Audio and MIDI recording not working in Sonar – Solved

Hi Paul. I can not get anything to record in Sonar. Cannot get anything to record…… have done a restart, closed whole system down and restarted but still wont record…have not altered any settings. Can we get together to see if u have any ideas please? Tearing my hair out!! – Brian

I received the above message from Brian and we arranged a time to connect for a remote support session.

Once we were speaking on the phone and had set up AnyDesk so I could view Brian’s screen, he showed me the problem.

He was clicking record on Sonar’s transport panel, the play head moved, but no MIDI data was being recorded into his instrument track. 

Initially I thought this could be a problem with MIDI being sent into Sonar, so I ran some tests to make sure everything was working with Brian’s MIDI controller and that his instrument track was receiving MIDI and playing it back through Kontakt.

I then checked Sonar’s recording preferences and couldn’t find anything wrong.

I then noticed that as Brian pressed record on the transport panel, the button would flash red very briefly and then Sonar would continue in playback mode but not record. I checked the Punch recording and found that it was activated, but both the start and end points were set to the first beat of the song.

Disabling Punch mode allowed Brian to record as normal.

Brian was delighted that his music system was now working again and we used the rest of the hour’s support session to do a health-check on Brian’s studio PC and update some of his plug-ins.

If you are stuck with any aspect of music technology and would like to book some time with a friendly professional to help figure it out, then get in touch.