Tom Riggs


I know that if it happened to me I would be frustrated as well. Again I encourage you to contact Cake with a problem report here http://www.cakewalk.com/Support/ProblemReporter/ The more people that do the higher the problem will get in the development queue.

Already done long ago.

Take Lanes.... Yes Take them out of the program!

I agree that it's easier to maintain a program with only a single method to do "anything", but often multiple methods are important to suite situations and the variety of users...

I for one wish Lanes would simply go away and have Layers back... but as I know there are some who like Lanes, the best solution to me is to have both.... Users can then decide which works better for them....

I found layers a unique approach that did a far better job than any other program I've tried... Yes, they had a few bugs and could have used some additional improvements, but replacing them with Lanes has been a nightmare for me...

The Bakers chose to make envelope lanes additional to our earlier automation editing instead of replacing it and Lanes should have been handled the same way...

I cannot stress just how much I don't like Lanes... Even if the bugs they currently have were fixed (zoom issues and clip movement) they would still be very problematic for me by their' nature. there is no way to get large counts of Lanes on screen at any one time...

...and please. I hope people can stop telling me that I shouldn't need that many takes... We don't all have rehearsed bands performing for a simple recording. Many of us use these tools in the writing process itself and the use of many takes is very common for me when I'm doing such...

Please! Everyone post feature requests for Layers... Maybe we can get Cakewalk to feel our need!

Keni

I wonder how much it would cost to comission Cakewalk to build a custom version of Sonar?

Maybe an alteration of the install routine to allow/disallow selected features to be updated/changed?

<sigh>... I've got to do a bunch of comping today... I may try working in X1 if these songs allow me with reasonable ease...

Okay... this is getting silly. I'd like to say to any Bakers reading this and possibly considering reverting back to layers I for one found layers to be completely useless after a certain point and a pain in the arse in general. Aside from the quirks and bugs Lanes currently have I don't see how they are causing such confusion and frustration. The comments about layers being easier for dealing with a large amount of takes is completely contradictory to my experience. With every take past a certain point they continued to get smaller and smaller because you could not expand the track beyond the height of the screen which eventually made try to edit them impossible. You also couldn't see ANY of the other tracks because if you scrolled the track with the open layers disappeared. The rebuild function was ridiculous in its randomness. There was no way to make detailed notes making it so every take had to be listened to or you had to make hand written notes. For those notes you would have had to write down the specific clip numbers and couldn't just visually see what was what. The mute and solo buttons were buggy and again would become useless after too many takes. It was just a very bad system.

That is not meant to be offensive to anyone but I think the voices of those who are MUCH happier with the new system should be heard as well. Takes do need some work and I get that it's a major adjustment for some folks but this talk of eliminating them completely would totally screw guys like me who view them as a godsend. Having the option to choose one or the other is a nice idea however I see that causing code conflicts and introducing new bugs which we already have far too many of. I gotta wonder... how hard have you guys looked into how they work? There are specific new procedures needed to working with Lanes. Is it a pain to learn when you already have a workflow based on layers going? Sure but man... as someone who has spent equal time using both (as a relative newcomer) Lanes SMOKE layers as far as ease of use and organization.

Again I do not mean any offense but if I lose the functionality of Lanes because of all of this I'm gonna be a very angry Beepster. My workflow has sped up ten fold with Lanes... that is the god's honest truth. I do not want to go back to the way things were.

Cheers.

If anyone is having workflow problems with Lanes let me know. Maybe I can help provide some workarounds. I can't do anything about the bugs obviously but maybe I can help make certain things a little easier. I do TONS of takes so I mess with lanes pretty extensively.

Cheers.

There aren't any workarounds using Lanes that would help me to achieve some of the 'extreme & tight' editing I did using Layers.
And to remove the 'remove empty layers' imo was just  foolish.
As previously stated, it takes much longer trying to do the same techniques with Lanes.

There aren't any workarounds using Lanes that would help me to achieve some of the 'extreme & tight' editing I did using Layers.

How so? 

FastBikerBoy


I feel a freebie video coming on.........

Yeah... please do. I wish people could see how easy this all is. Everything works... you just gotta look at it a little differently. Lots of stuff screwed me right frack up when I started with Sonar coming from a Steinberg background but I muscled through it and now I know what to do (more or less). A lot of the methods in Sonar are CRAZY complicated compared to that from my perspective. Lanes eliminated a huge amount of confusion for me. I really would like to see folks get comfortable with them but you are far more qualified than I am to explain it all. 

I just know they work and i lurves 'em. DON'T TAKE MY LANES AWAY!!!

Hi, Keni. Yeah they definitely need fix the siz/resizing issues with them and I'll add to that there should be a "Hide Lane" feature.

Specifically...

Lanes should collapse down to the size of a track (why it's double height makes now sense at all).

The limit on how tall you can expand a lane needs to go away as well. They should be able to be expanded to at least full screen height just like tracks. This is important for editing.

We need the ability to manipulate the height of the Lanes independently of each other so I can have the lane I'm working on the height I want it to be without having to view the others at the same height. This makes it difficult to edit in correlation with other tracks which is extremely important to my workflow.

A "Hide Lane" feature needs to be implemented so I can get the takes I'm not current working on out of the way (same problem as the independent height issue). If I have a dozen takes and I can't see the rest of my project because the rest are unnecessarily in the way... that's a problem. 

Fortunatly I can drag them around into different orders and have other tricks I do to view the other tracks but those are my hugest complaint.

I'd also like to see them remove the "one solo only at a time" restriction and have a function where you can double click the take you want and it pops open in the parent track... then the rest of the lanes can be hidden and only the lane in the parent track is visible... thus making editing that take in relation to the rest of the project FAR easier.

Also I'd like to see them steal a feature from the old version of Nuendo I used to use where in the main track you could just right click the track and choose which take would come to the surface while muting and removing editing capabilities from the rest of the takes (and have a preference setting window that can change this behavior in case you want to edit all takes in the track at once).

However... layers didn't really appease any of that properly and Lanes are easier on my silly little brain. There is a possibility I'm just totally daft and I work in an abnormal way. 

;-)

carl


It's more like a 'robbed Peter to pay Paul' thing.
It's not that Lanes are totally unusable but that many find Layers were more useful for the getting the same type results in less time & with less effort. ( & frustration)

But what exactly is tripping you up/slowing you down?

brconflict


I can say, for me, when editing, mixing or otherwise viewing lanes, I nearly always find myself expanding and contracting them, getting routinely disoriented in the process. This is the pitts when AutoZoom is enabled--not friendly at all. I know the Mute/Solo buttons are easier to click, but when using layers in X1, if you've enabled layers, they remained enabled indefinitely. In contrast, in X2's lanes, if you need to contract a folder, for example, then go back into it later, invariably I have to re-expand the lanes again for a specific track. 

Layers were cleaner and easier to navigate for me. Lanes are a pain to navigate. So, for me it's MUCH slower to work with lanes vs. layers.

I think just fixing the bugs and setting up a couple of ways to make managing lanes a little easier would help tremendously. One hint is to color the lanes a darker or lighter color than the track. Also, when solo-ing a lane, I would like to see that lane be the one that is displayed in the track "picture"/waveform vs. only the first lane whether it's solo'd or muted or not.

Not sure if this will speed things up for you but you can expand/collapse the lanes of the currently in focus track by pressing Shift + T. 

I get the idea behind Take Lanes and I think when its got some quirks ironed out, it will be way beyond what others have at the moment but the inability to copy and paste clips into the lanes like you could with layers sucks. For adding spot delays on specific clips...layers ruled and having to create a new track for every little clip is a huge PITA.

Edit:  To avoid the sense of "hit and run" and leaving it at the glib "+!", here are some things I liked before with layers: - screen real estate:  using the track space with all the layers - screen real estate:  being able to see multiple tracks with layers at one time - workflow:  rebuild function  - workflow:  cross-fading clips between layers was easier - workflow:  quick toggle for layer display without tracks shifting to accommodate - and others that I can't think of off-hand

Okay... I'll give this a shot.

- screen real estate:  using the track space with all the layers

Not sure what you mean by that.

screen real estate:  being able to see multiple tracks with layers at one time

You can but you have to disable Auto Zoom. This can be done with Shift + Z to avoid having to go into the Track View menus every time.

workflow:  rebuild function

Yeah that should be reintroduced but selecting and bouncing to clips works or just holding Shift and dragging the clips into the lane you want isn't THAT much of a pain.

workflow:  cross-fading clips between layers was easier

I don't see how. It works almost exactly the same as before with manual fades as far as I can tell and the auto crossfade feature (which I never used before X2 admittedly) is just a matter of enabling it/choosing the desired X-Fade in the Track View Options Menu.

workflow:  quick toggle for layer display without tracks shifting to accommodate - and others that I can't think of off-hand

Again I think this is solved by turning off Auto Zoom (if I'm understanding the issue correctly).

Auto Zoom is kind of a pain in the Bleeples in many situations. Toggling it is something I've gotten into the habit of doing. However I find I leave it off most of the time. We didn't even have that feature in X1 so it's no big loss but it is nice to have when I want to use it.

Cheers.

The whole point that a few folks here seem to keep missing is "you do not completely remove a feature that many liked and replace it with a half baked-almost there version of the same thing.
 
If your going to replace it-do it right. It's not a matter of "someone showing us how" I know how, I don't like it as it exists today.
Simple again.
 
Yes, I vote go forward-not backwards - But IMHO they went sideways-That's all-not trying to start a rumble here. Jsut the facts.
 

Sadly, I agree that we will not likely see any improvement for a while (I hope I'm proven wrong! ;-))

Layers was a totally unique method. Everyone else uses lanes of one form or another. It was good for me... Professional? The only thing in the look that might be perceived as not so were the mute/solo buttons as they appeared crammed in a bit. Unto themselves they worked just fine. The bugs were with various tools for them such as the rebuild (which I never had much issue with).

I wish there was a way to improve my workflow, but the limitation(s) of the current Lanes feature have me re-sizing, dragging, changing screensets etc... Simply to see what I want.

The only workaround I've found is to not use Lanes and simply stay with Tracks. This too is tedious for me, but often less so than my experiences with Lanes. So I try both periodically to alleviate my frustration (with no real success at the frustration tho I do get my work done eventually)

Keni