marled

cparmerlee
But I think the broader point here, to get back on track, is that SONAR (and Cakewalk) had clearly become a niche that was loved by an earlier generation and had little interest to younger people. The SONAR technology is great, but it is in a crowded field, making it impossible to survive.  And as time passed, we saw a vicious circle where the remaining users pushed the company deeper and deeper into the niche.  It was a death spiral.

I do not agree at all! In my opinion they should have strengthened the niche.

That niche was old guys with fading memories of the old studio days.  There is no business there.  That's why it failed -- TWICE (Roland and Gibson.)  During the time that Gibson had it another 5-10 very comparable DAWs came on the market fitting into that same shrinking niche.
 
The only way to make a business here is to find a way to grow the product, and you will not accomplish that selling against entrenched players like PT, Cubase, SO and Reaper, not to mention FL, DP, Logic, Mixbus and on and on.
 
Basically I think Bandlab is a positive thing, but everybody here should understand Bandlab will be appealing to the next generation.  They have to.  That's where the only real business is.  That does not have to be a bad thing, but old-timers should be prepared to open their minds to new ways of doing things that are not just like the "old SONAR".  This should happen gradually, so there is no reason for anybody to get bent out of shape about it.  And the "old SONAR" capabilities will probably mostly remain for a long time.

sharke

Skyline_UK
Back to your salient comment on how some youngsters think they're making music with loops. Let's just get this out there. They're not making music. We mustn't fall into the trap of thinking we need to defy our knowledge and wisdom and think the opposite of what we know is true for fear of being labelled 'Luddite', 'old', etc. We must feel free NOT to be persuaded that "That's how they're doing it now. It's modern and equally valid as learning an instrument was in your day. And by definition, as it's modern it must be good and therefore it's YOU that doesn't understand its validity".  Utter bollocks. Stringing together snippets ('loops') of music made by musicians on instruments is not making music. End of.  Anyway, I like to think that for every bedroom beats copy and paster there is at least one other youngster learning the joy of connecting with a musical instrument and actually expressing what's in their heart and head by making music with it.

This is a little narrow minded but not an infrequent view expressed in the Sonar community. People who rant about kids "making music with loops" are usually coming from a position of ignorance, in that they don't really know what goes into the kind of music the kids are creating and how they're using loops. The idea that they're just dragging 16 bar loops into the DAW and extending them across the timeline and saying they wrote a song is just not true. At least, for the vast majority of people making modern music which utilizes loops. 
 
In fact there is a LOT of musical creativity going on, arguably more so than someone who's been banging out 3 chord songs on a guitar their whole lives. Loops are usually only part of the story, and even when they're used they're being edited and spliced and rearranged and mangled in all kinds of creative ways in order to create something new. It's no less creative than an artist creating sculptures from junk found in a scrapyard (and some of that stuff is amazing). The idea that there is no musical talent or ability behind it is ridiculous. You have to have a keen musical ear to arrange samples into something new, just as you have to have a keen artistic eye to arrange old engine parts into a sculpture of an animal (or whatever). 
 
You don't have to perform with an instrument to compose music. Clicking notes in a piano roll is no different to writing notation down on paper - the computer is just a tool to facilitate the evolution of musical ideas. Whereas the traditional orchestral composer might well be an accomplished piano player, at the end of the day they're just using that piano as an exploratory tool to work out parts and how they go together. This is no different to someone using sample libraries and soft synths to compose in the piano roll. If you don't have a musical ear, you're not going to have to come up with anything decent. 
 
The notion that using samples is "cheating" is as outdated as the notion that banging out three chords on a guitar is "not real music" (and when rock and roll took off, the older generation held precisely this view of it). There are kids out there making electronic music without instruments who are being far more musically creative than a lot of "real" musicians, particularly those who have been knocking out the same old chords and riffs their entire lives. I'm not knocking people who are accomplished at an instrument (I'm quite accomplished on guitar - classical, jazz, folk and a lot of other styles), but I've never seen the use of samples and loops as "unmusical" or "uninventive." Perhaps that's because I've had a good crack at it myself. The level of detail in some electronic productions is immense, and there is a lot of extraordinary creativity going on with samples and loops. I always invite people who pooh-pooh it to set a day aside and try and come up with something good in these genres yourself, just by copying and pasting loops. They never do, and I suspect they'd be lost almost immediately. 

Oh God what door did I open????? My comment has been... misread.
 
First of all, Skyline_UK, not all old people are farts, and not all farts are old. There are plenty of young ones, who grow to be old ones, and plenty of old people who are simply old and not at all farts, and never were. An old fart IS a Luddite who is convinced their way is the only way.
 
I was just pointing out that I'm not old, and I'm also not a kid, just a particular age where I seem to be caught in a gap, and I am in addition, not a fart, some whiny baby who is refusing any kind of change to how they function from a dogmatic a priori belief. Hence, neither old, nor a fart. There are many young farts who think that tracking  a group live in a room is such an old person thing to do and that their looping way is the only way to create real, new, vital music. They're young farts. They'll grow up to be old farts and moan one day how music has declined.
 
Second of all, my comment about my friend's teenage son... that was not an attempt to put down people creating music with loops or samples. If I were to suggest that were the case, I'd be dismissing Stockhausen, Glenn Gould, much musique concrete, and the Beatles who used tape loops all over Tomorrow Never Knows.
 
My point was, and hopefully this will nip this insane conversation that started off a remark I might have phrased better, is that he wasn't AWARE there was another way of approaching things because the program he used made it difficult to view that way.
 
My hope is that the new NotSonar will be something that lets both parties be happy. It's all a sliding scale of increasing technology and ease of use, ease of access, without people, en masse, getting any more creative. The medium is just the tool. Most people still suck. When literacy increased in Victorian England, there was an exponential growth of writing than a century before, but the ratio of good to bad didn't change. There was just a lot more bad. Music is the same way.
 
I am a huge admirer of Frank Zappa. He released his 6 disc/12 volume 'You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore', showcasing the virtuosity of his decades of live music in the late 80's, when freeze dried drum machines ruled the airwaves. He showed what a brilliant man with a guitar with a good band can do live.
 
Then he went off to his basement and created music entirely from sampled instruments on his Synclavier (stone age Sonar), all played back by the machine but programmed in to create some of the most interesting beautiful music, which is still unique and beautiful beyond description. He showed what a brilliant man with sampled instruments from a ghuzheng to Tuvan throat singers and classical instruments,  and even some burps, can create.
 
Common component - brilliant man. He also grew up on analog (5 track that Paul Buff and Les Paul created!!!!), then moved to digital, but he knew the options and ways to achieve what he heard in his head.
 
My fear is that the new NotSonar may turn into something that doesn't give you all the options, since a lot of kids just don't know how to do it. The increasing emphasis on pleasing the consumer, by dumbing programs down to do what they already want to do, will lead to dumbed down imaginations on otherwise brilliant people because it's really difficult to do it any other way. The brilliant people are out there still. But they're losing tools, not gaining them it looks like. Sonar was one of the stand outs in a tool that worked like a digital mixer/tape machine. Who knows how many people will see it that way and decide to give making music that way a try and realize their creativity works differently that way.
 
As far as samples and loops versus playing real instruments... If I'm playing a funk song, I want a real funk guitar. I don't want it looped. Because looped is repeated exactly and your ear grows dead to it, and it has to lock in with the drums, so I don't want looped sampled drums, since it can grow stale. It's what the music requires, and I enjoy that kind of music very much, and that approach is the best to achieve the end, what I hear in my head. No quantitizing. I tried it - it kills groove, not again for that music. Sonar lets me do it this way easily.
 
I also have a project that I want to create where I want everything quantitized because I'm using sampled drum loops, specifically a disco beat, and entirely sampled instruments including loops, including vocal phrases, embracing the sterile 80's sound. It's an absurd piece with a structure of a ballet. That is the best approach to create the music that I hear in my head. I think Sonar will let me do this easily, but I've never really tried yet.
 
I wasn't lamenting the fact that my friend's teenage son wasn't playing an instrument - I was stating that it wasn't obvious to him that what he was sitting in front of is basically an amped up mixer that he saw in all those old videos of way back when, and he could use it the same way. The interface and format didn't clue him in, and he didn't know the history, so he never had the option of deciding which route he wanted to go. The software encouraged him one way, and he went that way, and the program he used was frustrating for me because it was not geared toward actually being able to play guitar, bass, and the rest of the parts in real time. He seemed to love it. He didn't seem to get that there was any other way to do it, though, writing away from the software and creating his own loops to use. Old recording was not better - it forced you to be, and it also severely limited what you could do which is WHY WE HAVE DIGITAL NOW.
 
Art is defined by the frame, and that's where the talent of a person comes in as the only important factor. I don't care for EDM, but I won't call it trash because I can appreciate the organization. I also appreciate that my 4 track Tascam mentality wouldn't help someone who is doing EDM.
 
I hope the new NotSonar is something that lets you switch between playing instruments in, and doing loop based style production. Not one or the other, but both. I am only lamenting that the software developers seem to pick a side sometimes, and people without my weird generation gap experience of 4 track and digital experience may not know there are alternate ways to express their creativity, which is really the whole point of all this after all, isn't it?
 
I never, ever said or implied her son wasn't making music by not using an instrument. I simply said it never occurred to him that there is a whole different way to make it that he might enjoy. Bandlab seems very youth oriented, and I do not know what their plans include. Hopefully, a versatile platform that gives people the options.
 
To quote Oscar Wilde:
"The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim...
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless."
 
Useless organized sound is music in a nutshell. How it's organized doesn't make it better or worse. Knowing as an artist that you have DIFFERENT WAYS to organize it, I think, is always good, and was my point. It is all just a bunch of sound waves hitting our ear drums at the end of a long journey, and everything is a tool to get there. Tools serve no purpose unless they are used by people as tools.
 
I did not intend to start this discussion to exclude anyone, but hope that new NotSonar is MORE inclusive toward different ways of creating, and hopefully I can end it by saying let's all get off our high horses and not pretend we're doing something useful, vital, or enlightening to humanity in general, but at the end of the day, totally biologically unnecessary and frivolous, totally biologically useless, and totally fun, which is why it becomes vital and useful to humanity in general. Let's not take ourselves too seriously here.  I know Mozart is the greatest composer, and I know why, and sometimes I'd still rather listen to Mississippi Fred McDowell than Mozart, who in general I appreciate more than enjoy, as opposed to Beethoven, who isn't as good as Mozart, but I like a lot more.
 
'I like it' and 'it's good' are not equivocal statements, nor are 'I dislike it' and 'it is bad'. 
 
Do we really want to turn into a bunch of essayists rather than musicians? I ran away to music from writing, despite being a writer, because music can be done real time and my jazz friends never went on about 'what an artist does' while doing nothing but talking about what an artist does. They jammed. It was great. I wrote music, ended up bandleader. It was fun (mostly). We played jazz, doo wop, blues, reggae, disco and it was all great, and silly, and great. We did, not talked, but did.
 
Artists art. Add one letter to that and you become .... well what I pointed out at the beginning of this post. They come young and old, and have closed minds. And they all stink, but the wind blow them away eventually.
 

 

Bravo Mr. ch.huey, very enjoyable reading. Applause :) 
 
My main interest in the DAW is it's MIDI features. I hope that the Preferences section get's a streamlining when it comes to the MIDI part. It would be nice if it was easier to select devices formerly associated with Cakewalk ... you would expect it to be just a matter of ticking off the right boxes to select say the VS-100 or the A-Pro Keyboard Series. It's a bit weird how it's quicker to get the A-Pro keyboard to work in Fruity Loops than in Sonar. 
It would also be nice to have easy integration of contemporary control surfaces and keyboards.

ch.huey
You can put any UI you want on it, add any features you want (or not add them), and gear it toward a specific audience, make it complex, which Sonar could be, or simple, like many drag and drop programs.
...
You can please most of the people most of the time, if not all, if you know what they want.
...
It's not that Sonar can't do many things other programs can't, ... it's that it's not set up to do so efficiently. 

 
IMHO, "pleasing most of the people most of the time" is more of a workflow issue than a 'generational' issue. All music starts with generating a 'sound event' by dragging and dropping a loop, recording a performance of a 'real' instrument or step-editing a series of MIDI notes routed to a VST. These events are then edited/mixed to an artistic end
 
The fact that someone is making music in the first place, regardless of the means, is evidence of creative drive. Nothing kills that quicker than being frustrated when trying to 'execute a creative move'. 
 
It's generally not a matter of capability. Most DAWs are incredibly feature rich and deep. However, a complete range of complex editing/mixing features is likely to be at odds with the desire for instant gratification. This is where presentation/implementation matter and a factor of the users background. Old school might be down with well documented (and marketed) methods and newer producers will expect complete freedom to 'color outside the lines'.
 
The market currently supports various DAWs which appear to target specific "styles" of music/edit preferences but the edit/mix features are fundamentally the same. As previously stated, it is more a difference in implementation than function.  
 
With the exception of full support for something like drag & drop, this appears to be the design goal for Lenses. CW might have gotten more mileage out of this with a video done by artists with cred in specific styles using lenses developed and tagged for a specific workflow. Imagine a lens preset designed by BT, EVH, Taylor Swift or Hans Zimmer. 
 
IME, the user experience is still platform dependent. Had two contrasting scenarios this week. One was setting up a guitar player to do some overdubs on his WIN laptop using PT. He's still working out issues with latency, dropouts, drivers, etc. Mostly likely some configuration issue as most here will surely recognize, but just saying. 
 
The other was to add a 2 channel USB interface to an existing 2 channel USB setup for recording 4 simultaneous channels in Ableton. Four different manufacturers and it was setup and running perfectly in less than an hour. He's on a Mac. And he's a drummer. :-)
 
Perhaps Bandlab will review the potential for a cross platform version of the program. And while SONAR has done a nice job with features like multi-core balancing, upsampling, keeping current with OS upgrades, etc., my sense is there is room for improvement in the fundamental engine, based on my experience with dropouts/glitches when getting heavy with editing takes, Melodyne, automation and ripple editing.
 
I expect a difference in marketing strategies as well.  

When Gibson closed the door, I wasn't that surprised knowing their history. I did go for the lifetime update. That said, I even asked myself how long can this last? Free updates forever? As we know nothing lasts forever. I already was a Reason user for some time and when Presonus had their very generous "SONAR users upgrade" offer for Studio One Pro 3.5, I took advantage of it. I like Reason, I like SOP 3.5, I like Sonar all for different reasons and won't say one is better but different. I'm not arguing the point. I'm glad to see Sonar has a new owner. I also realize the the free lifetime update will most likely be no more. If they come with a "reasonable" upgrade price I would be amiable to it. But if they do what Magix did with Sony Vegas Pro, then no cigar for me. I'll stick with the latest version of SPLAT. I think this will be true for other owners too if Bandlab bleeds users for the update or owners will just do the "every third" version update both which will ultimately hurt the new company. $79 upgrade to me is a reasonable price for lifetime owners and $99 for non lifetime owners.