Dear CakeFolks
 
I do appreciate receiving regular emails inviting me to various never-to-be-repeated deals on Sonar upgrades.
 
I hate to sound ungracious, having studiously ignored every last one of your appeals, but I think, finally, the time has come to have one of those heart-to-heart chats.
 
I first purchased Sonar 2.1 and I've since spent money to upgrade to version 3 (producer), then skipped 4 and 5 and then upgraded to version 6,7, and then 8. So, over the years, it's fair to say I've invested a reasonable amount of money in your products.
 
Some three years ago I left you for another. There's no need to be coy; it was Reaper. Reaper is far, far, far less sophisticated than Sonar. I miss a lot of Sonar's great features. But what Reaper offered me was something I never achieved with Sonar - bulletproof stability.
 
Now, like a long-ago partner, it's easy after all these years to remember the good times rather than the bad. So, when I recently upgraded the studio laptop and had to move all my old stuff across, I dug out my copy of Sonar 8 Producer and reinstalled it. To be honest, I had an ulterior motive - I do use some of the plugins like Guitar Rig 3 and Dimension Pro. I see this as at least recouping some of my substantial investment.
 
Now, some of the things I'm about to say might seem hurtful. So, before I start, a little background. I'm actually a software engineer in my day job. So I'm kinda meticulous about making sure everything's all set up just right and not doing stupid things and blaming everyone else but me. That said, let's talk about what happened next:-
 
First, the new DAW. It replaces an existing laptop and is an Acer V-571G laptop with 8G RAM, 1T 5400rpm disk and a core i7-3610 processor. It has both integrated graphics (Intel HD4000) and a dedicated GPU (Nvidia 640) which only kicks in when needed.
 
I think you'll agree that this is a pretty decent setup. While the hard drive isn't terribly fast, actually, it can cope with a pretty reasonable number of audio streams. I mainly use softsynths anyway. And it's been burnt in pretty thoroughly over the last week or so, after first upgrading the BIOS, all drivers and removing all crapware. I do not run AV software either so it's nice and clean, running Win 7 x64 SP1.
 
The audio output comes courtesy of an Edirol UA25 which has served me faithfully for a long time. And if there's a product Sonar should support, you'd think this would be it.
 
A week of testing, including loading some pretty big projects, revealed that even with the ASIO settings on minimum (buffer size = 96, latency 3ms), CPU and disk usage were waayyy down there. No crackles, no glitches, no crashes. But remember, this was with Reaper not Sonar.
 
So now, I reinstalled Sonar. This time, having a 64 bit OS for the first time, I obviously installed the 64 bit version, and then patched it sequentially with 8.0.1, 8.0.2 and then the 8.3.1 patch, all downloaded fresh from the Cakewalk site.
 
Time to play. Let's use the sample projects. I've never had much luck with these, but surely on something this powerful....?.
 
So, first, synth overload. Dark European Space Adventures. Loads fine. Plays fine. 20% CPU on Cake's meters. Get to nearly the end, press stop and then File/Open.
 
CRASH!. Rapture has stopped responding. Well, that's pretty much what always happened to me with this project, sooner or later. It'll play but do anything like scrub in the middle and you're heading rapidly for trouble. In this case, I didn't even need to do anything weird.
 
Moving on... Guilty, by Unified Tribe. Press play. DROPOUT!. Yup, that's an old friend from the past, too.
 
Well look, I want to be fair. So, let's just export the audio tracks without any effects etc. and then see what happens.
 
Select Export to OMF and embed audio. Wait a fairly long while.... and then, just at the very end, a cryptic dialogue comes up indicating the export has failed. I can't even remember what it said exactly, it was so user-unfriendly. Well, that's another untested feature, obviously. So let's export the WAV files and then reimport them.....
 
so now we have the WAV files... Press play.....  hmm, it's working.... scroll the bottom of the window up a bit and.... DROPOUT....
 
Right... But now we have a level playing field, don't we?. So start up Reaper and import the audio tracks. Press play..... CPU at 2%. Disk at somewhere around 100K/sec which is about 1% of it's available bandwidth - this is 38 tracks of audio we're streaming here at 44.1KHz. Resize, scroll and generally hit up the UI... nope, rock solid.
 
So here's the deal Cake. Why don't you try what I just did and see how it goes for you?. Can you do an OMF export on your own sample projects?. If not, why not?. You sold me that as a working feature. And why is Sonar struggling with the exact same 38 audio tracks with NO plugins....... am I being unfair?. Is my hardware somehow at fault?. How come this is the third machine I've installed Sonar on and had very similar issues?.
 
I've also been lurking on the VS700 forum. I lusted after one of those. But now you've left your users twisting in the wind, with no indication of when, or even if, you'll fix the myriad problems they appear to be having with X1 and X2.
 
So I'm sorry. I'm afraid your entreaties to lighten my wallet are currently falling on deaf ears. It's a shame, too. Much of Sonar is truly impressive but - and maybe it's just me - we just can't seem to get along together. At least,without regular crashes. And I'm afraid I have enough crashes in my day job. Well, that's not strictly true. My current company uses continuous integration, Test-Driven Design and various other 21st century software development techniques such as an extensive suite of automation and integration tests.
 
Frankly, they set a pretty high standard. Based on this current encounter, Sonar 8.3.1 wouldn't have survived it's first beta test and QA would have rejected it as unfit to ship. In fact, that OMF problem wouldn't even have got past initial QA handover.
 
From what I can gather, X1 and X2 aren't exactly a huge step forward here, not to mention the plugins (V-Vocal, anyone?). So it's time for some tough love. Frankly, you have a serious quality control problem and it's not getting better. You need to step back and think seriously about this. Because, right now, I think you're struggling. You have a codebase you probably don't fully understand anymore. Developers have left. You're trying to manually QA things with no unit tests, integration tests or automation tests. Or if you have them, they're not doing a very good job of catching the bugs. My test here isn't rocket science, after all.
 
So, over to you. Show me it's fixed and maybe I'll be back...... otherwise, I'll be sitting on my wallet, just at present.....
 
 
 
 

aj


Dear CakeFolks
 

 
From what I can gather, X1 and X2 aren't exactly a huge step forward here, not to mention the plugins (V-Vocal, anyone?). So it's time for some tough love. Frankly, you have a serious quality control problem and it's not getting better. You need to step back and think seriously about this. Because, right now, I think you're struggling. You have a codebase you probably don't fully understand anymore. Developers have left. You're trying to manually QA things with no unit tests, integration tests or automation tests. Or if you have them, they're not doing a very good job of catching the bugs. My test here isn't rocket science, after all.
 
So, over to you. Show me it's fixed and maybe I'll be back...... otherwise, I'll be sitting on my wallet, just at present.....
 
 
 
 

perhaps re-read one of Noel's technical documents before saying that bit about the code base. Unless you work there or test for them (I don't do either) , you can't say that in any qualified sense

you seem to factor out the variables that are your setup, much like the sound card drivers for starters.

I use 3 separate things ,by 3 different makers (including sonar) so can hardly be classed as a fan boi

You might not have the same issues if you used 8.5 which is stable as a rock for a very large group of us. I think 8.3 was full of bugs which I believe they mostly fixed with 8.5. 
PS, Admin doesn't read posts here anymore as this is a quiet corner where a few die-hards who have not upgraded yet still lurk. 

Cactus Music


You might not have the same issues if you used 8.5 which is stable as a rock for a very large group of us. I think 8.3 was full of bugs which I believe they mostly fixed with 8.5. 
PS, Admin doesn't read posts here anymore as this is a quiet corner where a few die-hards who have not upgraded yet still lurk. 

For what it's worth I still use 8.3 and only have not upgraded because 8.3 is rock solid for me and I don't want to risk messing it up for features I don't need.

Cactus Music


You might not have the same issues if you used 8.5 which is stable as a rock for a very large group of us. I think 8.3 was full of bugs which I believe they mostly fixed with 8.5. 
. 

I had very few issues with 32 bit 8.3. 8.5 is when they refined the 64 bit version and I was able to go 64 bit.
 
I won't say I have not had the (very) occasional crash in 8.5 but they were very few and far between. Most of these infrequent events were due my ESI Juli@ drivers. Since upgrading to X2 and Roland Quad Capture I have had one isolated crash. Generally its very stable considering X2, Kontakt 5 and 64 bit BFD Eco are frequently used and none of them are offically supported on my OS.

People who insist that their Sonar are problems are all software related are doomed to fail. If the software was that bad, then everyone would have the same problems. You should be looking into your computer and hardware to make sure you don't have a virus or memory issue. 

I never used 8.3 I just assumed that 8.5 was an upgrade to fix bugs which is par for the course with software, Excuse me If I was wrong. 
Dave , watch out, this guy is a software developer, they think they also understand hardware.... ::)  Just kidding. 

Cactus Music


I never used 8.3 I just assumed that 8.5 was an upgrade to fix bugs which is par for the course with software, Excuse me If I was wrong.  
 

8.5 was a paid upgrade. Quite a significant one IMHO.

So here's the deal Cake. Why don't you try what I just did and see how it goes for you?.

They probably don't have anything running with 5400rpm discs.

This is potentially the cause of all your problems and until you upgrade to 7200 drives, your problems will remain.

Thanks for the helpful replies. Some comments:-
 
I will install the 32 bit version and retry. It was, on reflection, unfair to criticise what, in hindsight, was a relatively early release of the 64 bit product in an era where 64 bit OS's were much less common.
 
Regarding viruses and memory. Of course this is always a possibility. I do scan daily using various AV tools. When I said I didn't run AV software I meant the kind of software that puts hooks into the OS and scans continuously. For obvious reasons that can seriously compromise a realtime system. But you have to then suppose all three systems I've used within the last  5 years all have some infection I never picked up. And the new machine is only a week or so old.
 
Regarding 5400rpm drives. Let me reiterate what I said in my original post. Reaper coped perfectly with the exact same 38 tracks Sonar couldn't handle on the exact same machine on the exact same drive, from the exact same folder, and Windows Resource Manager showed that only a very small percentage of the drive's bandwidth was being used to stream those tracks and that CPU usage was approximately 2%.
 
There's nothing wrong with 5400rpm drives. They are pretty much standard on laptops. They are, yes, a bit slower. But recall that these drives are also much higher capacity - this is a 1T drive. Each cylinder on the drive contains more data, which can be retrieved more quickly, than older, lower-capacity drives. They have more cache, too, and faster controllers. They can stream one heck of a lot of audio. They will comfortably outperform the previous generation of 7200rpm drives on older hardware.
 
Regarding being a software guy. Actually I grew up with hardware. I've designed embedded systems. I know a bit about hardware.
 
Regarding Sonar's testing. Of course, I don't know what testing processes they use or used. What I did say was, they clearly weren't very effective. I think that's pretty fair, based on this exercise, but I'll retry on 32 bit.
 
As for 8.5. Well, if it fixed a whole bunch of bugs, it might be a nice goodwill gesture from Cake to make it available as a free upgrade for Sonar 8 users who don't want a fresh bunch of issues with X1 and X2. That would certainly make me feel a bit warmer.
 
 EDIT: And if there's a trial version of X2, I will go get it and try it. That's only fair.