I love Cakewalk, use it every day. I own expanded and have purchased a number of extras from Cakewalk. Most of the time it works well. But sometimes, especially when the musical piece has grown complex, with lots of effects and tracks, the thing just bombs. Randomly. The program seems to know when a song is nearing finality, and then it crashes. Not always, and sometimes I can go weeks without issue. But when it happens its devastating. My plea is simple, make X2 the most stable ever. Concentrate on that. Make that the first key selling point. Bells and whistles are wonderful, and I know Cake must keep up with the joneses, but you have no idea how frustrating it is when the damn thing bombs after spending a kabillion hours building a song up.

I'm afraid the more bells and whistles they add the less stable it will be(come), no matter how much they focus on stability.

Which is why I'm sticking to X1 for now. It works like a charm on my system. So until X2 is deemed to be just as solid, I won't upgrade.

  I agree with everyone's points here - I had been plagued for several years with so many problems, I was spending far more time trying to debug issues that caused crashes, than I spent actually getting any serious recording done. I nearly gave up in frustration and walked away. Thankfully, several guys here really helped me and ultimately I found out that I had not one but 3 separate issues of hardware malfunction and driver incompatibilities. It took me replacing my mic, the sound interface,and various software issues before I got a really solid system together that works now. I too, wish Cakewalk did not have to keep up with the Joneses and add so MANY features, even many FX that seem redundant - and just build a stripped-down lean, mean, recording system that was a lot easier to use (oh - they did, it's called Music Creator 6!) I forgot, I used MC for a couple years and it really DID help me get productive fast, with no frills! Again, 3 cheers for CW! But yeah, I know how frustrating crashes can BE - Rick, my best advise in the meanwhile is to do frequent Saves during your projects, in case you crash before X1 can give you a backup. I force myself to do a manual Save every time I accomplish some major change in a track or in a mix, just out of habit. I very rarely lose anything. But I'm also with you guys on waiting awhile on X2 - I'm so darn happy with the stability I've had with X1, I'm in no hurry to step out on the upgrade cliff again and take a plunge anytime soon. :-)

Since we don't know your computer specs, we can't speculate on why you're having problems.

I'm sure the developers at Cakewalk do their best to make Sonar as stable as possible, but there are so many hardware platforms out there (motherboards, CPUs (Intel, AMD)), desktops, laptops, memory (DDR, DDR2, DDR3), soundcards (built-in, PC Card, USB, Firewire, serial, S/PDIF), operating systems (Windows XP, Win 7 and Win 8 plus Windows running on MACs) and plug-ins (many of which are homegrown), its impossible to make an application that 100% stable with all these different variables. Cakewalk does publish a list of minimum requirements to run Sonar, but that doesn't stop people from trying to run it on lesser equipped computers. Yet whenever someone has a problem or a crash, they first blame Sonar. Maybe they should be looking a little harder at their equipment, other software running, plug-ins, and Sonar configuration to find an answer. More often than not that's the culprit. I'm not saying to say Sonar is perfect, but no one should be crashing all the time because of Sonar. 

Sure you can... you just speculated that it was a problem with his computer.

That was easy.








You can gotta know when to freeze and know when to bounce.

I do it just before everything gets all flaky.

Cakewalk should do a SONAR University Masterclass video on how to recognize the warning signs of when SONAR is going to start flaking out.

It seems easy to me to see when SONAR is about to corrupt a file and leave you to depend on a back up.

It seems like there should be a more frank and open discussion about running SONAR nears it's limits.

It seems, to me, to be a normal aspect of operating any DAW.

Some sound technicians have the hubris to call them selves "engineers"... because managing a project is very similar to actual engineering. One has to learn to manage resources efficiently so as to actually complete a project.

It's a skill. Anyone can learn it. Someone should be teaching it.

best regards,
mike

Cakewalk, along with every other major DAW designer, Roland included, simply do not have staff available to do
full integration testing for every release. The programs have just gotten too big to test fully on a even a single system
configuration. So, the consumer's idea that every release should be "rock solid" is simply not realistic. A fact of life
is that software and hardware break down, and your only defense is to acquire the knowledge to work around those
eventual certainties. If you do that, there won't be a software issue that causes you to lose more than a few minutes of
work. Just ask the question, what do I do if this thing blows up? There are several answers, and once you have a plan,
you won't have to sweat over this stuff.

peregrine - you make some good points. But just to clarify, I believe that serious musicians *do* practice safe computing. For me, I back up like crazy. The song I am working on now has some 40 versions saved manually, plus the automatic copies, and probably 4 times that much in save overs. I don't expect the bakers to find every last bug prior to release, but bugs that cause lost work should be top priority. Kinda like a car. I can live with a factory recall of the seat adjuster sticking, but am less tolerate when a certain number of engines blow up yet they still keep kicking out new body styles.

Latency is not something, "you setup once, and forget about it."  The bigger your projects get, the more you have to start thinking about latency, and track freezing.  

If you are going for weeks without a crash, and sometimes, "it crashes."  than it could be any one of a number of things, not excluding a bug in any third party plugin.

Linear Phase - all good points. And more tracks need to be frozen, or bounced etc. I can live with that, and do. I baby the thing as best I can, and I am an Engineer by background and a software programmer, so I know how things can go wrong. And it is possible it is 3rd party plug ins. One of the best things I ever did to add stability, and only in Sonar X1 64 bit it was needed, was to stop using v-vocal and invest in Melodyne. Just doing that one thing cut the crashes quite a bit. And improved vocals at the same time.