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.

Don't hold your breath for that.... and if they do, they owe me $100 because I paid for it. 

daveny5

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.

Don't hold your breath for that.... and if they do, they owe me $100 because I paid for it. 

whether you payed for it or not they dropped support for 8.5 anyway so the OP is grasping for straws, don't know if your joking or just being sarcastic but he he does make some good points.

Yes some very good points, and I'm sure for every one of us that has no problems there are 5 who do. 
I still have problems with Word 2010, I hate it. Software is like that. Endless cycle of updates, bug fixes then ask you for more money every couple of years. So for now I am using Word 2003 and Sonar 8.5 and all is good. I'll catch up in about 5 years. 

I've tried three times to get into Reaper, and each time ended up shelving it. 

After each major update I'd re-download it and run through a typical project (audio + midi), but it never felt as smooth and natural as working in SONAR. Too often I'd bump up against some head-scratching "how do I..." moment. Of course, that's to be expected in any unfamiliar program, but it's something I do not recall ever experiencing with SONAR. 

I'd surely love to have a more efficient and stable DAW, but the #1 priority has always been that the DAW be transparent and never get in the way of making music. 

Reaper is great except for midi editing which is vital for me.

To the OP - your laptop's HDD is a problem, from my experience 5400rpm drives are a fail for DAW systems.
SSD's have come down a lot in price...

Cactus Music


I'm sure for every one of us that has no problems there are 5 who do.  
. 

There is no way of knowing of course, but I suspect that your ratio is inverted.  Any software were 83% of users were experiencing significant problems would not last long.
 
Of course it depends on what you define as a problem. All software will have the odd thing that niggles one user but not another.
 
 
 
 

aj

  
I do not run AV software either so it's nice and clean, running Win 7 x64 SP1. 
 
.....
 
 
 
 

This may be the source of some of the OP's problems.
 
Sonar 8 was released in September 2008 http://www.cakewalk.com/Press/release.aspx/09-22-08-SONAR8
Windows 7 was released in October 2009 so no amout of testing would have ensured the program would work with an O/S that did not exist at that time. the 8.3 patch also pre-dates Windows 7, so no compatibility issues could have been included in the patch.
 
8.5 was released around the same time as Windows 7 and was the first version with Windows 7 support, http://www.cakewalk.com/Press/release.aspx/09-15-09-Cakewalk-Announces-SONAR-8.5-Producer-and-SONAR-8.5-Studio-Now-Available 
 
No Anti Virus and not on the Internet does not guarantee "nice and clean". In my company there have been many cases of viruses on the machines not connected to the Internet. Removable media is a major form of virus transmission. The problem can be mitigated by controlling removable media and scanning it of a PC with a good up to date anti virus software before using it in an unprotected PC.
 
I am running X2 on a non-supported OS (Vista 64). If I get crashes (I have only had one isolated incident) I can only blame myself.

ya, I pulled it out of the sky , sorry. Reading the forums can give you a false sense of how many problems there might truly be. Most come here with problems. After all it's a rare thread that a newbie would start just to say. " just started using Sonar and just joined up to say how easy it is to use".  

With this version it will be rare to get newbies as all is about X2 now. As a matter of fact, most cannot claim to have "  just purchased Sonar 8.5 " which is now impossible so we can only assume where they got their copy from.  

A quick update. Rapture is definitely not stable under Win 7 x64 - it took Reaper out the water after just a minute or so of browsing around patches.
(I think I was using the 32 bit version of Reaper at the time). Dim Pro seems fine, though.
That probably explains the crash I had loading Dark European Space Adventures, so it was unfair to blame that on Sonar. (although Rapture is their product, I guess).
 
Someone pointed out here that Win 7 wasn't released when Sonar 8.3 was done. This is certainly true but Vista was out already. Although modern history has been rewritten so that Vista was some kind of weird bloated abomination that Win 7 magically fixed, the actual truth is that the OS kernel is very similar between the two and much of the negative press Vista attracted was due to it being run on machines that weren't, in actual fact 'Vista-capable'. There's an interesting story about how that came to be, but I digress...
 
In penance for being a little hot-headed, I will DL and check out Sonar X1 (since there appears to be no X2 trial version).
Also, for any people out there running the BCR2000 plugin I made a while back, now I finally have a 64 bit OS, I'm adding a 64 bit version to the downloads as soon as I can figure out why it isn't saving the MIDI port settings when I add it to Sonar. (I know I could have compiled one earlier but I never had any way of testing it).

I have had issues with 3rd party things crashing in sonar (in my case NI stuff) and the crash logs generated pointed to it being NI stuff tripping things up, which obv. cakewalk doesn't have access to their source code.

I assume reaper generates some sort of crash logs if such things happen? that might be helpful to pass on.

there is no trial of x2 currently , it's kinda standard they wanna put out a version after bug fixes etc.. as it's a first impression, so not something to be rushed.