Feature request - Project sections
Hi,
I have an idea for improving Sonar. I believe this would another powerful way to differentiate Sonar significantly from the other DAWs out there. Conceptually it is pretty simple - I want to be better able to manage working on an entire album's worth of songs in one Sonar project. This can be done already to some extent, but there are a number of features that become more cumbersome when working with longer projects that have multiple songs or sections. Automation. Plugins. Freezing. Tempo. Meter. Key.
What I want is to have the ability to add a new kind of "marker" to a project on the timeline - one that specifies the beginning of a new Section (or song). Each Section would enable plugins, automation, freezing, tempo, meter, key to be set/used completely independently of settings for other sections.
This would enable users to freeze the contents of a track independently for each section of the project. Or apply different plugins on a track to different sections of the project. Or work with track automation without needing to worry about continuity from one section to the next. All of this would make it MUCH, MUCH easier to manage longer projects - whether multiple songs for an album, multiple sections of a composition, or just a live recording that contains an entire show.
In addition, a new "global track" plugin bay would be added. This would enable users to quickly process content in an entire track through a set of plugins in real time, apply plugins to a specific section, and move them back and forth. In a way, you could think of the "global" plugin tray as the plugin tray that does most of the work when mixing the whole album, whereas the section specific plugin tray would be used to shape the tones in different sections so they are more consistent before going into the global track plugin tray.
The global bypass feature could be expanded on to enable automatic bypass for Section specific plugins that aren't in the current section, with a few seconds of silence between sections to enable a smooth transition from bypassing one set of plugins to enabling the other in a way that enables correct application of automatic delay compensation.
For instance, in this way, the user could easily choose between the processes that they want to apply to the snare drum for all sections, but still apply specific processing to the snare on individual sections as needed. Functionally this could be performed by using the current track plugin bay for global changes and clip specific bay for "section" specific processing, but this new architecture is more flexible, visible, and extensible. It would enable Freeze in just one section of the song, which can't be done today. In addition, this feature set could be expanded by enabling the user to "drive down" plugins from the "global" track plugin bay into a single track section or into selected/all track sections, and enabling users to easily copy plugins from one track section plugin bay to the plugin bay for that track in a different section.
What do you all think? Want to jump on board and make this popular enough that Cakewalk puts it into development?
Peace,
Tunes