GarageSpin

Dropouts, crapouts, DAW patheticness, software upgrades gone wrong...my very own personal digital audio workstation Odyssey may finally have come to an end:

An Abbreviated History of my DAW Trials and Tribulations:

• December 2007: After too many crapouts on my 5-year old Dell with Sonar 6 over the course of a year, I upgraded to a new DAW customized for audio production. 
• Jan-Feb 2008It was fast, mean and deadly...but unfortunatley, it was still experiencing crazy dropouts (despite an increase in performance).
• March 2008: In an effort to identify the cause of the problem, we installed the Sonar Producer 7 Trial and Reaper to run some tests.
• March 2008: Strangely enough, Sonar 7 and Reaper both worked perfectly fine.  Even more odd, so did Sonar 6...that is, as long as I ran Sonar 7 just before running Sonar 6.  Otherwise, it hobbled along just as much as always.
• April 2008: Then, the Sonar 7 trial expired.  And my file was labeled "corrupt" by Sonar 6.  (Most likely, some part of the S7 Trial had taken root in the S6 installation, then failed once the trial ended, "bruising" my project file.  Or something.)
• April 28, 2008: I upgraded to Sonar 7 last week, and installed it cleanly tonight (with help from Jim at Purrrfect Audio).  Voila, not only does my "corrupt" song project now work, but I didn't experience a SINGLE dropout after playing around for an hour.  Absolutely and completely AWESOME.

So far, so good!  Finally, back to recording audio...it's time to finish this song already...