Here’s a little improvement uncovered via the pig-pile which are the Sonar forums right now:

If you import audio via a menu (as opposed to using the Audio Browser, or dragging it in from Windows Explorer) – which is super easy because an “Import Audio/MIDI” has been added to your right-click menu – you can audition loops directly from the import dialog. Very handy.

And from the keyboard of Bob Damiano, one of the principle engineers, there are these less-heralded features:

Clips View:

* Peak markers are transparent. You can see your waveforms thru them now.
* Clip Names can be transparent. There is an INI flag to turn this on. (good excuse to read the Readme)

PRV/Inline PRV:

* Note overlap indication / hit testing improvements: When notes overlap in time, you can “see thru” them when the mouse is over them so none of the edges get totally hidden. The mouse tools will even find completely covered notes by prioritizing note edges over note middles.
* New selection mode on toolbar: When you select a note(s), any CCs within the time span of that note(s) also get selected. lets you move CCs and Notes together.

That last one is particularly useful.

That I’ll keep this going as I uncover ‘em.

Find any yet?

Edit:

Ah the motherload! After the jump a huge list of (most likely implemented changes and fixes) via Noel Borthwick, another principle engineer.

So if you haven’t visited the Read Me file or weren’t on the development team here’s some of what you might have missed:

Note: This list is not official. So don’t try to hold Cakewalk accountable for any discrepancies between this and the release version.

Complete unedited list after the jump.

Some more to add to Bob’s list. Note that I dredged some of these out from our old beta notes so I make no guarantees about complete accuracy since some details might have changed after these were posted. I reserve the right to take back what I post

Misc VST changes

Realtime event flagging:
VST events are now flagged as realtime when notes are played via live input. This is for the benefit of the Access Virus that relies on this behaviour for low latency output.
Respond to the "sendVstMidiEventFlagIsRealtime" audioMasterCanDo callback. This is a new VST2.4 cando that is used by the Access Virus to check if the host sends MIDI flagged as realtime.

Program Changes:
Fix reported problem with track embedded program changes not being transmitted properly to VST’s. MIDI program change events in tracks were being transmitted to VST’s with the status byte set to 0. This is invalid and was being ignored by synths.

VSTi stuck notes:
Some VSTi synths do not respond to normal note off messages from the SONAR transport and may get stuck notes during playback. For these synths, SONAR 7 now exposes a new parameter that will force those synths to suspend playback after a transport stop. To enable it, open the Plug-in Properties for a VSTi and check “Always suspend on stop”

VST note names:
VST note names are now displayed if supported by the VSTi. This also applies to VST’s wrapped by BitBridge in X64.

VST mono outputs:
Mono outputs from VST’s are now properly named as exposed by the plugin. Tracks are also created with these names rather than grouping them as stereo pairs.
Synths with odd numbers of outputs are also properly handled. e.g. all BFD’s outputs are now available even for configurations that have an odd number of outs.

Project File I/O
Add new data recovery enhancement to safe mode. When a file is loaded in safe mode, in addition to the normal behaviour of allowing the user to skip fx, this mode is more fault tolerant. It will now attempt to load as much of the project file as possible by skipping over damaged chunks in the file and proceeding with the file load. For example, with several files tested that would normally give a "not a SONAR file" error, now load with most of the data intact.

Bundle files
In SONAR 6 and earlier, bundle files could not store more than 2GB worth of data per wave format. This limitation no longer exists since the bundle file will dynamically switch to Wave64 format internally whenever any chunk exceeds 2GB. Note that such bundles will be incompatible with SONAR 6 or earlier.
Bundle file saving and unpacking is also faster in S7 due to file I/O optimizations.

Bounce I/O
Due to file I/O changes, depending on the project you may notice improvements in bounce speed while in Fast Bounce mode.

Quick Quantize
Drag Quantize gives you an immediate method of tightening up the timing of any group of notes (or other MIDI events).

SONAR 7 now makes it very easy to quantize individual Note events (or other MIDI events) without having to use the Process-Quantize command.

Drag Quantize works by clicking on an event (or one of many selected events), and moving the mouse up and down. The up direction moves the events toward the quantize target times; downward motion moves them away from the quantize target times. You immediately see the data being moved towards the target in real-time as you adjust the mouse position.

Drag Quantize is one of the programmable mouse "Actions", which can be assigned to any mouse button and key combination. By default, Drag Quantize is assigned to Ctrl+middle-click when using the Select tool. For more information, see Flexible Piano Roll Tools.

Expanded File Import/Export

SONAR now supports import and export of many new file formats, including AIFF (including 24 bit), Sound Designer 2 and FLAC, as well as files encoded with various codecs. The complete list of newly supported formats is as below.

AIFF (Apple/SGI) (extension "aif")
Signed 8 bit PCM
Signed 16 bit PCM
Signed 24 bit PCM
Signed 32 bit PCM
Unsigned 8 bit PCM
32 bit float
64 bit float

AU (Sun/NeXT) (extension "au")
Signed 8 bit PCM
Signed 16 bit PCM
Signed 24 bit PCM
Signed 32 bit PCM
32 bit float
64 bit float

CAF (Apple Core Audio File) (extension "caf")
Signed 8 bit PCM
Signed 16 bit PCM
Signed 24 bit PCM
Signed 32 bit PCM
32 bit float
64 bit float

FLAC (FLAC Lossless Audio Codec) (extension "flac")
Signed 8 bit PCM
Signed 16 bit PCM
Signed 24 bit PCM

SD2 (Sound Designer II) (extension "sd2")
Signed 8 bit PCM
Signed 16 bit PCM
Signed 24 bit PCM

W64 (SoundFoundry WAVE 64) (extension "w64")
Signed 16 bit PCM
Signed 24 bit PCM
Signed 32 bit PCM
Unsigned 8 bit PCM
32 bit float
64 bit float

WAV (Microsoft) (extension "wav")
Signed 16 bit PCM
Signed 24 bit PCM
Signed 32 bit PCM
Unsigned 8 bit PCM
32 bit float
64 bit float

Options | Global | Stop at Project End

When checked, the behavior is the same as SONAR 6: Playback will not start with no data in the project and playback stops when the last event is reached. When unchecked, SONAR will play back with no data in the project, and playback will continue past the last event.

Hide Muted Clips from PRVP
revents events in muted clips from being displayed in the PRV. Pull down the Display Types menu (upper left corner of the PRV) and choose “Hide Muted Clips”

Velocity Edit operations no longer modify Display or Edit types
Doing a note velocity drag will no longer force Velocity to become one of the visible types or change the edit type to Velocity. If Velocity is not the edit type, you will still see velocities for any dragged notes while the mouse tool is down and active.

MIDI Event Mute
MIDI events can now be muted individually.

Synth Rack
You are now prompted before deleting a synth

Track Export with no selection
In SONAR 6, when performing a Bounce to Tracks or Export Audio with no selection and the source category set to “Tracks”, all audio tracks would be exported at the length of the longest track. In the same situation in SONAR 7, the length of all bounced or exported tracks will all be the same as the ORIGINAL source track.
This allows you to quickly export multiple tracks to multiple target wave files while retaining the original track lengths.

Real-time Bounce
Unchecking “Fast Bounce” in the Mix Enables for any bounce operation now performs a true, real-time bounce, effectively identical to playback. If The Audible Bounce setting is also checked, the project will also play back audibly through the destination hardware outputs. Real-time Bounce is available for Bounce to Track(s), Export Audio, and Freeze commands.

Izotope Radius
Updated to latest Izotope versions that have various fixes for performance and quality and also support for 64 bit sample times.

Transparent Clip Names
Add TransparentClipNames=1 to cakewalk.ini to display clip names transparently

UAD compatibility enhancements

Fixed problem where UAD plugins would load with incorrect default settings.

Added new ini variable to improve UAD compatibility

New aud.ini variable
AllowOfflineRenderMixThreads=<0 or 1>, default = 1

Set this variable to 0 to temporarily disable multi-threaded mixing during a fast bounce operation.

A value of 1 (default) allows multiprocessing during fast bounce when multiprocessing is enabled in SONAR.

This variable can be used to improve compatibility with the UAD-1 v4.7.1 driver running in SONAR compatibility mode. This variable is required because this UAD driver is not compatible with multiprocessing in SONAR’s fast bounce mode.

If you hear clicks in the rendered audio while running with multiprocessing, you should set this variable to 0, under the [Wave] section of AUD.INI. This variable is only applicable on multiprocessor capable PC’s when multiprocessing is enabled in Options | Audio | Advanced. For example:

[Wave]
AllowOfflineRenderMixThreads=0

Updates to Improve Playback Performance

SONAR 7 introduces a new CPU conservation mode that reduces the number of GUI updates with no effect on actual playback quality and rendering. This maximizes CPU resources for the audio engine and can be useful while playing projects that consume a lot of CPU, to help avoid dropouts.

Like the Scroll Lock key, the Pause key now works as a special GUI throttle toggle key. When the Pause key is pressed, SONAR runs in a CPU conservation mode by reducing the frequency of GUI updates. For example, VU meter updates, Now position pointer and progress updates will appear to update less frequently.

During CPU conservation mode, the UI is only updated once per second.

This mode can also be helpful to conserve CPU while doing a real-time bounce (see Real-time Bounce).

Note: There is no indicator in SONAR when CPU conservation mode is active, and most computer keyboards do not show the state of the Pause button. If the GUI does not update smoothly and you did not intentionally enable CPU conservation mode, press the Pause key to make sure you didn’t inadvertently put SONAR in CPU conservation mode.