It also had some compatibility issues with the waves plugin suite which made any project that included the plugins freeze upon opening.

Despite these upgrades Sonar still crashed very frequently (costing me 20 minutes or more of work). My hope was that this would alleviate all of the chronic crashing and sluggishness of Sonar. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore and decided to upgrade my workstation to a Core i7, 8 gig ram, and SSD drive running Windows 8.1 and also get Sonar X3 with all the latest updates.

I put up with the difficulties for a while much like you would put up with difficulties from a gradually degenerating appliance. A whole slew of problems seemed to come in but for a long time I wasn't sure if it was my new workstation, new OS, or new version of Sonar (too many variables to know for sure). The turning point was when it was rebranded Sonar X1 around 2010. without the stability of the software seeming to suffer. Over the early 2000s the feature set grew as it supported VSTs, VSTi, DXis, etc.

There were much fewer features back then but the software definitely seemed usable and stable at the time. I've been a Cakewalk user and advocate since the mid 90s when I started using Cakewalk Pro Audio 5.0.

Not sure why this product has so many 5 star reviews on here but I'd like to give my piece on this software.

Cakewalk sonar x3