Pre-Purchase Question--switching from SONAR 8.3.1

I have to agree with stupeT's statement, as I'm coming from Sonar 7 myself. z3ta, Dimension Pro, Rapture, TTS-1, sonitus:fx, Boost11, PerfectSpace, Pentagon, everything works in Reaper.

Phil, I can't comment on the 64 bit version, but I have both running side by side - no conflicts - Not all of the Sonar plugins will work, some are coded to work only with Sonar, like True Pianos in the S8PE version. I've been on Sonar since version 3 and made the jump over to Reaper with 3 - Had looked at previous versions but 3 seems to have really come together for my combination of midi and audio workflow. I've got Sampletank, EZ Drummer and Dimension Pro - so I'm in pretty good shape on the soft synth front. I still have projects working in both, but all new projects are now started in Reaper. I'm passing on the S8.5 update as I see no benefit. Both are good DAWs but for my money and workflow Reaper is working great.

Reaper's 32/64 bridging is brand new but it seems to be working pretty well for people. You can install both Reaper 32 and Reaper 64 alongside each other (in different directories) and use whichever one suits you. You should be able to open the same project in either one. Your licence covers both on the same computer. Technically your license covers you using Reaper on any computer.

Heh, this is like a guy who only ever had one really awful girlfriend. This is like asking the new girlfriend: 1. I understand women only like sex two days a year. How far in advance do I have to schedule it and what jewelry do you require? 2. When your other boy friend is over... should I just sit on the closet floor quietly until you two are done? Or may I excuse myself and go into the family room? 3. Will your mother be requiring me to trim her toe nails regularly? Dude, that relationship is over. Get ready to not have to deal with that crap anymore.

Um, humor. Wow, tough crowd. Though, let's not overlook being slightly weird as well.

I hate to read about someone having a bad initial experience with Reaper. Probably your particular use patterns found a bug that other users' use patterns don't happen to trigger. If you experience a crash, it's very useful to us if you can report anything about the crash. Ideally something like this: but even if it's just "Reaper crashed when I did X, Y, then Z" that gives us some information.

Stability involves so many factors and I always see folks with different levels of stability. I rarely have crashes in Sonar and have yet to experience one in Reaper. I spent about 10 hours in Reaper this past weekend with a project I've just completed. EZ Drummer and Sampletank multi-output tracks, audio for bass, rhythm guitar, guitar melody, guitar harmony melody, plus an instance of DimPro in combination with Catanya's arppegiator plugin - all of this routed to a set of mix buses with parallel compression techniques for the drums processing and lots of plugins for reverb, eq, compression, etc... Totals about 42 tracks when all is said and done. Like I said, about 10 hours of recording, mixing, editing and not one hint of a crash (I do save often, though!!) My system is a custom built quad core with an EMU 1820M interface - completely dedicated to music, so there's not a lot of crap installed. Most of my stability issues in the past have been EMU driver related, but they settled out over the last couple of years. <<TS>>

i would suggest starting an empty project, adding a track, and inserting one plugin at a time, and trying it out. rougue plugins can do a world of evil. also, are you having trouble specifically with the 64 or 32 bit version? you are running the latest version, too, yes? i've just come off of a few days of long (20 hour) editing sessions without so much as a hiccup. i'm running both audio files and unrendered vi's (48k/24b): superior2 with a full+ custom kit, a few blue's, an albino, gpo4 (cello, viola, violins 1&2 ks patches), microtonic, 4 amplitubes (mono), a couple of lexi/PSP42 delays, an instance of aether, and i think a zebra in there somewhere. all in all, i'm somewhere around the 50 track mark...and this is on a core2duo 2ghz with 3g ram. kell

So far, so good...