Believe me, Keith... despite the wining or lazy non-reading of a few... nearly every one of us is also excited and loves the passion you've been pouring into "X", the new forum, and our connected universe! I remeber when it wasn't so... and you've made many artists extremely happy to be a part of the family.
 
I use to dream of what is possible today... Thank you, all! 

The irony in all of this is that me and many others on this board knew of craig from his articles on synths for various publications.
 
I'm also literally laughing out loud that cakewalk should replace synths like Z3ta with synthedit products.  I do agree it is a good idea to grab some indie developers.  Z3ta was a result of them grabbing an indie developer, but intentionally going after synthedit developers is like hiring someone with an ez bake oven to make your wedding cake.  Don't get me wrong, there have been some good creations made on synthedit, but most are throwaways.

vladasyn
Anderton, I am glad that you have such a wide experience with electronic music and synths. It does not show from your forum avatar. Also it is confusing- if you work for Cakewalk, may be you consider to have "Cakewalk" instead of "Forum Host" under your picture, this way we would know. It is great that somebody knows about electronic music, it would be even better if this person was software developer. I have a lot of love for EDM and can program sounds, but I can not make my own software. "Bakers" to me are people who make software- nothing else is matter when it comes to software features. You either know how to make them or not. Electronic music value is not only in dance. It can be anything. You can use any drums and combine any types of instruments. The value is in technology. Before Massive, not many people heard sounds used in Dubstep now days. With introduction of distortion in software synths it became possible. We want to know where technology can take us and what can be discovered and invented in the future. Checking what is new on the market is not the same as making innovations. I would like to see Cakewalk hires real talents and innovators who will move progress of computer music.

Several of the people we recently hired studied Electronic Production & Design at Berklee (they called it Music Synthesis when I was in the major). I bring up those recent additions to Cakewalk since that major tends to have tons of people innovating all different areas of electronic music. These folks are all insanely talented musicians and very smart people. Many of them have chops in a variety of areas that I would challenge others would aspire to obtain. I'm personally not a big EDM guy... I'm more into video game soundtracks to be honest and couldn't stand next to these guys without embarrassing myself on stage or in the studio. I'm okay with it though, I've found other things that challenge me. I'm a nerd.

Maybe some of the newer guys will be the next Keith's and Noel's. Maybe we're already doing exactly what you think we "should" be doing. :)

I don't necessarily disagree with your sentiment regarding seeking out talent for innovation. Tell people to apply!!

It does kinda seem like you're picking on the wrong people though. I helped revamp the forum, rebuild the website, rolls out forum hosts, create a new delivery system, etc. There were others involved as well who did some pretty brilliant work. I do not program SONAR and DSP though, so what difference does it make to you? You gotta have people with different skills to make anything happen. You're sort of suggesting we spent all this time rebuilding how we distribute the "same" product. You clearly don't know the half of it though.

We
- built entirely new versions of SONAR with a ton of new features that are powerful and well thought out and based on a TON of feedback FROM the community
- designed an entirely new way of selling our software while also not alienating our long standing customers (also based in feedback FROM the community)
- designed an entirely new way to distribute, update and support our software via Cakewalk Command Center
- rebuilt our entire website, online store, registration, sign on, delivery and authorization systems from the ground up COMPLETELY to support new these new products

Honestly, I think we're in the middle of some pretty cool stuff that will make the innovations in our DAW and instruments much easier to support. Tell people to apply. It's a great time to work for Cakewalk.

There are a lot of things that Sonar does right when it comes to electronic music production. It feels like a hardware studio emulator, more so than anything else, especially ableton which feels entirely like software.
 
There are also a lot of things it does wrong, like allowing the step sequencer and groove quantizer to break and having generally very haywire midi behavior.
 
zeta+ isn't bad or grainy or anything, it's exceptional especially for how old it is, in the pre-Massive era it was the most popular soft synth in drum&bass, a genre where they are rather picky about synths.

Keith, thank you for your reply. We all using Cakewalk software for years and tell everybody about it. We love it. So thank you for the great work. I would like to know what we missing that users of Abelton or BitWig have. But it would be fantastic to see new features that no other DAW has. To be specific, few of the interesting innovations are:
 
Cthulhu chord memorizer and player http://www.xferrecords.com/products/cthulhu
 
SquaredHeads Nora https://www.squaredheads.com/programa.php
 
RapidComposer http://rapidcomposer.com/ 
 
Catanya VST MIDI Arpeggiator Plugin http://www.7aliens.com/catanya-arpeggiator
 
I am not posting software synths. Just the tools that help make music. I need a tool that would help enter chords in to a MIDI track. I have to draw chords note by note in Staff or Piano roll, and it takes entire evening to enter 32 measures of chords. I can play them, but I can not play all of them exactly on time which is requited to triggers arpeggiators in software synths. Is Sonar could offer a tool that would just select "A minor, D minor", and so on and fill the piano roll with chords for me, I would be happiest person. There are guitar tabs in Staff mode, I believe or used to be. We need to be able to populate Piano roll with chords. Hope it will be possible one day. It would save us many nights of repetitive work.
 
 

vladasyn
I do not own Abeltom Live, or Bitwig, so I can not give specific examples of what "other" DAW offers. But I know that it offers cool things that Sonar does not have. Why not research what it is that attracts users to other DAW and make the same or better options? I recently bought Nora arpeggiator. It is a nice tool. In their manual, they had step by step for Logic and Abelton. When I contacted them and asked if it would work on Sonar- they had no idea and said- nobody uses Sonar. Sonar is good to capture live musicians playing, like guitarists, vocalists and drummers. It is not good in making music out of nothing. Taking noise and converting it in to music, such as desktop electronica, dubstep, trance, progressive and so on Sonar is no good. How would I attract new kids to buy Sonar? I would offer functionality young generation needs. Music production technique changes, and Sonar is behind.

Technically, Sonar is better for electronic music than either ableton or logic because it has an integrated step sequencer. It doesn't work as of x3e, but it did at one point and can probably be fixed. Production techniques don't really change. They are much of the same thing as they were 10, 15 years ago. Synthesis changes, I guess, as well as effects processing, but that's outside of the realm of a DAW. You need to get your own modules. I often watch production sessions in ableton and logic. I never see the other guys do anything I can't do in sonar, mainly because I use the same instruments and effects. There is exactly one thing ableton (but not logic) can do that sonar can't: group multiple synths in a rack and make macro knobs out of them. Currently you can only macro your effects in Sonar. Hopefully they listen to me and improve on that.
 
I never used this particular arp but it probably works like the others: in its plugin properties, set it to be configured as a synth, open it in the synth rack, activate its midi output. then you will see its output in your synth tracks. just send your midi to the arp and it will forward it to the synths.

I don't normally get into these kinds of debates, but this I couldn't pass by.

Anderton
 In many ways SONAR was ahead of the time with music production. Dim Pro could run four REX files simultaneously and pull out the MIDI files for jumbling long before Reason's OctoRex.

HyperSonic 2 crushed DimPro in terms of sound design and feature richness. I bought them both in 2007 with my first copy of Sonar. And today, the words "Dimension Pro" and "ahead of the time" look laughable in the same sentence.
 

The Matrix view is the only other view that resembles what Live can do.

So your example of being "ahead of the time" can be best described by a comparison to another product that's been around for years?

Every MIDI track has an arpeggiator.

 
An arpeggiator that cannot be automated or even disabled mid-song. So unless you intend to have an instrument play the same pattern the entire song, it's pretty darn useless. 
 
 
And doesn't it rub you the wrong way that all these examples of being "ahead of the time" are from version 8.5 (2009) or older? And in many important ways, Sonar is still behind. No tempo track, no ability to auxes/sends next to the tracks that feed them (they're confined to a separate pane for no good reason - this limitation is unique to Sonar). ACT is a nightmare compared to controller bindings in StudioOne.
 
Remember this mess? It's still there!
 
Freeze still doesn't work sensibly (frozen plugins become bypassed, not immutable). ProChannel seems innovative as an integrated channel strip, but it's just a bunch of VST plugins underneath, except they're crippled in that they can only appear in Sonar and only in ProChannel, forcing constant switches between the track strip and ProChannel in the inspector (which, of course, require an inefficient mouse action). The docked console does not size itself cleanly, but is simply the usual mixing view that the user manually sizes. Neither Cubase nor S1 are this sloppy.
 
And all this while the company chases its own tail with features that become deprecated one release later. Like Beatscape. Or X2's track lanes. Or the 3rd-party guitar amp du jour.
 
Even without the bugs, when it comes to the core production experience, Sonar is behind.

vladasyn
 Is Sonar could offer a tool that would just select "A minor, D minor", and so on and fill the piano roll with chords for me, I would be happiest person. There are guitar tabs in Staff mode, I believe or used to be. We need to be able to populate Piano roll with chords. Hope it will be possible one day. It would save us many nights of repetitive work.
 

Write your melody or notes in the piano roll. Select one or more notes. Then, go to Process > Run CAL. There, you will see chords. They are not all there, but most of them are. Just select the kind of chord you want. Your chord will appear in the piano roll, with the same length as your notes.
 
I have been making hiphop, d&b, house and techno for 10 years in sonar and I have this stuff all figured out, just ask me if you have any questions

yevster
An arpeggiator that cannot be automated or even disabled mid-song. So unless you intend to have an instrument play the same pattern the entire song, it's pretty darn useless. 
 

The arpeggiator is automatable. Open up the automation tab of the midi track, the parameters are in the drop down menu, just above MIDI.
 
Press CTRL+I to switch between the prochannel and the channel strip.
 
Press ALT+SHIFT+5 to access the tempo track. Or, open it from the Project View menu (not the Track View menu).

Spencer

yevster
An arpeggiator that cannot be automated or even disabled mid-song. So unless you intend to have an instrument play the same pattern the entire song, it's pretty darn useless. 
 

The arpeggiator is automatable. Open up the automation tab of the midi track, the parameters are in the drop down menu, just above MIDI.
 
Press CTRL+I to switch between the prochannel and the channel strip.

Wow, you're right! But only on a MIDI track, not a MIDI tab of an instrument track. Facepalm.