In an effort to help the bakers understand what to work on, I thought it might be prudent to ask what things are the most difficult to do in sonar?
 
What is your most time consuming and difficult task on most of your songs?
 
For me, it's multitrack drum editing. I have become pretty expert in audiosnap, drum replacer, track groupings, and many other techniques for tightening up multitrack drums. But it still is a very time consuming and difficult process.
 
In today's world where your smart phone can do voice recognition, it seems like there should be a better way. Actually it seems like there should be an automatic way. Even a novice can tell what the drum part is "suppose" to sound like, but attempts to have audiosnap or other tools automatically process an entire part frequently result in a part that is completely out of whack.
 
This means you have to do a lot of manual editing, moving markers, and doing it beat by beat. Seems like there should be some sort of artificial intelligence or "drum recognition" that could take 12+ drum tracks and auto-correct them. 
 
gabo

Agree. This is long overdue some improvement.

Moving around take lanes, especially moving take lanes from one track to another. They proliferate so fast that you run out of vertical screen space quickly and have to move groups of takes in jumps, i.e. drag, sroll, drag, scroll...

Selection/display/commands. 
 
- Selecting what I want selected and nothing more.  Please don't ask me what should be done
 
- Display and commands really belong together as display is a subset.  Finding the right menu choice or key(s) for what I want to do.  This is more of a slow-down for moderate and occasional tasks than things that get done multiple times a day.  IMO, there are two things that would help this in a really big way. 
 
The first is to make existing menus and key(s) consistent.  Don't exclude some track items from the top level Track menu while including them only in the arrange Track menu.  There should either be one Track menu, or both should include all Track menu items.  If 'D' toggles the Multidock between minimize and restore, make 'B' work the same way for the Browser.  These are examples, not a small all-inclusive list.
 
Specific to keys, explode the items available for keybinding to the max.  This would allow users to bind keys to actions in a way that makes the most sense for their own individual workflow (and memory).  THEN remove arbitrary limitations on the number of buttons available in the Control Bar Custom module.  While you're at it, allow multiple Custom Modules so users can group custom buttons so that they match stages of workflow on an individual user basis.  Might as well call these custom toolbars and make the full list of actions available to keybinding available for buttons as well

What's the hardest thing you do in sonar?

Coming up with good ideas that the masses will enjoy.
 
Ok, seriously... slip editing vocal tracks. I wish I could say chop up clips and remove all clips below -40db. Then I could solo the vocal track and extend a clip that got chopped off and just apply fades (in and out) where needed.
 
Maybe there is a way to do that but I could not be arsed to find it.

Slip editing all tracks. (I think there's a pattern emerging...?)
 
It's made all the harder by strange bugs.
 
Recently I tried Autocrossfade for the first time (didn't know it existed!)
After a time of intense editing, the crossfade regions started to turn into clips,
all by themselves! So that when I moved a clip away again, the crossover region stayed put.
 
But even when auto crossfade is working fine, for some reason the fade regions 
stay in the clips when you move them apart. Not always what I want.
So once again, manual work to correct an automatic feature that fails.
 
Perhaps I could say the hardest for me are the bugs I run into whenever
I try out something new. And they are not exotic things by any means.
Yesterday I had to delete all the blank bars between the beginning and where
the song actually starts, but I needed to keep the marker flag positions relative to the song.
Cannot be done. Huh?!? Am I the first person ever to do something as basic as this?
 
Sometimes I shake my head in dismay and wonder whether I am the only
person really using Sonar.

jpetersen
 
Sometimes I shake my head in dismay and wonder whether I am the only
person really using Sonar.

So all of these posts in this entire forum are just you talking to yourself?

jpetersen
Yesterday I had to delete all the blank bars between the beginning and where
the song actually starts, but I needed to keep the marker flag positions relative to the song.
Cannot be done. Huh?!? Am I the first person ever to do something as basic as this?
 
Sometimes I shake my head in dismay and wonder whether I am the only
person really using Sonar.

You can do that, I do it all the time editing spoken word stuff.
 
You need to select the time range, and then use "delete special" on the edit menu. In the dialog box that comes up, tick all the options. You only need to do that once for each session, and it will retain the option choices after that.

Oh, you probably don't want to tick "move by whole measures".

jpetersen
 Am I the first person ever to do something as basic as this?
 ...
Sometimes I shake my head in dismay and wonder whether I am the only
person really using Sonar.

Well, how about posting the steps here, and seeing if these "bugs" are reproducible?  That's what we try to encourage here.  Personally, if I were running into these issues all the time I would want to know if these were reproducible bugs, or IF IT WAS JUST ME (IE. USER-ERROR).