tenfoot
I get what you are saying Beepster and agree for the most part. I am just not sure that it is always that easy to streamline functionality without losing flexibility. That said, I think that the introduction of the X series (and skylight, as you mentioned) were a big improvement in this area - I remember many things being more convoluted in 8.5. I guess as new features are conceived of they are necessarily layered on top of others. I imagine that it is an ongoing balancing act for the bakers between changing functions and operations and maintaining consistency in the interface to stop us all from complaining about having to re-learn the program. Remember the fuss when X1 first came out!
We certainly all have our niggles. My biggest one is definitely external controller support - It has always been a bit light on.
Still, as an old dog, when I think back to Cubase for PC version 1 (Cakewalk was only a midi sequencer back then) on my Osborne 386 computer with an Audio Media 3 card, all of which barely worked, trying to do the simplest of tasks between very frequent crashes, I can't help but be blown away by how incredibly capable Sonar has become and how inexpensive it is given all that it can do. I think the bakers deserve to be proud of their baby:)
Cheers mate.
Yeah, I think maybe as a bit of a "new" dog myself I'm coming at it from an outsider's perspective. I don't have 20 years invested in the program or DAWs in general (I've been doing this for almost a decade now but only used my previous DAW as a glorified multitracker/microstudio to record demos of my bands... no MIDI or heavy duty mixing/editing). The tech was not useable, affordable or practical enough for me until recently but now that it is I'm all in.
I definitely agree that we don't want to somehow remove or drastically alter the existing tools, features and paradigms. Just enhance them. Even after a short time using the program (I guess coming up on four years now) that would kind of annoy me as well and I think the existing program is great (otherwise I would not use it).
More what I'm envisioning is getting into that old code and layers of feature creep that's been going on for the past few decades and making it a little more modern and cohesive. Like Skylight theory was supposed to be the grand unifier of the program but perhaps has been abandoned a little.
So no drastic changes. Just an extra menu option here, an extra link there, a couple new windows and dialogs that link things up, etc. Just take all the awesome components and get them working together (and independently) at max efficiency.
Now that Cake seems to be almost completely out of damage control mode (first the X series release, then a massive corporate restructuring, then wailing away at stability issues) they can finally get down to some of the stuff they do well. Innovation and adding a "cool" factor. Thing is though the program is already cool but a little hard to manage.
Most people are yelling for totally new features and consistent bug fixes which is definitely going on but IMO it would likely be more beneficial to everyone (and easier to implement) little tweaks to what's already there. I get blown away by the things it is SUPPOSED to do, and can KIND of do if you force it but when I actually TRY to do those things it gets a little weird and annoying.
If they just went through and made all those little things easier month to month I'd be much happier than getting some epic flash and dash release that introduce another possible set of complexities. Bug fixes are crucial though but really I ain't getting many major problems since the launch.
I guess I would just like to see a third component in their current development scheme.
1) New goodies (already being done)
2) Bug Fixes and maintenance (already being done)
3) Combing through and tweaking/improving/modernizing the "old" stuff and/or creating new features that make those older components come back to life again/streamline the average user's workflow. (sort of kind of being done but as an afterthought)
There have been quite a few posts from the Baker's indicating they've actually been ripping into a lot of that old code to make some of the newer things possible and it's actually forcing them to repair a bunch of old stuff AND leaving nice wide open holes for new development simply because of the nature of the new code. That implies to me that as their in their and solving issues that were previously unsolvable (for whatever reason) they could toss in a few extra lines in here or there to make whatever they're working on a little more useable.
I'm not a programmer though and they likely have a development schedule to adhere to but it would be nice if they added such things to that schedule.
Kind of like when I'd get a service call in the old days to just go in a paint a room at a regular client's house but while I was in there I might unstick a window, fix a leaky faucet, snake out a drain and rehang some cabinet doors... whatever needed doing as long as I was in their in my work hat. Just makes sense.
You get it. I'm just blathering because it's hot and typing is easier than actually doing something productive... which I should be.
;-)
Cheers.