williamcopper
... Did anybody need "route anywhere"?  Probably not.

You're kidding... right?     Patch Points + Aux Tracks (along with synth recording) seem to be among the most discussed new features so far this year, and it's only been what... a week? 

TerraSin
I would personally love if they did a complete overhaul of MIDI editing that destroys the competition. 

Oh hell yeah. It is so clunky and annoying now. Dreadful.

It was another great year for traditional musicians and project studios and another goose egg for EDM producers and song writers. (Yes I know there's some overlap, here, so no one cries ) No updates to MIDI editing, automation, Matrix view, or drum maps. No warping feature, Arranger or Chord track. 
 
Maybe 2016 will be our year.

I thought I would resist the upgrade from X3 Producer to Platinum.  They just came up with too many cool changes and then had the recent sale with the upgrade only costing $120, so I had to go for it.  It was worth it.

Notecrusher
It was another great year for traditional musicians and project studios and another goose egg for EDM producers and song writers. (Yes I know there's some overlap, here, so no one cries ) No updates to MIDI editing, automation, Matrix view, or drum maps. No warping feature, Arranger or Chord track. 
 
Maybe 2016 will be our year.

Yes I think sooner or later Cakewalk are going to have to bite the bullet and bring Sonar up to date for the electronica crowd. I've said this many times before but it's an absolute nightmare to control synth and plugin parameters with a controller. Just a little thing like mapping a rotary to the cutoff of a filter plugin is awkward and fraught with frustration whether you're using ACT or the Cakewalk Generic Surface. Last night I discovered that if you try to map a controller to an FX Chain control in a CPU heavy project, and you have the plugin window open (so you can see what you're doing), the mapping is so laggy that if you sweep the control from min to max it just jumps straight from min to max with nothing in between. Close the plugin window, and it's fine. Little things like this make performing with controllers absolutely horrible in Sonar and the whole thing is screaming out for attention. You should be able to assign a controller to an automation envelope in one step and draw the envelope with the controller during playback. Simple as that, yet we're screwing around with ACT and all of its horrible bugs and quirks. I watch tutorials of other DAWs and they're doing this stuff without thinking about it. 
 
And yes, arrangers and chord tracks are becoming a standard part of workflow too, especially among the electronica crowd. It's not as if Cakewalk hasn't thought about the young EDM market, because clearly much of their bundled MIDI and loop content is geared toward modern genres. Loops are not what we want though, we can get those anywhere. We need solid, robust, well designed features for recording, programming and performing with synths and plugins. 
 
Part of the trouble is that you wont get very far complaining about this stuff on the forum because I think the majority of people here are older guys who specialize in more traditional style of music - to them, Sonar's audio recording and editing capabilities are of #1 importance, not twiddling filter cutoffs. I'm in that "in between" age where I've grown up with both traditional styles of music AND modern electronica, and so my ultimate dream for Sonar would be if it was rock solid for both styles of working. Right now it's not. 
 
 

You're right, I could give a rip about electronica. I sometimes wonder if it should be called music.....
 
I'm 64

charlyg
You're right, I could give a rip about electronica. I sometimes wonder if it should be called music.....
 
I'm 64

I'm sure your grandparents thought the same way about rock 'n' roll in the 50's.

Notecrusher
No updates to MIDI editing, automation

 
There were a lot of change to the underlying MIDI engine. I'm not saying that's a precursor to eventual changes in MIDI editing, but if there are plans for changes to MIDI editing, optimizing the MIDI engine and VST3 multi-MIDI inputs and such would need to be done first. As to automation, I think the biggest automation update is Mix Recall...very helpful for remixes.
 

No warping feature

 
The best warp algorithm I've found is the one in the top-of-the-line version of Ableton Live, where you can put in a long piece of music and parse it into beats. I wonder if Ableton came up it as something proprietary or has an exclusive license, because it seems like it would be a logical and highly desirable addition to Traktor.
 
As to SONAR warpage, my favorite technique is not an obvious one but it's best for preserving fidelity. I open the Loop Construction view to set the transient markers, use the tab+split option to cut into beats in Track View, then quantize the resulting clips or apply a groove. I prefer this to AudioSnap for short clips, i.e., 2-4 measures because of the lack of artifacts.
 
AudioSnap is not a happy camper with program material, but I use it with good results on individual tracks.
 
What I'd like to see for EDM are more MIDI plug-ins. I think there are a whole lot of unexplored options that would save a lot of time and open up creative possibilities. I wonder how hard it is to write them.

sharke

charlyg
You're right, I could give a rip about electronica. I sometimes wonder if it should be called music.....
 
I'm 64

I'm sure your grandparents thought the same way about rock 'n' roll in the 50's.

 
Yup.... although there is a consistency to the beat and familiar tones(excuse me, timbre) in 50s R&R.
And the biggest factor for me, the music comes 'round again....

charlyg

sharke

charlyg
You're right, I could give a rip about electronica. I sometimes wonder if it should be called music.....
 
I'm 64

I'm sure your grandparents thought the same way about rock 'n' roll in the 50's.

 
Yup.... although there is a consistency to the beat and familiar tones(excuse me, timbre) in 50s R&R.
And the biggest factor for me, the music comes 'round again....

 
It's just the same with electronica to the younger generation though, the sound of drum machines and 303's and syncopated rhythms and a heavy bass are all "familiar tones." 
 
Personally I think if you're genuinely enthusiastic about music then it doesn't matter what form it takes, you can get something out of it. A musical person can hear music in the cacophony of a factory or heavy traffic. Pattern recognition is a huge part of it. Personally I'm not a fan of dubstep (the timbre doesn't sit well with me) but I've heard one or two tracks that were so musically and technically creative that I couldn't help enjoying them.