John T
Heh, yeah, true enough, it's not like the Quick Start box has ever caused me to wail and beat my chest. But hey, improvements are improvements, and there are all kinds of different users. I assume the intention here is to make things more novice-friendly, and I think that's a laudable goal.

Fair enough, that does seem to be the most logical conclusion. 

I think a faster way to locate projects that are currently in progress certainly makes sense, and there are other people in this thread who've mentioned it as something useful. Being able to enable/disable the start screen already exists, so I'm sure Cakewalk already has the recipe for that.
 
However, I think the point of the OP is what could be done that would make the Start screen helpful. Certainly being notified that an update is available would be good. Organizing your own templates in a more customized way than the current list would be helpful. If you have several interfaces, selecting the one you want to use for the project and the sample rate without having to dig into preferences would be cool...and I'd like to see a little meter that would indicate if you were getting MIDI when you hit your keyboard. Cakewalk used to do a tip of the day, I don't see any downside to having a short tip based on all the "gee, I didn't know that, cool" forum posts for shortcuts and such.
 
Think about the forum threads were people are upset that some preferred setup doesn't persist, until someone turns them on to the normal.cwt template. That could certainly be made more obvious, and more choices for your "normal" template would be useful too. "Normal" for songwriting is different from normal for narration. Yes, you can save different templates and call them up, but if all the things you needed to set up a project quickly were on one page, I see value for that...sort of a "preferences" page not for the technology, but for your projects.
 
@ampfixer: Yes, there are other things that are higher on my personal priority list. But if the start page became genuinely helpful and made it easier/faster to get going, I can see its value. It all depends on...well, the answers that crop up in this thread, and if enough of them make people go "Yeah, that would be really helpful."

Yeah, I'd like to see update notifications in the main program.

Anderton
Cakewalk used to do a tip of the day, I don't see any downside to having a short tip based on all the "gee, I didn't know that, cool" forum posts for shortcuts and such.

That used to be in loads of applications, didn't it? Can't remember the last time I saw it. I wonder when and why that fell out of favour as a design idea.
 
I never used to switch them off, in any application. They'd either tell you something new, or remind you of something you'd forgot.

Well it stands to reason. Sonar will end up being the store to buy stuff. CCC will be the delivery mechanism. Start page is the beginning of this. In the end you won't need an external browser to buy stuff from the cake store. This is all part of the integration plan... Hearsay of course.

Btw that last post sponsored by Rapture Pro.
 

It also occurred to me this would be a great place for "bulletins." How many times has "reset and rescan" been given as an answer and solved a problem? So the notification could say "There's a new major update in the CCC, please remember to reset and re-scan your VSTs after updating." Or "The Sizzle Bus FX Chain is in the Anderton Collection Processors folder"...stuff like that.

John T

Anderton
Cakewalk used to do a tip of the day, I don't see any downside to having a short tip based on all the "gee, I didn't know that, cool" forum posts for shortcuts and such.

That used to be in loads of applications, didn't it? Can't remember the last time I saw it. I wonder when and why that fell out of favour as a design idea.
 
I never used to switch them off, in any application. They'd either tell you something new, or remind you of something you'd forgot.

Word use to do that as well. IIRC when Microsoft stopped doing it, so did SONAR. Maybe there was some Magical Code that made it easy to do. I dunno, I just use the stuff.

Anderton
It also occurred to me this would be a great place for "bulletins." How many times has "reset and rescan" been given as an answer and solved a problem? So the notification could say "There's a new major update in the CCC, please remember to reset and re-scan your VSTs after updating." Or "The Sizzle Bus FX Chain is in the Anderton Collection Processors folder"...stuff like that.

 
Or buy Rapture Pro! Offer expires soon! 

Doktor Avalanche
Well it stands to reason. Sonar will end up being the store to buy stuff. CCC will be the delivery mechanism. Start page is the beginning of this. In the end you won't need an external browser to buy stuff from the cake store. This is all part of the integration plan... Hearsay of course.

Well, that sounds quite convenient, to me. I mean, the option to not buy stuff remains either way, so what the hey.