sharke

Beepster

sharke

Beepster
Ya. I've had issues but not like that.
 
Sometimes weird crap goes down and I just restart the program.
 
Most of my issues come from jamming a project with too many takes/comp edits without cleaning them up and/or too many tracks with too many plugins.
 
Other programs seem to handle that type of thing better but really... I try to KIS(S*) these days. Seems to work out better in the long run.
 
*IR teh stoopid one in this example... must control the inner spazz puppy

I wish I could do that. I wouldn't mind restarting at all if it meant the weirdness would end. Unfortunately for me it happens as soon as the project loads 

Sounds like you got some toxic shiz loading, sharke-o. Again I would normally just revert back to a stable project but in your case (based on minimal info and assuming reverting would lose too much work) I would attempt a Safe Mode load of SONAR and do the ole dance of "find the crashy plug that seems to hate SONAR".
 
Then... because I'm obstinate about how I like things to sound... I would concoct an evil scheme to preserve whatever the crap it was I did to strangle choke my project... just to be an arsehole... to that specific plug... that was being an arsehole to me.
 
/stable genius
 

It has nothing to do with plugins crashing or stability though (although I do have stability problems in large projects - Sonar sometimes crashes while looping sections). I would estimate there is probably 200+ plugins in this project, so even if the problem was a plugin crashing, doing the whole safe mode thing would be a gargantuan task. 

 
You'd like cubase.  It has 16 inserts PER TRACK!  And all one has to do to adjust pre and post fader is to move a little green line where the pre's and posts are.  Honestly, I have no clue why people are so resistant to changing daws.  Resistance is futile!

Well... you already know my beefs with SONAR automation. Again... I kind of work around it. I personally would clean up that project though (or honestly... if that's what you do consistently just go ballz in and CuBase it).
 
 

eph221

sharke

Beepster

sharke

Beepster
Ya. I've had issues but not like that.
 
Sometimes weird crap goes down and I just restart the program.
 
Most of my issues come from jamming a project with too many takes/comp edits without cleaning them up and/or too many tracks with too many plugins.
 
Other programs seem to handle that type of thing better but really... I try to KIS(S*) these days. Seems to work out better in the long run.
 
*IR teh stoopid one in this example... must control the inner spazz puppy

I wish I could do that. I wouldn't mind restarting at all if it meant the weirdness would end. Unfortunately for me it happens as soon as the project loads 

Sounds like you got some toxic shiz loading, sharke-o. Again I would normally just revert back to a stable project but in your case (based on minimal info and assuming reverting would lose too much work) I would attempt a Safe Mode load of SONAR and do the ole dance of "find the crashy plug that seems to hate SONAR".
 
Then... because I'm obstinate about how I like things to sound... I would concoct an evil scheme to preserve whatever the crap it was I did to strangle choke my project... just to be an arsehole... to that specific plug... that was being an arsehole to me.
 
/stable genius
 

It has nothing to do with plugins crashing or stability though (although I do have stability problems in large projects - Sonar sometimes crashes while looping sections). I would estimate there is probably 200+ plugins in this project, so even if the problem was a plugin crashing, doing the whole safe mode thing would be a gargantuan task. 

 
You'd like cubase.  It has 16 inserts PER TRACK!  And all one has to do to adjust pre and post fader is to move a little green line where the pre's and posts are.  Honestly, I have no clue why people are so resistant to changing daws.  Resistance is futile!

I'm not resistant in the slightest, as I've already said, the only reason I'm still using Sonar is because I have unfinished projects that are just way too big and "baked into" Sonar to contemplate moving them to another DAW. I wish it were that simple. 
 
I recently purchased Bitwig and Reaper licenses. I haven't gotten deep into Reaper yet, although I have used it briefly in the past. Bitwig though is another matter entirely. It's so well designed in terms of what it does, and stepping into the world of modern DAW's has been a joyous experience so far. Even in terms of the GUI. I'd gotten so used to Sonar that I never really noticed how dated some of it looks - the skylight interface is really nice, however the dialogs and menus look like something out of Windows 98. But it's modern features like having complex & creative modulators that you can drop into any FX chain and modulate anything in that chain, and being able to split your FX chain into different paths, and have FX chains within FX chains....wow. The sky really is the limit when it comes to processing your signals with Bitwig. 
 
What I've also come to realize is that Sonar is so bloated - I bet the vast majority of users never touch 70-80% of the program. It has a lot of legacy baggage, much of which just isn't relevant for most people today. So it feels great to step into a lean, trim DAW that's been designed with today's production techniques in mind, and isn't trying to recreate the entire inside of a recording studio in your computer. 

Beepster
Well... you already know my beefs with SONAR automation. Again... I kind of work around it. I personally would clean up that project though (or honestly... if that's what you do consistently just go ballz in and CuBase it).
 

 
I've cleaned it up about as much as I can to be honest. Any tracks that I really don't need have been deleted, and the hidden ones are mostly stuff like MIDI that's archived that I need to dig out again from time to time. Doesn't help that Sonar keeps unhiding all of those tracks 
 
I've even tidied up all the automation envelopes - you know all of those superfluous and unnecessary nodes that you end up with after playing with automation a lot, even though they're probably harmless, I've gone in and erased all of them "just in case" they're borking something up on a level I can't even contemplate. 
 

Yeah, but the project files still maintain whatever gankiness that has built up too. I also pick an "end" point of a particular phase of a project then I will (if I think the project is getting too intense) yank all the raw audio/MIDI clips and load them in a spanky new project.
 
Pain in the balls but if you are intent on salvaging the project... well that's what a Beepster would do.
 
He would again recommend looking at Cubase if you intend on massive MIDI orchestrations.
 
I use MIDI for drums, some ornamentation/flair and maybe some reinforcement. That may change in the future but for now that suits my needs. If I were trying to do epic orchestral/electronic stuff... SONAR would not be my first choice of software.
 
Based on my own experience and everything I've seen around here it's really an old school rocker type tool... despite whatever marketing hoopla has come out over the years.

I wish I could just yank out raw clips and load them into another DAW. Trouble is that many of these tracks utilize some pretty heavy FX chains which delve into the area of sound design, not just mix processing - and for that, I'm automating a lot of plugin parameters, sometimes 10-12 automation envelopes on each track. Then I have a few instances of StutterEdit in some of these FX chains, each with heavily modified patch banks being controlled MIDI tracks. by To recreate all of this another DAW would be a nightmare. Recreating the FX chains themselves (along with dozens of synths) would be a lot of work and involve the saving of hundreds of presets. 
 
I've looked at Cubase a lot over the years and while it definitely seems a lot more stable and less troublesome than Sonar, it still suffers from way too much bloat and legacy for my tastes. That's why I settled on Bitwig, it being a lot more lean and heavily focused on the kind of stuff I do. My only worry was that it didn't support time signature changes (I use these a lot in certain projects), but now they've added that. There's a lot of "sound design" geared routing and processing that is definitely doable in DAW's like Sonar and Cubase, but with a lot more work and complexity. With Bitwig you can do things on one track that would have taken multiple tracks and auxes in Sonar, and I love that. Plus you can freely mix audio and MIDI on the same track, which again just gels with my way of thinking ("Why can't you do that if you want to?") 
 
As DAW's get older, I think they become a lot more "boxed in" in terms of development - you're limited as to what you can implement and how you implement, because you're still having to accommodate legacy stuff going back years (decades in Sonar's case). Not just code, but overall design too. And you have a older user base which is more resistant to change, as well as having a lot more backwards compatibility to maintain. The big problem with older DAW's in my eyes is that they're very much based on the studio paradigm, i.e. trying to recreate a console and multitrack recorder with all the trimmings. This kind of design is optimized for a certain way of working - getting your composition and arrangement completed outside of the DAW (with your instruments), and then going in and recording it. The other way of working, which I prefer, is to experiment heavily with composition and arrangement (as well as sound design) in the box, so there's a lot of moving stuff around and trial and error and taking the composition this way and that. I'm beginning to see how much better DAW's like Bitwig and Ableton are for that workflow. However if large orchestral arrangements were my thing, I would definitely use Cubase. 

i think my 30 track songs have more going on than that one. good luck with bitwig sharke!

sharke
Yeah it's definitely a very fragile platform, and it has some serious issues that manifest in large and/or long running projects that have been worked on across successive updates. I've definitely pissed some people off by talking openly about these problems, primarily because they never experienced them in their projects and didn't like anyone tainting their view of Sonar as the "best DAW in history, ever." 
 
I honestly think it's probably a great DAW for working with traditional band recording setups, and I get the feeling that's what the vast majority of users do with it. Someone asked the question on the Facebook group a while ago, "how many tracks do you typically have in a session," and a lot of people answered. The average seemed to be in the region of 10-30 tracks with most people saying "just the usual stuff - guitar, drums, bass, maybe a drum VST and a synth pad." Sonar handles that pretty well. Here's one of mine zoomed out, as you can see there is a lot of stuff going on (this is with all of the MIDI tracks hidden except a handful), about 20 minutes worth of timeline.
 

 
I've noticed as a rule of thumb that when I start to get irritated by the length of time it takes Sonar to save a project (i.e. there's no quick CTRL-S and continue with what you were doing, you have to sit back and wait a while), that's about when the project starts to become troublesome. It's not exactly as if it's taxing my CPU too much either - I mean each of these tracks have upwards of 5 or 6 plugins on them (maybe more), but my CPU meters are showing just over 50% (mind you, with maximum buffer size). But really, in the realm of electronica, this kind of project size is typical. It's not as if all the tracks are playing at once, there's just a lot of sounds throughout the project. I'm convinced that it's when you have a lot of MIDI and automation flying around, that's when Sonar starts getting confused and sending signals where they shouldn't be. 

 
 
Looking at that, I'd say your problems might be that all those plug-ins are waiting for something to do, and falling asleep

Bear in mind though that this project is 20 mins long and hence very zoomed out to fit on one screen. And there are a lot of tracks which were originally arranged and processed as multi-track parts in Geist's own sequencer - I process them in there (it's like a mini DAW of its own) and then bounced them to a single track of audio for simplicity. I'll also layer multiple tracks of synths and then bounce them to one once I'm happy with them. All part of keeping the project as small and organized as I can. But yeah, in a large project like this I don't have more than a few things playing at once, and many tracks exist purely for sounds which only happen a handful of times. So, shouldn't present any stability problems at all.

I think sharke and Beepster should do a collab.