michael diemer
Thank You PBOGNAR, Elffin and vintagevibe. I checked out Studio One, a lot of DAW for the money, but one review said midi editing is not its strength. DP very expensioso. Logic's for Macs. I will check out the threads you mentioned also. My preference is to stay with Sonar. If they don't improve SV, how hard is it to use Sonar and a notation system simultaneously?

You can rewire a notation editor from Sonar but you can't send the midi back so you have to drive all of the VSTis from the notation editor. I don't know if notation editors can load VSTis when running as a rewire slave.

vintagevibe
 
Staff View is dead.  No matter what Cakewalk says publicly it will never be addressed.  People need realize that.  This same thread has appeared in every release cycle since the 90's. 

 
To base what's going to happen in the next couple years based on what happened in the 90s doesn't take into account that Cakewalk has only been under new ownership for 16 months. Look at everything that's happened in that time. To assume Cakewalk is going to operate the way it did in the past is a mistake.
 
All the people who said Cakewalk wouldn't survive the acquisition have been proven wrong. No one predicted that there would be no X4 and it would be replaced with a new way of buying and owning software. No one predicted that Cakewalk would start getting more heavily into content creation, or partner with TASCAM on hardware intended to work seamlessly with SONAR. I'd be wary of making definitive statements about where SONAR's going unless you have inside knowledge, which I doubt.
 
If someone depends on staff view, for the near term there are better options than SONAR, no doubt about that. But as I said, I don't think people are asking for some mind-boggling staff view. They want something functional. That's doable; I don't think Cakewalk's motivation would be to compete with programs that already have it, but more to provide a service to the existing user base. At that point, I think all it depends on is Cakewalk believing that it's not just a vocal minority that wants this, but a priority to a high enough percentage of existing owners to justify devoting resources to it. 

But folks have been asking for just such a result for years, way before you (or Gibson) came on the scene. CW "know" the numbers already. so re-asking folks to re-state positions and re-vote on things is pure obfuscation imo. Having a working staff view and associated tools is not that much to ask, especially if programmers (read CW staff) actually have a desire to do so in the first place, and stop having people coming to the forum creating "spin" as to the reasons against.
 
So you now wonder why after yet another release, and no change, that folks are "banging the drum" yet again. It is simply not good enough for you to come here as a CW apologist, and saying we don't know the future. So it MIGHT happen...that's just so much b.s. tbh.

Seeing the Staff View feature request broken down into small individual features looks promising to me. The 2 things that came up in the threads of old are Fixing Snap and Triplets. Now hopefully these will be seen as a priority. But for cake to see other ideas, the fixing of these 2 main issues, may overlap with some of the others in a way that that can easily be implemented as part of the other fix. This may help deliver a number of fixes and enhancements in one go, making SV feeling much fresher, Customers (er members) happier, and satisfied that the trickier ones can be deferred for a while. Of course iif they blitzed the whole shabang, I'd be chuffed to bits

joden
But folks have been asking for just such a result for years, way before you (or Gibson) came on the scene. CW "know" the numbers already. so re-asking folks to re-state positions and re-vote on things is pure obfuscation imo. Having a working staff view and associated tools is not that much to ask, especially if programmers (read CW staff) actually have a desire to do so in the first place, and stop having people coming to the forum creating "spin" as to the reasons against.

 
I don't understand why people have such a hard getting my point, so I'll try once more and put it all in one post. (And by the way, not a lot of people at Cakewalk now were there in the 90s or even the 2000s.) 
 
1. In the past, staff view never ended up as a big priority among the user base as a whole. Period. Cakewalk has to prioritize. The company uses surveys and other methodology to glean what's most important to the MAJORITY of users. Look at how many people noted the improved stability of X3, and now it looks like Platinum represents a further improvement. It does no good to have a staff view, or any view, if the program has problems that impact the quality of the experience for all users.
 
2. Count up the number of unique people posting in a six-page thread about Staff View. That's partially responsible for why it's considered a vocal minority. However...
 
3. Situations and user base needs change. I already mentioned that Cakewalk signed a distribution agreement with Hal Leonard, which has a strong reach into the educational market. The educational market likes notation. If there's an influx of interest from educators, that would have a high probability of tilting the user base toward considering staff view more important. Therefore it would move up in the list of priorities.
 
I don't know why everyone is automatically discounting what was said very clearly and openly at the beginning of the thread by the person who is SONAR's product manager:
 
We frequently (annuallyish) investigate Staff View improvements, or even an overhaul. It's not "dead" nor "abandoned." It has just been "deferred" due to other priorities that impact a larger group of customers. Don't lose hope. We understand there is room for improvement and intend to tackle it eventually. Our new release model will allow us to budget time and resources more easily, so it's more realistic now than it has been in years. Thanks for being patient.
 
To assume the future is going to be like the past seems like not a safe assumption, given what's happened in the past 16 months.
 
Sylvan also sums it up well:
 
Maybe they will get around to notation later on. I hope they do for people like you. But for now, I am happy they are concentrating on the core of being a audio and MIDI recorder/editor/mixer.
 
Those core features impact ALL users. Staff view, by definition, impacts a much smaller group of people. I'm sorry, but I am not apologizing for anyone, I am explaining the reality of a situation that has to balance user needs, resources, and priorities that affect the greatest number of users.
 

It is simply not good enough for you to come here as a CW apologist, and saying we don't know the future. So it MIGHT happen...that's just so much b.s. tbh.

 
I specifically responded regarding the source of the definitive statement that "No matter what Cakewalk says publicly it will never be addressed." That is a direct contraction to what Bill Jackson posted. I would have much preferred  a statement like "I'll bet nothing will ever happen" or "I highly doubt anything will happen" rather than essentially calling Bill a liar, especially because as far as I know the poster has no inside knowledge of Cakewalk's plans whatsoever. So you are in the unusual position of believing a statement about the future of the program from someone who has no connection with the future of the program, and discounting the statements of someone who became product manager very shortly after the acquisition occurred, and is looking at this from a fresh perspective. And frankly, I think he's done an excellent job in improving the core functionality of the program on which EVERYTHING, including enhancements to staff view, depend.

Kamikaze
Seeing the Staff View feature request broken down into small individual features looks promising to me. The 2 things that came up in the threads of old are Fixing Snap and Triplets. Now hopefully these will be seen as a priority.

I agree, good plan. If specific bugs are identified, that means a much greater likelihood of fixes then just saying "Why doesn't Cakewalk fix staff view?" over and over again. 

Anderton
2. Count up the number of unique people posting in a six-page thread about Staff View. That's partially responsible for why it's considered a vocal minority.

There really has been little interest over the last few years in improving it, I mean you can count the number of people that have bothered to express an opinion to have it improved or at least fixed in the life of the X series on 25 hands, It's just the same old vocal minority.
 

I'm in the relatively non-vocal and probably somewhat larger minority of people for whom it's not ever going to be a deal breaker, but who would dearly love to see some shine on the staff view - making tuplets work in a robust and flexible way would seem to be a great place to start. I will not give up hope that under the new model at least that much will happen at some point. As Craig points out, stranger things have happened along the way!
 
I will also give an enthusiastic plus one to MuseScore, which is free, multi-platform, open-source and much deeper and more complete than most people realize. Scoring does not form a core component of my work or career, but I need to spin up arrangements at least a few times a year, for a variety of styles and instrumentations, and I have yet to run up against something I needed to do that I couldn't get done in Muse. I don't know if it does ReWire so that might be a limitation, but you never know - someone in the user/coder base might be working on it as we speak...

Not to sound too harsh but there has already been a clear statement from cakewalk regarding this. I'm observing some posters stating the complete reverse with what they said. To say that cakewalk has no intention to fix it is ridiculous right now esp after what they have said. I understand it is frustrating but I know where I'd rather get my information from. Discuss away but it does not change that statement.

Yes and intention that goes back years. It's going to happen guys, just you wait!