to answer that.

Jim Roseberry


FWIW, Unless you like testing... you'd be well advised to sit out the first 6 months or so of Win8.
It's been the same with every *major* new OS release (Win7 wasn't such a radical change - a very smooth transition - what Vista's initial release could have been IMO).

Benchmarks are great for comparison, but one could point out that many benchmarks aren't exactly real-world projects.  Also, Win8 is an infant of an OS.  We need BIOS updates, driver updates for the core hardware/components, driver updates for audio specific hardware, and updates for the OS itself.
In short, it's not surprising that Win8 performs less than stellar at initial release.
<SNIPPED>.

The issue here is that CW opened Pandora's Box when our beloved Mr Borthwick posted the very favourable review of the performance of many Sonar-specific apects of Windows 8.
 
It seems as a result that there is a "case" for users to upgrade to Windows 8.  On the other hand, out in the wild, it seems that equal performance is best-case and worse performance is not uncommon.
 
I have the greatest respect for Noel - he and the rest of the bakers made the software I love, but when you post something like that, it WILL come under scrutiny.

Funkybot


Where tests like that are helpful in that you may be interested in 1) seeing how efficient Sonar is, 2) such as seeing how your DAW's load balancing compares to other DAWs (the dreaded core 1 is spiking the others are nowhere near 100%), 3) determining if there's another DAW that will allow you to squeeze a few more plugins/tracks into your mixes (this would be helpful if you had a fast PC but were still maxing out your CPU during large mixes). It could also help companies like Cakewalk in identifying where there can be room for improvement, by someone else doing free performance benchmarking for them.


It's completely legit, and if you read about their testing methods and how they distribute the plugins...I think it's a fairly unimpeachable method of comparison. If you also read his criticism of Noel's testing method, his points seem entirely valid. I'd love to see Noel's response to that.

What a test like that doesn't show is how well you interact with your DAW, it's workflow, and it's features. These are clearly the most important aspects in picking a DAW. Sonar still some has some things that drive me nuts (limited routing options, the terribly huge, non-resizable mixer, no varispeed, horrible notation) but overall, it's still the best DAW choice for me. I've yet to find the perfect DAW, and every one out there seems like it's good at some things and not so good at others, and overall Sonar has become my main choice. So to those who point out that the benchmarks don't address this aspect, I agree with you 100%. 

But that doesn't mean anyone should just blindly ignore the test results because Sonar didn't come out on top. At that point, people are turning DAW preference into a psuedo-religion by ignoring the science. I think we can all be a little more rational than that. 


I honestly don't think the people saying the test is completely irrelevant would be too upset if Cakewalk came out and said, "hey, we improved Sonar's efficiency by up to 25% in large projects by making adjustments to how we handle load balancing" or something like that as a result of benchmarks like these.

Exactly!


Much props to Vin for all of his contributions... I can see why he hasn't posted here in so long lol

I just read the entire GS thread front to back and found nothing written there by Vin to take issue with. In fact, I sense a kindred spirit there and would have happily signed my own name to every one of those posts. His criticisms of the Windows 8 UI are spot on.

The GS posters even have at least a bit of a case for accusing Noel (whom they inexplicably keep calling "Neil")  of being a Microsoft sock-puppet. He does diplomatically sidestep talking about Metro, even though I'm sure he dislikes it as much as everyone else. He's said that future builds of SONAR won't even install on XP, a foolish and unnecessary move that only makes sense if you assume he's taking orders from Redmond.

The one point in the GS thread that I'd temper is the criticism of Noel's in-house benchmark, implying that it's not valid. For Noel's purposes, as well as ours, it's adequate. It tells us that Win8 will be OK with SONAR, and that's the main thing that he and we want to know. The idea that he'd rig it to make Win8 look good is preposterous.

Whether or not Noel's benchmark tells us if Cubase can run more convolution reverbs, that's simply not its aim. Fortunately for that we have Vin and his obsessive-compulsive determination to analyze numbers until our eyes glaze over.

bitflipper


The GS posters even have at least a bit of a case for accusing Noel (whom they inexplicably keep calling "Neil")  of being a Microsoft sock-puppet. He does diplomatically sidestep talking about Metro, even though I'm sure he dislikes it as much as everyone else. He's said that future builds of SONAR won't even install on XP, a foolish and unnecessary move that only makes sense if you assume he's taking orders from Redmond. 

Even though I am skeptical that Windows 8 offers anything over Windows 7, I have to respectfully disagree with your statement regarding the drop of support for XP.  This is an operating system that was released 11 years ago.  Yes it was stable and while Vista was the only upgrade path, people were right to maintain support for it.


But just how much resource do you give to supporting 4 x 32-bit operating systems + 3 x 64 bit operating systems (if you don't count XP x64, which was only an OEM release).  And how far back do you support?  How many beta testers do you force to use an out-dated OS just so you can test it?  IMHO, it's entirely reasonable to drop support for an OS 11 years after release.  Was anyone developing for Windows 3.1x 11 years later?


Many of the Brand-name computers I deploy at work don't even have XP drivers available.  There comes a time when you draw a line in the sand and move on.  If you want to see Sonar progress, you have to cut ties with the legacy OS.


Having read Noel's article, he certainly does not "sidestep" the Metro I/F.  He points out the limitations of trying to develop a Metro audio app.  Implying that he's "taking orders from Redmond" is a little insulting, but the truth is - every Windows developer in the world has to ensure their software will work with the software coming out of Redmond.