Greetings all,
A few years back, I posted a thread venting my frustrations regarding the impediments I encountered to my composition process when making the switch to newer versions. While the PRV has received much love, there is still one component I believe needs consideration.
I write classical music, and as such, I like to write canons, fugues, double one instrument on top of the other, and borrow note values from other tracks when writing for another track. I was able to do this seamlessly in sonars 1-4, and even cakewalk 8 before that, all with the simple ctrl + click and drag of a mouse within the Piano Roll View. Now I find myself switching between screens out of the PRV (This messes up my point of reference big time), opening menus that I didn't have to mess with before, and a few more additional clicks of the mouse. While this may seem minor, it is actually tremendously annoying and impedes my workflow drastically. I was able to keep my ideas fresh in mind with the ability to do things as i was in sonars 1-4 and cakewalk 8. Now I find myself getting frustrated more often and forgetting what I wanted to do because of all these extra steps. Let me draw up an example to hopefully make myself clear as my concern is very subtle but requires some degree of attention to detail to understand:
Lets say you have two tracks open in PRV; an oboe and a flute. I have a chain of notes or canon written in my flute track that I want to copy into the oboe track, and transpose them an octave below the flute. In Sonar 4, I was able to do this seamlessly all within the PRV because if I had the oboe track selected in PRV via the right window pane where the tracks are listed, and I highlighted the chain of notes from the flute track to do a copy, Sonar 4 didn't switch tracks on me just because I select notes belonging to a different track; sonar kept me locked into the track I myself selected on the right window where the tracks are listed in PRV. This allowed me to copy over into my oboe track from my flute track's notes in all sorts of useful ways including, doubling notes, or copying a chain of notes and transposing them by moving them an octave below as an oboe, not a flute, via a simple ctrl + click-drag-release motion.
Now, you have to either highlight, copy, paste, select the track you want to paste in, paste, highlight those notes again, right click, select transpose, select the octave you want to transpose to, and click OK. You can also switch out of PRV to track view and highlight the track you want to copy to, and transpose the notes the same way (very tedious because both either require you to do extra steps or switch view which will make you lose your frame of reference and train of thought).
Because sonar 5+, and the sonar x family switch you to the track belonging to the notes you click on, you can no longer do this, and it sucks big time for me. I should not have to do any extra steps or compromise my workflow for whatever reason it is that the previous functionality was omitted in subsequent versions.
I hope there are people on these forums who understand what I'm talking about, and will hopefully help me to push Sonar back to the days of greater glory by encouraging developers to at least add a switch to turn the above functionality on for those of us who need it and off for those of us who don't. Call it a "Copy across PRV tracks" option or something. Good software should be inclusive and well differentiated to accommodate various user types. I look forward to hearing from you all.
Best,
Daniel DeCastro, composer.
P.S.- Where did the PRV Icon go?? Why do I have to navigate menus or mess with my keyboard when i simply want to use my mouse?? Please allow for there to be a PRV icon, staff icon, and scrub icon in Sonar x2; I don't want to memorize keyboard shortcuts!!
https://soundcloud.com/ddamaged1 www.decastromusic.com