Apollo progress slow because of Sonar X1 Crashes

I have been a very happy Sonar Cakewalk user for the last few years. I started recording  my own music in 2005 and I have selected Sonar back then since I liked the work flow and intuitive layout. Since then I have upgraded on all versions coming after that. I never had any real problems so far. When Sonar X1 came out I was already working on my Apollo album and thought it would be wise to wait with the upgrade until the album was finished. But I could not resist downloading the demo and was very pleasantly surprised by the new layout. So I decided to upgrade anyway. At first everything looked OK, but now I'm working with heavier projects and I get a lot of unexpected and unexplainable crashes. I looks like a memory leak problem to me. My Roland contact told me an update was coming soon, but so far it still isn't there. I can still continue working, but I have to work around the bugs and the crashes slow me down a lot. If I don't make the deadline for the April 16th release it will be mainly due to these technical issues :( And I'm afraid to tell you that things are not looking good at the moment :( The chances I made release on E-day are not more than 50/50 at the moment. Just wanted to let you know. And I hope the Roland guys read this post too and hurry up a bit with that update ;)

VS-700 Upgrade

Recently I upgraded to Sonar X1 and that also included new software for the VS-700 console. But I got all kinds of messages that my firmware was outdated. So I looked for new firmware on the Cakewalk website and also found. But I also found out that it is not so easy to upgrade because you have to flip some dipswitches back and forth and for that I had to take the VS-700 module out of the rack and I postponed it everytime, but today I finally decided to finally do this.

The first thing to do is open up the ARX slot compartment and flip a dipswitch there to put it in upgrade mode. Then you can load new firmware over USB in it, after that you have to do the same for the rack processor itself. I think it would have been nice if Roland had put these dipswitches on the back of the unit so you don't have to take it out of the rack. Well after this the VS-700C itself (the controller) has to be upgraded as well. But for this you have to install it stand-alone (without the processor) with special drivers. Again some dipswitches on that back and new firmware. Well it took some time but luckily it all worked out.

But after this I decided to move the VS-700 Processor to another place in my main desk. Now I can open it up while it stays in this position in case I have to upgrade it again in the future. Only today I found out by the way that I could choose to hookup the console without the processor. I don't actually use the audio interface that is in there and to be honest I never used the build-in Phantom VS synthesizer either. So now I decided that I'm going to at least use the Phantom VS. I already hooked it up to the MX-1000 mixer that in the mean  time replaced the Friend-Chip DMX-12 digital patch bay. I'll try them both out tomorrow. For today I'm done :)

Sonar X1 Update

Last week Cakewalk released the new update for Sonar called X1. They completely changed the interface and I was very skeptical at first about it. Actually I thought about skipping upgrading for the very first time. But then when I read the new work-flow coming along with the new interface I decided to order the update and just check it out. The last two days I have been working a lot with this new version. First on my notebook and after I found out that I liked it a lot (even though I didn't expect to) I updated my studio PC too today. I worked on some projects and I must say I'm getting happier by the minute. Especially that fact that you can dock all views so that you can easily recall them is superb. And also the editing functions have become smart now. You don't have to change tools that much anymore. A lot of options are easier to reach and you can build custom views that you can recall easily. I had to look up some things in the manual, because also the keyboard short cuts have changed and some functions are in different places, but in better places I must say. After one day I was already working like I never used another version. So a good update I must say :)