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GET OUT THE BUG SPRAY
SONAR 2 CREATES NEEDLESSLY LONG BOUNCED TRACKS
I recently wanted to bounce my edited drum track to a new .wav file. The drum track, after editing was just over 200 bars long. After the bounce SONAR CREATED a .wav file for the drums 718 BARS LONG ! There was no excuse for this because Sonar was properly informed to BOUNCE only the drum track. The drum track was the only track on the RPC 1/2 BUSS. I de-selected the RPC 3/4 BUSS. There were some REMNANTS from the 18 minute jam finishing out at bar 718 on the 3/4 BUSS, but these WERE NOT part of the MIX nor were they heard in the BOUNCE GENERATED DRUM WAVE. The .wav file generated by Sonar 2 had the 6 1/2 minute drum part WHICH I WANTED, followed by more than 10 minutes of SILENCE. This made me wait extra long and wasted hard disk space. My workaround for this was to use COOL 2000 to TRIM the wave down to 6 1/2 minutes, RENAME IT, and then import it back into Sonar after deleting the ridiculous 18 minute version.
I'm finding that REWIRE will crash Sonar 2, especially after I installed Unity DS-1 . (Review "Using Unity DS-1 with the Roland Studio Pack" will be coming before the new year.)
AUTOMATIC LOOP RECORDING BUG
Another unusual thing that I found was that when doing automatic loop recording ,with more than a single track, will produce a DELAY for any additional tracks. Let me explain further. I wanted to record my drums with 4 separate microphones. I decided to use 2 stereo tracks to record the drums. Each time the system looped and began to record the second stereo track there was an approximate delay of 4238 samples (24bit @ 44.1 khz) . In my case , I simply DELETED the first 4238 samples from each delayed track. I recorded 4 takes and each time there was the same delay of 4238 samples, so once I calculated the delay I just repeated the delete process. The QUICK AND DIRTY way would be to slide the offending tracks back in time, but if your edit is out by a 1/2 of the waveform cycle, you will get severe CANCELLATION due to phase shift.
How about SWAPPING WAVE VIEWS?
I just ran into this problem today. I wanted to juggle all of my drum tracks into CONSECUTIVE TRACKS, so I could easily see all of them ON TRACK 5, 6 AND 7. After I SLID THE 2 TRACKS INTO THE NEW POSITIONS, ONE OF THEIR WAVE VIEWS LOOKED MYSTERIOUSLY MORE LIKE THE SYNTH TRACK THAT USED TO BE IN THE SAME SPOT? Was it a synth track or was it a drum track? I hit the SOLO button, and sure enough it was the drum track? HMMMM? It looks like Sonar forgot which WAVE GRAPHIC belongs to which track!
I also kept getting notices that I was running low on DRIVE C: disk space even though I set up all of the filepaths for drive F: ????? This was also maddening at times. Was this some THROWBACK because I also had Cakewalk Pro Audio 8 on my system??? Here again I find that there are 2 TABS on GLOBAL OPTIONS for filepaths/folders. One is called AUDIO DATA and the other is called FOLDERS. All of the software I have ever used has user preference settings for ALL filepaths in a single WINDOW.
The following requester popped up. "Please delete events containing missing audio before attempting to save as a bundle." This requester came up AFTER I deleted all of my unnecessary .wav files AND then deleted all SUB TRACKS associated with those files. There were no references left to old .wav files . I even re-booted and when I loaded the .CWP file, I wasn't given any notice whatsoever that there were missing .wav files, but I got the requester again after trying to save as a BUNDLE! So what was the problem? Well it seems that ,after 45 MINUTES of careful examination, I was able to find a single OBSCURE clip of silence on a vocal track DURING THE INSTRUMENTAL PART. When I deleted this seemingly innocous silent clip, the problem went away. WHY WAS THIS SUCH A BIG DEAL? If it was such a big deal then the designers of SONAR 2.0 should have shown this clip as CROSSHATCHED or CHECKERBOARD to draw my attention to it. It looked like silence in the main window! The other related problem that I found was that sometimes a CLIP can be hiding underneath another clip and so you don't see it. Sonar will keep asking for a clip that you can't see.
Why does SONAR move the timeline when you want to SPLIT through several tracks??
Thats right. This happened to me several times. I would highlight a number of tracks , then hit the right mouse button and select "SPLIT". To my surprise the TIMELINE WOULD ALWAYS MOVE and the split would always be in the wrong place. I would need to UNDO and then MANUALLY type in the correct time code and try again.
RIGHT PCM IN AND LEFT PCM IN? INPUT BUSSING CONFUSION WITH SONAR.
What ever happened to WINDOWS CONVENTIONS? In most Windows software since Windows 95, each open TASK can be seen on the task bar at the bottom, but in SONAR 2.0 (My system has win ME) THEY ARE HIDDEN. For instance if you open up the console view and resize the window and then try to COLLAPSE the window to the task bar, IT WILL DISAPPEAR BEHIND THE TRACKS WINDOW???
Until SONAR 2 I never knew what a MEMORY HOLE was, but even with my 512 megs of memory, things start to get real FUNKY after 3 hours of splitting, cutting and pasting and at that point you must save your work and reboot, because even my 1.4 GHZ P4 system slows down to a crawl. I know that I'm not afraid to use the SCISSORS but what is happening?THIS MAY BE , IN PART, BECAUSE I'M USING COOL EDIT AS MY WAVE EDITOR, MOVING BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN THE 2 APPLICATIONS.
DELETING ITEMS IN THE EVENT LIST UPSIDE DOWN?
Another weird thing. Every time I hit the "DELETE" key to delete an event, while in the event list, (usually to delete extra MIDI controller junk) THE EVENT LIST KEEPS MOVING A WHOLE PAGE UP SO THAT THE NEXT TIMED EVENT AFTER THE ONE I JUST REMOVED MOVES TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN FROM THE TOP? I find myself constantly forced to hit the scroll bar or killing my DOWN ARROW????Now after playing with it for a little while I have begun to realize that deleting in the event list works more intuitively if you start at the END OF A MIDI TRACK deleting unwanted events, rather than at the beginning. Don't most people work from the beginning to the end??? My gut tells me that some programmer got his code upside down somewhere.
HARDWARE USED FOR THIS REVIEW
P4 1.4 GHZ PROCESSOR
20 GIG ULTRA DMA Hard Drive 7200 rpm
LG 24x10x40 CDRW
Samsung SyncMaster 570V TFT VIDEO 768 x 1024
Nvidia 32 meg graphic card
512 megs 266 DDRAM
Windows ME
SBLIVE! Audio card
Also have many other applications and hardware installed without a problem.
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