The great, the bad and down-right ugly of Sonar’s X1 release in December 2010

This is my Sonar X1 Diary until I quit in January and went back to Sonar Producer 8.5.3.

I probably wasted 2-3 weeks of time in the process and didn’t learn anything other than an old lesson: don’t believe software developers that a first release isn’t beta and don’t install beta software when you need to get work done.

Update – Sonar X1b now ready for prime time

The diary is edited from my comments on the Cakewalk Sonar User Forum and old include my words to avoid copyright issues or breach of confidentiality. It tracks day-to-day comments up to version X1A with the ASIO patch.

Cakewalk announced they hope to fix most of the bugs by March 2010 in release X1b.

December 08, 2010 What is your overall thought of Sonar x1 so far?

I am having a great time with X1. The first download didn’t work so I did it again. Big deal. The install was smoother than 8 and the authorization process a breeze.  

I made a copy of my current project – Blue Christmas which has 29 tracks across 7 buses.

Not only did everything work right off the bat – no audio or midi hangups like I get every day with 8.5.3 but it looks so cool. The screens are easier to read. Can’t quite figure out what the track colors come from but it’s easy to differentiate them. Love the Console view with only active tracks visible.

Very impressed and going to record another vocal session tomorrow and rhythm guitar, since I wasted most of today just poking around looking for holes and problems – found none.

Especially like the new easier to see audio data path. I love X1

December 09, 2010 – Control Surface and Track Folder issues – can anyone confirm this pls?

I’m just having flaky issues keeping MCU Pro C4 and (Presonus) Faderport working. X1 worked great with MCU Pro and C4 until I installed my Faderport.  Now it hangs. MCU Pro just says “Connecting”

I’ve unchecked the Faderport but the MCU doesn’t sync. Any ideas please

December 10, 2010 – Re:X1 and Control Surfaces

Unlike 8.5.3 (where a registry edit was required) the Faderport was just there. All I had to do in X1 (64 bit) was check box it and assign the midi ports – at which point things when west. The response from the MCU Pro/C4 became slower and then stopped altogether.

I may have to go back to 8.5.3 – can’t waste days playing with new product. X1 may be pretty but under the covers she has some bitchy quirks.

This AM is decision point – It’s silly to keep working when 8.5.3 worked. I don’t need Faderport to survive but I sure as #*** don’t want to lose my Mackie Control Pro. Cheers.

———–

Did the old trick – reverted project to start of yesterday, deleted control surfaces, deleted ini files for X1, restarted X1, installed midi ports, control surfaces (without Faderport) and everything seems to be working again.

Something new – orange bar at bottom of Console view and left side of Track tells me what bank the MCU Pro is controlling. Shift banks and the dark orange follows you. A lighter orange remains (to show where you’ve been?)

Everything seems to work in faders, arming, mute, change from tracks, to busses to mains.

Not working – the screen labels on Mackie remain where it starts – shifting to the 2nd bank of tracks leaves labels for tracks 1-8 on the screen.

Anyone know the fix for that? I have to record a vocal this am so we’ll see how it works in production.

—-

All right! just completed 4 hours of recording and the ding-dang X1 thingy got along with MCU all the live long day. I rest.

Uninstall the control surfaces, quit and re-install – working for at least 10 minutes!

Especially like the orange color mapping MCU to screen.

December 12, 2010 – X1 and Control Surfaces

When you work with the MCU Pro in X1 it feels like the MCU Pro got an upgrade. Seems to have opened up the system and the orange highlight bar on the screen really helps to figure out where the MCU Pro is focused. Put an MCU Extender on order.

SONAR X1 still using outdated, unsupported, buggy MSVC++ 2005 redistributable

I dunno…second guessing the developers might introduce untested variables into the system and make X1 unstable.

I used to be a Windows developer and nothing is worse than someone upgrading the OS, language, dll’s and or drivers that haven’t been tested.

There is more to X1 than a pretty face and Cakewalk are reasonably well connected to Intel and Microsoft. I’m leaving the heavy lifting to them.

Suggestion for X1 documentation

There are a lot of Preference choices on the midi side that aren’t explained…would be nice

All the excitement is X1

Thanks to the great folks at Cakewalk and Roland for supporting them. We have the hottest property in DAWs.

X1 is a winner with attention focused on X1. There are a smattering of people on the old Producer forum but X1 is getting all the heat.

Nothing like attention, good bad or ugly. The GS folks are spreading the world, even the nay-sayers.

Never let people stop talking about you. It’s deadly.

December 13, 2010, If You’re Happy Raise Your Hands!!!

Happy and having a great time

Audiosnap difficulties

(It’s the)same here…transient markers and zero action

December 14, 2010 XI and VST plugins

Well I really like X1 – that is until I started adding my fave 64 bit plug-ins. The dropouts came fast and furious.

Moved up to 1024 buffers to no avail. Have the latest Lynx Studio AES16 drivers (not beta though) running on powerful cpu.

Dropped all those 64 bit plugins and moved to ProChannel which is pretty cool. However, it doesn’t have reverb so I loaded Sonitus. Yikes dropout city.

Anyone know why the VSTs are problematic and have a reverb solution?

ProChannel=$99 “VS” SSL plugins= $450-$1000 I’m not complaining!

I used Pro Channel today since the old 64 family caused my computer to dropout. Fantastically powerful and simple to use. Great results.Forget fancy interfaces, just give me the old comp/eq/tube.

Some things are a little basic but I was surprised how easy it was to mixdown the tracks and have everything sound great and in it’s place. I’m not an expert.

December 15, 2010 Even a clean install is unstable

I like X1 but it is very unstable and subject to dropouts. Has anyone got any ideas on how to make X1 stable?

It got so bad today I called support and they were very nice – suggested blowing away the ini files. That worked for 30 minutes.

I simply stopped doing mixing and uninstalled Sonar 8.5 and X1, purging all sonar files from the computer (and there are a lot of them) and cleaned the registry – cold booted and re-installed X1.

It was better. I was able to finish my mix; however, I did get dropouts.

Using the supplied 64 bit plugins causes dropouts, V-Vocal causes the blue screen of death. I switched to Melodyne and it’s a very cool product, except I couldn’t find a shape tool.

I can only use UAD-2 plug-ins which is OK since I have bunch.

Something is wrong – I have a very fast, dedicated DAW computer with fast drives – data, plugins and software all have their own drive. It’s an i7 860 computer with 8 MB ram, the excellent AES16 card, no other drivers, no software running, all unnecessary services stopped – and Sonar X1 is barely able to mix a 6 track project with one UAD-2 plug-in, no synths.

8.5.3 was not that unstable.

My project file has gone to be mastered – what an ordeal.

At this point in the conversation a senior Cakewalk moderator stepped in and suggested it was my hardware and asked me to check latency, which was very low and acceptable, and the issue of Core Parking with the i7 860 CPU. On the issue of core parking, I could tweak my cpu but it made no difference in the number of times Sonar X1 crashed or the BSOD errors. If you’re getting the feeling the code is flaky and needs a rocket scientist to run successfully that was my opinion by then as well.)

December 16, 2010

OK, I read the Cakewalk articles on Core Parking – the regedit didn’t match the entries in my Win 7 64 registry (deleting entries). Core Parking Tom’s Hardware

There was another link that matched in Ultimate Computer which I am trying.  The issue makes sense. I never see the cores working for half (every second one) which told me they were turned off.

CW said that dual installs can create confusion where ini files and settings get mixed up. BSOD is pure V-Vocal – checked the Win 7 tools for event manager. All of the stuff is coming from CW programs. With Windows there are few mysteries since it traps every event.

I had 8.5.3 but uninstalled it. Once X1 was installed, it became unstable.  I have some things like Right Mark and an ASIO tester I’ll run tomorrow. See what happens.

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The problem is not hardware but application. The tech support person was perplexed and thought there might be a conflict with old code and new code – as in the ini files.

Which is why I deleted the whole shebang and started with a fresh clean install.

Still had dropouts afterward.

I’ll post the latency screen shots.

Brandon (Cakewalk moderator), thanks for helping out. Zip your 40 track project and send it to me.  (since he claimed the ability to use X1 for a 40 track recording – no response.)

It’s helpful to assume the person with the problem has a valid point. I’ve been a computer geek – professionally and personally – for 40 years, was a beta tester for Microsoft with Win 3. 3.1, WfW, NT and almost every operating system since. Ran both a systems integrator and development shop.

I can always learn something new – X1 has me perplexed.

——–

Here are the CW support suggestions, which I have already done. None of them make much difference.

They suggest turning if Win7 services – Brandon Ryan says not. I know how to do that and generally will but even years of experience doesn’t mean somebody unexpectedly isn’t using a stopped service.

It’s totally silly that 6 audio tracks, with V-Vocal on one, PC and fader automation craps out.  It would be nice if CW would either have a real suggestion or admit they are working on solving the problem.

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So X1 runs well in 32 bit. That’s something to try because 64-bit may be a Bitbridge too far…forgive the pun.

——

I certainly appreciate your comments Brandon.

The back and fro on i7 860 is interesting but not relevant. It’s a standard Intel i7 processor with lots of headroom and the latency test proves the machine is setup lean and mean.  It would be strange if CW said X1 was only certified for certain processors/motherboards, a long dark road into the past.

Is there a next step, somewhere to go with this?  something to try?

I have been in contact with Lynx Studio and they have no suggestions.

It would be good to know if anyone else with AES16 rel 18 drivers is having issues.

——

With all due respect the comment from Keith is foolish. Event Manager already identified the cause of the BSOD as CW and it’s posted above. I’ll repeat it

Yes the BSOD is caused by a dll – Sonars’ dll
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\SONAR X1 Producer\SONARPDR.exe
Faulting module path: VPSoloDec.dll

?Users all over this board are having trouble. Trying to push customers in circles is unprofessional.  There are several threads running on BSOD and latency problems. How convenient to blame me and the rest of the “problem customers”

Don’t change the subject – I don’t have Maudio – its a Lynx AES16/Aurora with the latest drivers.  Is CW suggesting that high end products are second rate?

If so, please identify the rock solid, quality audio cards that will run X1. Before I purchased the $4K Lynx setup everyone on this board told me it was the cats’ ass. Now it’s just another cheap card because X1 is not a finished product.

December 17, 2010

Happiness is getting your song back from the mastering service.

Unhappiness is another BSOD.

While everything worked last night, playing the master and pre-master caused the system to crash again. MS update Win 7 last night and the error seems to be Windows related.

Dump report follows.  Rolling back last night’s updates from Redmond to isolate the issues. Cheers.  Bug check description: This indicates that an exception happened while executing a routine that transitions from non-privileged code to privileged code.

——

Took 5 hours to unload last night’s update. Re boot ad nuaseum.

Tried the pre-mastered file and it worked.

Over the weekend will try to load the large version with more effects.

On the way in it says P64 is missing. Weird I never used it. Cheers.

——

Lynx suggest turning off double buffers.

——

Wow, a whole 3 passes of the song before dropouts. What’s different? Pointed X1 to CW plugins. System freaked out. Stop, start, stop, zzxssss pop hiss …

Glad my song is done and the master back.  X1 is pure frustration.  Cheers.

December 17 2010 – This is by far the best SONAR ever

And then I can just blow X1 off my computer completely and go back to the old girlfriend who is looking better everyday. I called her up last night just to talk you know. She was a little frosty but there’s a chance she’d take me back.

——

When it works, X1 is beautiful. When it works without bugs, it will seem like heaven.

Between the holidays I installed Windows 7 from scratch, re-installed Sonar X1 with the accumulated wisdom of three months testing and forum suggestions but the code would not work. I cleaned off the computer and started from scratch again with Sonar Producer 8.5.3 which is working well.

Word leaked out that Sonar was working on an X1b patch for February or March 2011.