mmorgan

Subjacent
 
do I hold on too my £180 towards bitwig studio,

When Bitwig first announced they generated a lot of excitement and it looked like it was going to be a fantastic DAW. These days I get the impression that it is vaporware and that you will be waiting quite awhile for it...
 
Regards,
 

Bitwig is due out before xmas, I will be jumping on that bandwagon myself, I personally think it will surpass all others because of attention to detail, all the video have more than proved to me, but that is because of my chosen styles of dance/club music, and the modulation and the layout amongst many other things, but if you are a long time sonar user or live musician etc sonar now has all you need on the whole, I don't doubt that.
But what you have to look at is Bitwig is not your average daw, like ableton was not / is not, bitwig take the whole thing that much more serious than ableton ideals of making money first and foremost, why it is taking so long they want to eliminate as many bugs as they can now, and test it inside out. But without bigging up a Daw I have never used, or putting it up against sonar, I don't wish to do that, It has its appeal which will be at home with artists like me more so as suppose to the traditionalist, for me sonar is almost their for what it is foundation wise and some, and bitwig will offer me a different take on things, I will end up using both in their own place depending on what I want to achieve, their is no beating the Pro channel and I must admit and despite glitches in the past sonar audio engines it sound better than all the daws I have used, it has a lovely warm and rich sound with excellent clarity I cant fault , studio one was just way too harsh for me, it sound like its always pushing the highs too much so I finished with that.
 
No harm in having  a couple of Daws, I will always have a hate to love relation ship with sonar, that may become all love lol, but I am one to experiment so bitwig will be my replacement over ableton I can confidently say will meet expectations.
I am keen to see how sonar will carry on, so it will always have some part in my heart.

bigboi
Bigwigis ghostware. Never ggonna happen. 1,5 years since announcement. Or is it 2 years now?

Tell that to the beta tester already underway, and constant video updates on features and functions etc, lot of time to waste on a ghost . But not really wanting to go into to much detail about another Daw here, that's not polite, it is almost time, but for now its sonar time and despite my ranting's I don't take away anything from the hard work that has been put into sonar.
I bet you one free future insult that it will be here before xmas, got to have a joke instead of a provoke lol.
 
 

Subjacent
Okay I am off to test the x3 hype, its only money. 

Hype?   No.   Just a solid release with some really nice new features and a bunch of enhancements to others.  
 
Oh, and a nice selection of plugins for those that do not already own every plugin under the sun.    Like me.    
 

Anderton
I understand that if someone already has Addictive Drums, the Nomad plug-ins, and Melodyne, this might not be as compelling an upgrade from their standpoint...

I have them all and I still think this is a damn solid release and worth the price. Eeven with the VST3/UAD bug which Noel says, in my thread in this forum, the solution is at hand, I'm excited to see it in action. For now VST2 works just fine.
 
ARA integration should help my workflow with Melodyne Editor even though I'm just a hobbyist.
 
I like that color customization is finally (back) here .
 
Although I do not "comp" (not bragging, it's just my goto workflow) I plan to dig into it in depth over the coming weeks.
 
I'm a happy camper with X3 and I was a happy camper since X1 (actually I've been a happy camper since SONAR 7 which is when I really went ITB).

Subjacent
Okay I am off to test the x3 hype, its only money. 
 
Gone and done it 

OK - didn't see this before my last post above about the base version.
 
But curious now - which version did you get?

jimusic

Subjacent
Okay I am off to test the x3 hype, its only money. 
 
Gone and done it 

OK - didn't see this before my last post above about the base version.
 
But curious now - which version did you get?

X2 too X3 Producer, just finished downloading, and the way I have to look at it is still a step up, so cant be all that bad, not that I ever suggested its bad, just wonky in places lol , Still looking forward to it, now doubt I will at it until the early hours, as I have a piece of work well on the way that will benefit from melodyne and no need to bounce from daw too daw, so happy days in that department.

I'm not sure how CW operates, but the software company I work for runs into the same type of things that Noel described.   If a bug never existed in a commercial version but was still fixed in that next release, it should be excluded because it never really saw the light of day.  Or perhaps it did exist previously but no one (literally) ever reported it.  And you also have bugs that are not outright fixed per se, but rather they cease to exist due to other factors.  
 
There can be a lot of overhead involved with getting the "data entry" bits and pieces in place that have no effect on the software.  So creating a "sanitized" list from these many scenarios can be very time consuming, and is something that my company doesn't do for that reason.  So perhaps the bakers knew that the list couldn't be ready in time for release but weren't about to hold up X3 for it.   Honestly, based on the feedback I've seen here and my own two days worth of experience, I think they made the right decision.
 
So here's to whatever the next patch is and the beginning of a deeper look into the inner workings of X3.   I may not need this list as others do, but I still find it useful and very interesting.
 

I totally agree.  Plus the upgrade price is not much IMHO.  All this research, development and improvement for the cost of what - a pair of nice shoes?  a great meal for two?
 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
So you don't think a full blown new comping mode, support for 3 new standards VST3, ARA and Gobbler, Prochannel improvements, redesigned color customization, as well as huge plugin workflow enhancements do not constitute a massive upgrade? All of these features impact pretty much every user in some way and were picked because they are not niche features but solid useful tools for every DAW user. Regarding the 3'rd party stuff they are 100% value adds. They take zero development time from us, other than some minor support issues and bug fixes and obviously release management. So its not like taking those out would have magically bought other features you wanted. 
 
If not you have some pretty unrealistic assumptions about what goes into building software. Every one has different ideas about what would be ideal features for their specific workflow. We pick features that would have the most impact on our larger user base. If anything I think X3 hits home here much more than any other version since it tackles the basics - recording, editing, plugins, and customization. Most users would agree that this is very close to what the majority of people wanted. Cakewalk is a small company and we have very finite resources so we have to spend our time wisely..

jatoth
Noel, you posted the following explanation.
  "Regarding lists of fixes, its actually hard to enumerate deterministically since sometimes there are sweeping changes that change the behavior of the program and make old issues no longer applicable. Also sometimes issues are logged and fixed within a cycle that may or may not apply to prior versions."
 
This is a cop out. Your beta testers could have gone through a bug list, testing each KNOWN issue to see if it could still be reproduced. If it was no longer an issue, why not tell us?
 
"However with the next update we will be listing a large number of issues that we found in our database to be resolved. This is by no means the entire list but it should give people a better idea idea of the areas of change."
 
Why "the next update" and not THIS one? This makes no sense to me, please explain.
It kind of contradicts what you said in the paragraph above. Unless, being a "small" company, CW could not afford a more rigorous beta cycle. If that is the case, why not solicit some of the more aggressive users to do beta testing.

It will make sense soon enough. Very soon enough. We just don't list bugfix lists as part of the marketing campaign for new products. We told everyone that X3a, on the other hand, provided a lot of fixes and that an patch to the update would be available for disc customers very soon (since it's already available for download customers). We're going to highlight some of the notable fixes that made it into X3 in general very shortly that the general public might be happy to know about.
 

stevec
I'm not sure how CW operates, but the software company I work for runs into the same type of things that Noel described.   If a bug never existed in a commercial version but was still fixed in that next release, it should be excluded because it never really saw the light of day.  Or perhaps it did exist previously but no one (literally) ever reported it.  And you also have bugs that are not outright fixed per se, but rather they cease to exist due to other factors.  
 
There can be a lot of overhead involved with getting the "data entry" bits and pieces in place that have no effect on the software.  So creating a "sanitized" list from these many scenarios can be very time consuming, and is something that my company doesn't do for that reason.  So perhaps the bakers knew that the list couldn't be ready in time for release but weren't about to hold up X3 for it.   Honestly, based on the feedback I've seen here and my own two days worth of experience, I think they made the right decision.
 
So here's to whatever the next patch is and the beginning of a deeper look into the inner workings of X3.   I may not need this list as others do, but I still find it useful and very interesting.

Indeed. There's a lot of work digging into this stuff. I know first hand since I have to deal with it :)
 
People are often quick to point out all the things we should be doing without necessarily knowing what's going on behind the scenes or whether or not the suggestion actually is a better one in practice. All things considered, I think we have an extremely well implemented bug tracking system. As Noel pointed out, some bullet points incoming soon.
 

To OP:
On #3:Audio Warp issue.... 
If I'm understanding you correctly, I use a series of "Set Measure/Beat at Now... Shift-M" placements to accomplish that task. Hope that helps.
 

CakeFan
I miss CAL... I thought it was way ahead of it's time and fun to create with. 

I'm not sure I follow - why do you miss it?

Yeah, I wish they'd taken CAL a little further.
I remember back in the Soundfont drum days messing around and creating little drum roll and transition patterns, renaming the track names to the drum-name in the split-note-to-tracks just for the fun of it.
 
Documentation was spotty, so there were a lot of hits & misses while debugging.

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
SONAR is a massive program and its humanly impossible to address every enhancement request in any one cycle so we have to prioritize.

Did we mention we also want frequent product update cycles?  So it is simple really.  All we are asking for is:
 
- Fix every bug, even the ones we didn't take the time to report
- Add every function that any other DAW has and do it better than any other company
- Do it for half the price and then knock off another 50% because money is tight right now
- Don't take anything away from a work flow we used in 1998
- But don't introduce any new bugs into the ancient processes
- One major release a year, and patch releases every month.
 
That's only 6 things.  You can manage 6 things can't you?  :)
 
I don't mean to pick on anybody.  I know almost everybody here wants to see the product succeed.  And we all ask for things -- nothing wrong with that.  But the code doesn't write itself.  It is hard work and if we held every software project to the standard of perfection or off with their heads, there wouldn't be many programmers roaming the earth.
 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
+1. Its always interesting to see what gets perceived as big features by customers, because any given feature has a varying value for different people. To someone a simple change in a tool or the UI that took a couple of hours may be considered huge, because its something that impeded their own personal workflow. This time around though the changes are so fundamental to the DAW and so widespread, that I believe that any user would benefit from them - From the power user with hundreds of plugins, to the user who simply uses SONAR like a tape machine. Even if we took out all all the plugins from the package, its still a compelling upgrade.

Agreed. I am still hoping for an 'allow only one track at a time to be armed for record' option in prefs as I keep forgetting to unarm the previous track. I record on one track waaaay more often than I do two or more and I suspect many others do but hey ho, I live in eternal hope!

Regardless of that, X3 looks amazing and I am equally impressed by the quick release of two patches to help it along. I believe this could be the release that 99% of us wished for.

My wallet is is in therapy right now as it needs mental preparation for the next 24 hours.

Bibs

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]

wizard71
Agreed. I am still hoping for an 'allow only one track at a time to be armed for record' option in prefs as I keep forgetting to unarm the previous track. I record on one track waaaay more often than I do two or more and I suspect many others do but hey ho, I live in eternal hope!

So what you are saying is you will buy X4 if all it had was an exclusive arm mode and no other new features? :-P

Hell yes! For £119 I definitely would. ;-) it's way cheaper than a brain upgrade!

Ps Don't be starting any X4 rumours just yet :-D

Bibs