sharke

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. 
 
 

Well put. But as they started getting serious with audio I'd like them to finish off and perfect it first. And get on with improving and speeding up the work flow. Zoom bugs at this stage in the game should be resolved. Zoom needs improving Get those take lanes sorted as well. Scroll the screen keeping the time line in center of the screen. For the love of god improve audiosnap. Varispeed! Concentrate on get that functionality excellent (and bug fixes!!!!!!!!) before moving on. Touch is the future wheather you like it or not. Take note of the suggestions in feature requests esp the ones that other DAWs can do. Some of the lessons learned will help moving forwards... And allow Sonar to do it better than ableton ever would.

I can cope with third party solutions in the meantime to handle my sequencing needs. I'd rather do it in Sonar but we are where we are. Make piano roll more like melodyne and you are onto a winner.

Yup controllers are a bugbear!!!

I'm not interested in unique selling point functionality and mini vanity projects until Sonar has all round improved. It just delays the other meat and potatoes stuff that is way overdue. When the baseline has been raised then you can get on with that sort of stuff.

Cheers..

Better controller handling is of value to all styles of music, so that seems like a good place to start. Like AudioSnap, I've reached a detente with controllers where I can make them do what I need...but ACT is an unnecessarily mind-numbing protocol. I think a good solution would be to take the flexibility of azslow's plug-in, give it a gui that makes it friendly, compartmentalize sections so beginners don't have to mess with the complex stuff but advanced folks can really make it fly, and consider it mission accomplished.
 
As to electronica (do people really still use that term? didn't it die with the 80s?) vs. rock vs. whatever, all genres have amazing musicians and all genres have hacks. Once you've seen someone really good in a genre, it changes your opinion about that genre.
 
It's very easy with EDM to push buttons, mix the kick up high, add some staccato synth parts, and think you know what you're doing. But then there are those EDM artists who do amazingly long, evocative sets that blend different elements together so seamlessly it creates an experience no other music can provide.

I just have to add one comment about EDM etc. and then I'll shut up. No matter what style of music anyone plays, they can benefit from understanding other styles. For example DJs and EDM musicians really understand the value of removing sounds in strategic places. Applying that kind of thinking to rock music has equally dramatic results. Similarly, a lot of rock guitarists really know how to ride a riff, and bringing that concept into dance music can be really positive. To truly understand harmony, listen to Bach and for how to twist solos inside out, listen to Coltrane. Even if you never play classical music or jazz, what you learn will add depth to any music you play.

AndertonWhat 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.

Depends on what you mean by plugins...
I'd much rather have Cakewalk start moving away from Style Dials, Synths/Samplers (Does anyone actually use Strum Session 2 for serious work?) and sample packs. I'd rather the resources go into building a better DAW. The new tools they have been making like Patch Points and Drum Replacer are more along the lines of what I want to see, but I think there are also already a lot of basic things that Cake needs to focus on such as the new MIDI engine and editing.

MIDI editing is most important for me. There is much room for improvement.

To me , midi editing and score editing / printing are definetely the sections in which I'd like to see improvements

Can we have Chord Entry + Pattern Entry --> populated to a MIDI Track [something like BIAB/Jammer] ?

BobF

TerraSin
I would personally love if they did a complete overhaul of MIDI editing that destroys the competition. Everyone mentions how Cubase is the current lead in that area.
 
I'd also like to see an update to video support for audio editing in film.
 
Going to laugh when January comes and they surprise everyone with Mac support and finally become the industry standard DAW. ;)

I don't know about Cubase, but IMO, having the P5 SS/MIDI editor section ripped out of P5 and set up as an optional MIDI editor for Sonar would be great.

+1

Anderton
As to electronica (do people really still use that term? didn't it die with the 80s?) 

I still hear it bandied about. I use it as a catch-all for music which is primarily programmed and/or sequenced using synths, samplers and drum machines. "EDM" is a term that really only took off in the past few years, we never called it that. And it's funny but much of what the kids call EDM these days really sounds to me like the cheesy mainstream dance music that took off in the mid 90's. Before then the scene was largely underground and organic and the music we were dancing to at illegal warehouse & forest parties was still very acid-tinged, 303-based psychedelic trance and the beginnings of drum and bass (or "jungle" as it was called back then). Around the mid-90's you had the rise of superclubs like Cream and the Ministry of Sound in the UK and with them a whole new cheesy style of pop-tinged dance music. It also heralded the start of the superstar DJ culture - before then, I don't think we ever looked upon DJ's as celebrities. 
 
So a lot of the EDM I hear now is very much the child of that superclub/Ibiza sound. And since it's so easy to get hold of the tools to make it, you have thousands of bedroom producers churning the stuff out off a conveyor belt. As a result there's a whole lot of crap out there. To me it sounded a lot better when the people making it had to commit to hardware and things like recording tracks onto DAT, I guess that separates the wheat from the chaff lol. Not that I'm complaining about how easy it is to use DAW's and plugins now, I think it's great. It just means you have to search a lot harder to find the good stuff. 

TerraSin

AndertonWhat 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.
 

Depends on what you mean by plugins...

I mean what I said, MIDI plug-ins...MIDI FX if you prefer. They provide really useful MIDI functionality but could be taken much further.
 
As to sample packs, loops, and other content, they are not done by the developers and do not cut into dev time. Content was always intended as "icing on the cake" for the monthly releases.