The simple fact that this "fully featured professional DAW" has no end of project marker is a really basic oversight.
The fact that you have to select what you need to be rendered in advance, is an extra step that professionally speaking, should not be required.
I agree with the original poster, this feature needs to be implemented A.S.A.P. and then many users will not have to hunt for the problem's cause and waste more of their own time and money in doing so.
B.T.W. stop at project end does absolutely nothing towards solving this problem.

GMcT
The simple fact that this "fully featured professional DAW" has no end of project marker is a really basic oversight.

 
There's a difference between a "fact" and an "opinion." Here's a fact: on October 3, 2015, you posted a thread titled "Goodbye Sonar, I've had enough." In it, you said:
 
"So, I'm going to return to being creative in what I view as a technically inferior program but which is far more user-friendly and has a vastly superior interface/workflow.

Goodbye Sonar, it was a real waste of money, but that is something you can only find out by paying for it and trying it out."
 
Yet here you are. Either you're still using SONAR, which means the thread I referenced above was just meaningless grandstanding, or you're not using SONAR, in which case I can't help but wonder why you feel compelled to continue posting here.
 

The fact that you have to select what you need to be rendered in advance, is an extra step that professionally speaking, should not be required.

 
A true professional knows you don't always render an entire project. SONAR currently lacks the psychic powers required to read your mind and determine in advance which portion you want to render, or whether you want to do something like render a particular passage of a virtual instrument. Granted, maybe someday you'll be able to say "Cortana, please render the section I remixed between measures 22 and 36, then drop it in place of these measures in the previous mix" but we're not there yet.
 
 
 

GMcT
The simple fact that this "fully featured professional DAW" has no end of project marker is a really basic oversight.
The fact that you have to select what you need to be rendered in advance, is an extra step that professionally speaking, should not be required.

You know, I think the export selection system could be better. Indeed, I've raised it myself here before, and Noel popped up to discuss it, and he and I and others had a fairly promising discussion about ways it might be improved in the future. So I'm no apologist for how it currently works.
 
But I can't see how one can equate "professional" with "doesn't want to think about selecting what's to be exported". If you've got to deliver release-standard content, be that in music, audiobooks, video games, film, or whatever, then you're just not going to be using whatever the automated option is anyway. You're going to be making sure that the file starts and ends exactly how and when you mean it to.

That's what "professional" is, not somehow owning the magical fantasy DAW that allows you to stop being thorough and careful about what you deliver. Things like this do not put off professionals; nobody professional would even want the software making these kinds of decisions for them. This is, frankly, a hobbyist's complaint.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for things being better for hobbyists. I'm not sneering at anyone here. But honestly, this is like saying "this camera doesn't auto-focus and auto-zoom, it expects you to do those things, surely professional cameramen hate it."

Anderton
Granted, maybe someday you'll be able to say "Cortana, please render the section I remixed between measures 22 and 36, then drop it in place of these measures in the previous mix" but we're not there yet.
 

"I'm afraid I can't do that Dave. This conversation can serve no purpose any more."

To be completely fair to GMcT, special start and end of project markers are an obviously good feature that would be useful to anyone. No argument with that.
 

Man, imagine if we'd had internet fora when ADAT was a common recording platform. Some of you people don't know what suffering is, I swear.
 

Several people, including Anderton, nailed it.  Especially on the grand standing comment.
 
It's really not hard to deal with this "issue".  There are SO many solutions to it, number one being, listen to the darn track before sharing it.  I would not even put that in the Mastering 101 class.  That's like...Beginner Recording Hobbyist 101.  To put it bluntly, the oversight isn't Cakewalk's.  
 
I do like the idea of the end marker, but that technically already exists, so why reinvent the wheel?  CTRL-A is your friend.
 
Another option...render your wav down, and open it up in a wav editor and chop the tail.
 
Or if, like others, you are complaining the reverb gets cut off like an axe, as someone else suggested, place an event a few measures past the end of the song, or place a marker at the end.  
 
I would never ever ever give even a "demo" of a project without giving it a real world listen first.  I'm flabbergasted that this happened.  
 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
... best practice when doing a final render is to explicitly select the region between the start and end point you want as well as all relevant tracks.

To simplify this process I add explicit markers called begin and end to the project. Then when its time to export I do this:
- open the markers view
...
-  Click the begin marker in the markers view
- clrl-click the end marker (this selects only the region that you wish to render)
- export
...

 
So Cakewalk already has an "End" marker available, but it is not associated with any default automation and we have to type in the label every time. I recall seeing this topic come up repeatedly over the years. Why not add a little functionality to help with this?
 
I could see having the "add marker" dialog redesigned to have an option to select "*Begin" or "End*" markers or to type in user-defined markers. With a bit of engineering, it would then be possible to design "*Begin" and "End*" be special markers that can be used in automatic processes. Maybe these special ones can also typed in (with code to prevent duplicates).
 
Then make these specific markers act as internal hooks for default behavior during render process. For example: 
[IF *Begin and End* markers are both present, THEN select that range for rendering and ask for confirmation with a dialog box that displays the default times of these markers and gives options to move those markers or to select the entire project],
OTHERWISE
[ask the user to define the range to export using a dialog box that defaults to selecting entire project but gives option of setting *Begin and End* markers before rendering].
A good user interface engineer might come up with a better way to get this done.
 
Until this gets built in, I'll be joining the group that now knows about using manually inserted markers for this functionality. Thanks for the reminder.

Nevermind, figured it out!
 

i hope this has been resolved for some of you but was confused as from pro audio days you can make sonar stop at end of project by an option setting. it is found on arrangment page under option and last entry on drop down