For me Sonar's biggest problem is stability, especially if you're using a lot of VSTi's. I think one of the reasons the problems in this respect don't get more mention is because its user base is weighted toward the audio guys - indeed if you take a look at the song forum on any particular day, 90% of it seems to be audio recordings of real instruments as opposed to electronica or other MIDI-heavy projects. You don't see many techno guys using it.
I like to go nuts with synths. Lots of them, and tons of automation on each one. I'm forever loading synths, deleting them, replacing them, loading new ones etc. And this is where I think Sonar falls down. The longer I work on a project, the more weirdness, instability and corruption creeps into it. I've had projects that have taken 10 launch attempts before I can load them without crashing. I also have a very annoying and ongoing problem with Native Instruments effects that reset all of their dials to zero whenever the project starts playback. It's been happening to me for almost 2 years, ever since I bought Komplete, and has even followed me to a brand new machine with a fresh install of everything. Having invested so much in Native Instruments stuff (2 versions of Komplete with upgrades to Ultimate), it's a real pain and means I'm never 100% confident about using the instruments and effects that I want to use. The problem seems to have perplexed the Bakers so far (fingers crossed), and Native Instruments say they have never heard of it (perhaps because the vast majority of their customers use other DAW's).
I've also started to see a problem whereby a project with Melodyne in it crashes every time on load (and the error message tells me it's Melodyne's fault). Going to send that one to the Bakers when I get the chance.
I have a few Sonar projects that have become so corrupted and problematic and crashy that I've had no choice but to abandon them and reconstruct them from scratch. As you can imagine that's a huge amount of work and not really acceptable. Luckily this is just a hobby for me at present.
Another huge problem in Sonar is moving large amounts of data around - inserting measures, deleting measures, that sort of thing. It has never worked properly for me and I've heard a lot of other people say the same thing. When inserting or deleting measures (i.e. empty space), you just want the rest of the project to move left or right accordingly. More often than not, you either get crashes or the automation you've painstakingly constructed doesn't move with the clips (even if you have that selected in the options). Lassoing the whole thing and dragging it manually is also very problematic and very rarely works properly. This for me is one of the biggest disappointments of Sonar. Moving around whole blocks of a composition is a fundamental part of the arrangement process and should work seamlessly and intuitively. It seemed that way when I used Pro Tools, never had a problem. With Sonar it's so problematic that it affects my composition choices. Shall I insert those 8 extra measures I've been thinking of? Better not - I'm likely to go through a whole evening of problems just getting the rest of the project (including automation) to slide along 8 measures. When you're letting the technical limitations of your DAW dictate something so musically fundamental as the arrangement of the song, it's not good. When you were looking forward to an evening of right-brained musical creativity and you end up spending the whole night wrestling with left-brained technical problems, something's wrong. It's especially painful for me given that work & personal commitments mean I only have a limited amount of time every day to be musical.
So yeah, I've thought about and continue to think about other DAW's all the time. I really need something which can handle very synth-heavy projects without crashing, something which facilitates the creation and manipulation of a ton of complex automation seamlessly and without confusion. I need something which works with my creativity, not against it. Right now Sonar isn't working for me in that respect. I stick with it though, a) because I don't want to spend the money and the time buying/learning another DAW, and b) despite these problems, there is a lot about Sonar which I love, and I've become sort of attached to the little blighter. So I'm sticking around in the hope that the problems which sting me every day get sorted out eventually. Maybe I'm mad
