I still don't like Take Lanes...

I'm one of those who never liked Take Lanes in X2, and have been staying away from the feature for long, but today I decided to give it another try, in X3c.
 
Apart from my long-time wondering why the muted MIDI clips have to show up in the track when the lanes are collapsed and why the copied clip doesn't land on the selected lane when pasted, I'm wondering what these behaviors the feature performed in front of me today mean.
 


The screenshot above shows nine MIDI takes I recorded (without using loop) and the numbers indicate the order they were recorded. Why did Sonar have to add the fourth lane (T4) to record Clip #5 when T1 and T2 were available? Same applies to Clip #8. There's no need to create seven lanes to accomodate these clips. Only three would do.
 
Next, I decided to bouce the clips. So I applied the "Bouce to Clip" command to the three groups individually (1-3, 4-6, and 7-9). And the result was this:
 

 
The first merged clip appears on T1, while the second and third merged clips appear on T5. What made them decide to go into these lanes? I have no idea. Also, I tried undo and applying the Bounce to Clip command several times and the resulted clip positions were almost always different, like this:
 

 

Next, I created another project and this time I disabled the "Create New Lanes on Overlap" option in Preferences because I actually want to record all takes in the part on a sigle track/lane. The online help's explanation on this option is "If you have the Expand/collapse Take Lanes button on a track enabled, and you record one clip so that it overlaps another clip, the clips appear in different take lanes when this option is enabled."
 
So I recorded three takes with the Expand/Collapse Take Lanes button enabled, and the screenshot below shows three takes recorded in a single lane. Good.
 

 
Then, if I click the Expand/Collapse Take Lanes button to collapse the lanes and click it again to expand the lanes, surprisingly, I see three lanes there, like this:
 

 
So, what is the point of disabling this "Create New Lanes on Overlap" option?
Also, in the above pic, can you see that the order of clip numbers and lane numbers are different? Why????
 
 
Anyway, what I'd really like to know is if there's a way to record all takes (including overlapped clips) in just one lane WITHOUT enabling the Expand/Collapse Take Lanes button. Can X3 do this?
 
When I record MIDI, I want to use lanes as a place to keep alternative ideas (that's why I don't want muted clips in additional lanes to appear in the main track when the lanes are collapsed).
 
I really don't understand these behaviors. I really don't understand Take Lanes. Am I missing something?
 
Thanks
 

Blades
Why is take 4 in the same lane with take 3 in your first image? 

 
I also want to know it. Only the programmer knows, I guess.
 

Blades
And out of curiosity, why would you want all of your multiple takes to be in one lane, as you indicated with:

So I recorded three takes with the Expand/Collapse Take Lanes button enabled, and the screenshot below shows three takes recorded in a single lane. Good

 
Because they belong to the same part, and also because I often delete part of the clips and then record different ideas over them when I'm in the songwriting stage. As you know, Sonar doesn't have the record mode that automatically merges the recorded take into the existing clip, so that users have to bounce the clips each time if they want them merged. It's ideal to have both options, like some of the other daws.
 

Blades
In that case, why use take lanes at all - just put the record mode to sound on sound and leave it all collapsed.  Right?

 
That's exactly what I've been doing since X2, and I always thought all takes I recorded were in a single lane. But I realized I was wrong when I clicked the Expand/Collapse Take Lane button today (that's why I did these experimenets today). If you collapse the lanes and record multiple takes in the same section, X2/X3 assigns the clips to separate lanes (in the background).
 
It's difficult to explain, but I use many linked MIDI clips when I'm in the songwriting stage and today I noticed one linked MIDI clip (because it had the dotted clip outline) that didn't seem to have any shared copy in the project. To find out where the copy or copies are, I right-clicked the clip and selected "Select All Siblings," but I couldn't locate any shared copy in the project. Then, it struck me that the shared copy might be hidden somewhere, and.....I found it in one of the lanes. I don't want this to happen again. It was confusing.

Standing back, feel quite passionate about how this works from the X2 days so I'll keep my mouth shut ;) Take lanes were a great half baked idea that should have been fixed in X2B.

Also, in the above pic, can you see that the order of clip numbers and lane numbers are different?

 
Does it maybe have to do with the length of the clip that the clips re-order? I'm not trying to say it makes sense. It's a difference I noticed and I was thinking about how they have written code to make a composite track out of clips. I'm wondering if as part of their work to discover clips that were recorded last as top priority for display in the main track and then clips that exceed the length of the last recorded clip doesn't cause some strange ordering of the clips when you expand the clips from a single lane.

gswitz
Regarding the first image, I think takes 3+4 and 6+7 are in the same lanes because the second recording follows the first in time and does not overlap the first. I understand questioning the behavior, but I think this is the reason it doesn't trigger a new lane to be created.

 
And perhaps the reason it doesn't use T1 to hold recording 4 is because T3 is the active lane at that point in time.

The screen shots in the OP's post don't look like X3c Pro to me.

Never heard of "base edition", is there are link somewhere on exactly what's in it?
What about guitar, keyboard and vocal editions? ;).
Anyway I digress, ignore me.

I am one of those throwbacks who still preferred Layers over Lanes even with it's bugs... Lanes are still very buggy, but I haven't managed to come up with good enuf specifics to report them...
 
Many times having two Take Lanes named Take one and if I delete one it also deletes the other??? Lanes getting shuffled out of order for unknown reasons... The list goes on...
 
And lets be a little realistic here... Layers were removed and Lanes were imlemented in their place as a believed improvment... For many of us they are not...
 
Meanwhile as I don't expect Cakewalk to agree with my view, I'm doing my best to live with a very uncomfortable time with my editing... All the new attempts at guessing choices (Smart Grid and Comping Mode come to mind) might be good for some people, but not all and for many of us get in the way... Luckily we can chose to not use them as has usually been the approach of The Bakers, but not so with Lanes...
 
Layers were a brilliant inovation which is sadly in the past...
 
Don't get me wrong... I like many of the new ideas and always look forward to trying new things... I've watched the video on speed comping and see how helpful it can be in some situations... Good... One day I may need that...
 
Right now I need and easy way to turn comping off on the smart tool... the smart tool actually being one of the innovations that's been working for me until now... I understand the premise of the speed comping, but much of it is still very young and in need of more depth development to be  comfortably useful for me...
 
The new color coding is a good step towards retunring and improving some of the usefulness of color controi as we had in 8.5.3.... But for me?
 
I need a way to have Lanes a noticeably different, yet related color to the track as it's still visually confusing as to what is track vs lane as well as the track's display of clips while working in lanes needs to be noticeably different as well as it's very confusing to the eye whther you're looking at a ghost or the real thing and as to how many things are being selected.... Yes, the left side is indented, but that doesn't help when I'm looking at the clips area doing actual work...
 
Not to derail the thread from the OP's matters.... I apologize if I did, but I see all of the matters presented as of the many bugs still apparent in Lanes without nitpicking the details...
 
Oh, did I forget to mention! The huge number of ZOOM issues introduced to accomodate Lanes??? Right now between those decisions and a new bug introduced with C's debugging progress has made editing very frustrating with much time wasted moving the mouse all over the screen to accomplish a zoom and never ge too pleased with the result regardless...
 
Zoom needs some serious re-thinking and Lanes is a big part of the problem... Zoom was much more straight forward in 8.5.3!
 
Keni
 

I am similarly flummoxed by the treatment of MIDI in comping mode. For audio recording, I am starting to appreciate it. I do all my own woodwinds live and also use my Rhodes for a lot of tracks with the hardware effects. I can use the 'takes' to try a bunch of variations through, for example, a 16 bar phrase, and then cut them up and mix and match the variations pretty easily. 
 
In MIDI with softsynths, however, it seems to get all mixed up. Stuff gets chopped back and forth and is out of order. I wish that it worked exactly like the Audio version, but I can't seem to get the same fluidity of setting the break points. Seems to have something to do with the 'discreteness' of MIDI events. Too bad, because I would prefer to do the creative front end stuff in MIDI what with the choices of softsynths now available. I still end up committing to a 'hardware' keyboard sound up front and recording it in Audio.
 

Damn good idea Brian!

I also agree automation lanes are better now than they ever were.

I have not tried to comp with midi trks yet. Will have to.give it a shot.

I love the lanes for audio coming.

Please forgive me for jumping in here; I'm not an old hand, but I think there's a basic misunderstanding of how take lanes work and how comping and bouncing work within take lanes.
 
I think the key to understanding take lanes is to put what you know about layers out of your mind. Very little, if any, of that workflow applies any more. They may look similar, but the behavior is quite different.
 
If I may, I'd like to suggest grabbing the Groove3 "Sonar X3 Explained" videos (still on sale for $15 until midnight). Videos 26 and 27 cover take lanes quite well. I came to X3 directly from X1, so I had never seen take lanes before and I was pretty confused. Those videos cleared things up for me.
 
 
 

Alex, it is money well spent.

Thank you all for your feedback! It's interesting to see how little many know about these behaviors in Take Lanes. Since the feature is still half-baked (at least for me), I'll just use the main track (without enabling the Expand/Collapse button) and bounce clips every time after I recorded additional takes. I didn't mind about Sonar not being able to automatically merge new takes into the existing clip, but now I'm really starting to want the feature, so I'll send in a FR. Also, I'll keep using other tracks (not lanes) as a place to stock ideas.
 
As for the track layer feature in X1, I never really looked at it in detail because at that time I was very busy learning various other new features in X1 (because I upgraded from v2.2) and also learning how to use anther daw (Studio One) I bought then (because X1b was so unstable...). So now, I've just launched X1 and tried track layers, but they also aren't what I'd like to use. Because, as the screeshots below indicate, when the layers are collapsed, the muted clip and layer are both still displayed.
 

 

 
If you also use Studio One or have used it before, you probably know what I'm talking about here. I'm sure some bakers are reading this thread (or will read it on Monday), and since some of them also use S1, I hope they'll understand my points and improve Take Lanes again in X4 (I've already submitted requests for improvement about the muted clips still showing up in the main track, the lane height limitation, etc.).

CakeAlexS
Never heard of "base edition", is there are link somewhere on exactly what's in it?
What about guitar, keyboard and vocal editions? ;).
Anyway I digress, ignore me.

 
Well, I can't ignore because I'm an English learner (so if you get no reaction from me after posting a joke, don't worry, it's not because you're not funny -- it's just that I don't understand the joke ) and want to know the correct way to describe things.
 
It's off topic but "base version" is correct and "base edition" is wrong because "base" isn't a name of an edition like "Producer" or "Studio"? In that case I'll update my signature block.

I often wonder if just asking "What version of Sonar are you using?" is enough because the response can be both "I'm using X2" and "I'm using Producer." What about when the question is "What edition of X3 are you using?" Can I say "I'm using the base edition"?
 
Anyway, if you just mistakenly read "base" as "bass," just ignore me.