The Mix Scenes are really growing on me

This post may sound like "Mr. Obvious" to most folks, but I just thought I'd provide some feedback about my use of mix scenes.  I know it has been out there quite awhile now, but it is the kind of thing that has slowly crept into my workflow, as opposed to being a instant, dramatic change.
 
I think the original motivation was to do A/B tests.  That is great, but there is so much more that it can do.  Initially I found mix scenes a little buggy and unstable, so I avoided it.  But these days, it seems to be rock solid and surprisingly fast in switching scenes.  Here are some things I have done recently:
 
I recorded a live big band show with 14 channels.  This had the 5 saxes individually mic'ed, direct lines on bass and piano, mic on guitar, kick and overhead, 2 area mics covering trumpets/trombones together, a separate solo mic for the brass players, and 2 vocal mics.  We had a total of 6 singers who had widely ranging timbre and technique, and the 26 songs covered a wide range of moods.
 
I got a "foundation mix" that sounded good for the instrumentals and saved that as my primary scene.  Then I created minor variations for single singers, duet singers and brass solos, saving each of those as scenes.  And a couple of quiet balled needed yet another mix scene.  That was so easy.  The upshot is that I have the entire show in one Sonar project (actually one project per set), and if I want to do further refinements to the mix later, I can easily get back to the mix I used on each tune.  That is a lot easier to manage than having a separate project file for each song.
 
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Now for a second example.  I have been working on a project that has a concert band playing a new composition march that uses a men's chorus.  We tracked the concert band in the field last November.  That all was easy.  Last night I had the male quartet to my house to capture the vocals.  I used the scenes a little bit for A/B, but that wasn't really needed.  Here's where the scenes will be awesome:
 
We expect this piece will be performed later this year by a different group of singers.  Coming from the Barbershop tradition, they typically learn their music by rote and repetition, not by reading music.  So the composer is requesting 4 edits:
 
#1 - The band and baritone, lead, and tenor in the left ear and the bass part in the right ear
#2 - The band and bass, lead, and tenor in the left ear and the baritone part in the right ear
etc.  I.E.  a different edit for each of the quartet to learn his own part.
 
The scenes will be perfect for this.  I can keep the same single Sonar file and create 4 new scenes per the above, yet instantly go back to my "real" mix at any time.  I know there are other workflows to get to the same result, but this is pretty cool.  I don't think this great feature gets the applause it deserves.

I like to mix scenes too I find them way more efficient.
 
cparmerlee... You can do mixdowns based off of your mix scenes too. that option is available in the Mixdown window.

I don't know if it's just me, but Mix Recall doesn't seem to work properly with 3rd-party plugins, at least with Guitar Rig and Valhalla Room, which I used in a recent project. The issue, IIRC, is that if you reload the current scene (or switch to another scene and switch back), all the settings in the plugin get initialized. This didn't happen with plugins that come with SONAR, including TH2. Do you use any 3rd-party plugins? Do the settings in them remain after switching scenes?

bluzdog
If your project contains multiple Mix Scenes, you can export all mixes simultaneously.

Wow.  That's strong.  I had no idea.
 

icontakt
I don't know if it's just me, but Mix Recall doesn't seem to work properly with 3rd-party plugins, at least with Guitar Rig and Valhalla Room, which I used in a recent project. The issue, IIRC, is that if you reload the current scene (or switch to another scene and switch back), all the settings in the plugin get initialized. This didn't happen with plugins that come with SONAR, including TH2. Do you use any 3rd-party plugins? Do the settings in them remain after switching scenes?

I've just run into this problem.  I'm playing with stereo position and width and set up two scenes, one using Channel Tools and the other using the NI Replika delay.  Replika does not remember its settings after a switch.  Channel Tools appears to do so, as does R-MIX.  I tried creating a preset for Replika (a "vst2" preset since I haven't figured out how to create a new preset in Replika) but that didn't work either, so it doesn't remember a preset either.
 
I would really like plugin windows to regain the state they were in, so open if they were open when the scene was saved.  It's a pain with just a single plugin to have to reopen its window after every scene switch.
 
Noel wrote in another thread :
 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
Regarding 1, its really replacing all existing plugins in the tracks being recalled so the old windows have to get closed. I suppose we could consider reopening the windows if they were open previously, once the mix has been recalled completely.

 
Yes please.

Paul P

icontakt
I don't know if it's just me, but Mix Recall doesn't seem to work properly with 3rd-party plugins, at least with Guitar Rig and Valhalla Room, which I used in a recent project. The issue, IIRC, is that if you reload the current scene (or switch to another scene and switch back), all the settings in the plugin get initialized. This didn't happen with plugins that come with SONAR, including TH2. Do you use any 3rd-party plugins? Do the settings in them remain after switching scenes?

I've just run into this problem.  I'm playing with stereo position and width and set up two scenes, one using Channel Tools and the other using the NI Replika delay.  Replika does not remember its settings after a switch.  Channel Tools appears to do so, as does R-MIX.  I tried creating a preset for Replika (a "vst2" preset since I haven't figured out how to create a new preset in Replika) but that didn't work either, so it doesn't remember a preset either. 

 
Thanks for posting this, Paul. I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one encountering the issue. I thought Mix Recall would be a great addition when it was announced, but sadly it doesn't work with some (not all) of 3rd-party plugins I have. Since the issue seems developer/product-dependent, I guess it's very hard to fix. 
 
Btw, Replika has a drop-down in the upper left corner of its GUI that has "Save As" (IIRC) for saving the current settings as a preset. But the next time you open the project, the preset name in the GUI adds an asterisk even though you didn't tweak any knobs on the GUI after you saved the preset. I reported this to NI and they said they would fix it.

Paul P
So I saved my settings in a preset and these were remembered after a scene switch ! 

 
Glad I could help. On the other hand, settings in Valhalla Room get initialized after switching scenes even if I save them as a user preset. I guess it's better to only use plugins supplied with SONAR if I want to use Mix Recall. 

Dan Gonzalez wrote a really interesting blog post about using Mix Recall to try out different kits in AD2.

If ValhallaRoom and Replika don't work with Mix Recall then the feature is essentially dead to me. Shame, as that's one of the few things introduced to Sonar in the last year I'd intended using.

I shouldn't be plugin specific - mix recall is like a giant macro on top of a ton of normal SONAR operations and some internal stuff. Its most likely that mix recall is exposing some order of operation bugs in the plugins themselves. I'm pretty sure that the issue isn't with Mix recall itself.
 
If someone can build a really simple project with some mix scenes that demonstrate the issue I can try and look into it or work around it. 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
If someone can build a really simple project with some mix scenes that demonstrate the issue I can try and look into it or work around it. 

In the case of Replika, it's pretty easy.  Just set up two scenes on a very simple project, one scene with Replika on a track and the other without.  Any changes done to Replika are lost when you come back after a scene switch, if the scene is saved or not before switching.  If the changes in Replika are first saved to a preset before switching, then  the setting will be 'remembered'.

stevec
I swear when I made a single change in Valhalla Plate as the only change before saving a new mix scene that change was lost, but as soon as I started making additional changes (those two plugins or otherwise) and re-saved the existing mix scenes the changes were retained.  

I found that I was getting unexpected results because I had the setting checked to automatically save when switching scenes.  That doesn't sound like your problem but I thought I should mention it in case others are tripped up by this.
 
The work flow I was using was to explicitly save the changes to scenes right after I made a tweak I wanted to keep.  And if I didn't want to keep that change, I would just cal up another scene.  But it doesn't work that way if you have that setting checked.

cparmerlee
I found that I was getting unexpected results because I had the setting checked to automatically save when switching scenes.  That doesn't sound like your problem but I thought I should mention it in case others are tripped up by this.

 
Thanks for the tip, I didn't know about this setting.  In my case it's On so I've been saving for nothing prior to switching, but the settings are lost just the same.
 

The work flow I was using was to explicitly save the changes to scenes right after I made a tweak I wanted to keep.  And if I didn't want to keep that change, I would just cal up another scene.  But it doesn't work that way if you have that setting checked.

Interesting use of mix recall as an extensive undo feature.  I'm not sure now which I prefer, but I tend towards the autosave.