riojazz
Since someone is keeping count of unique posters who support development of the staff view in SONAR, please add my name.  I would much prefer to stay within SONAR to use notation for editing and composing, rather than the back-and-forth between programs I do now.

 
Definitely.  The DAW needs to support three work flows:
 
1) where the composition is done in one of the big notation programs like Finale or Sibelius, and the material is rendered in the DAW for the best playback quality.
 
2) where the composition is done within the DAW, and needs to be sent to one of the big notation programs for professional-grade engraving needed for publication.
 
3) where both composition and notation are done all within the DAW.  This last mode will naturally be the most seamless and could be very satisfactory for many projects.

kitekrazy1
  People are loyal to a DAW to a fault.  If it's that big of an issue then use something else.  It's pretty obvious the staff view in Sonar will remain as it is. 

There it is. Finally, someone just had to say it. I've been waiting for days.
Threads about Staff View ALWAYS have someone who can't resist telling us to "use something else".
I'll never understand these posters. If you don't have any skin in this game, why butt it and tell us to go elsewhere?

Well, add my name to the list of those who would love to see this but have quit commenting on it (usually) as it has seemed that Cakewalk were not going to pursue this.  I have workarounds but put in a feature request describing exactly what I'd like to see from notation quite some time back.

Jon Bryson
Well, add my name to the list of those who would love to see this but have quit commenting on it (usually) as it has seemed that Cakewalk were not going to pursue this.  I have workarounds but put in a feature request describing exactly what I'd like to see from notation quite some time back.

I wonder if Cakewalk has any formal process for users to request a position statement?  They routinely monitor some other threads and chime in from time to time, but I don't recall any company person present on this thread.
 
Cakewalk is making a big deal about how they want us all to be members in this club, paying monthly dues, rather than simply customers that buy a release now and again.  That should be a two-way street.  The club President ought to give the club members some guidance about these matters.  I'm sure we all understand that they can't decide on a moment's notice to take on a huge development project that (probably) was never in their plans.  But I would say it is reasonable for the users to receive information that indicates what kind of priority this will have and what scope of capability should be expected in the future.
 
How does one go about getting such participation from the company?

I understand that many folks want improvements to SV. But the idea that a professional musician could use it to prepare sheets for recording simply doesn't work for me. I am such a person and it might apply to me. I have never used staff view in a DAW, and make sheets with Sibelius.

The problem is that a sensible sheet layout can be really far from the reality of the production. Meaning for instance I don't want a drummer to read 32 bars of the same groove with each fill exactly as I wrote it. In Sibelius I'd write the pattern once and then add repeat signs or a number of bars, and expect him to fill to taste unless there's a specific hit I need. With guitar parts the same; I want chords and a basic rhythm generally. Even for orchestral parts, the PRV is just much more precise timing wise. Once I get it sounding right, it'll often look horrible in the staff view. I would basically need a parallel staff view that doesn't actually play anything. While that is an option, I'd then much rather use a dedicated notation program. My DAW is for getting things to sound right. My notation program is for getting them to look right.

Just my opinion, someone wrote about SV from this viewpoint and I felt the need to reply. Did not read all 252 other posts.

Sanderxpander
a sensible sheet layout can be really far from the reality of the production. Meaning for instance I don't want a drummer to read 32 bars of the same groove with each fill exactly as I wrote it. In Sibelius I'd write the pattern once and then add repeat signs or a number of bars, and expect him to fill to taste unless there's a specific hit I need. With guitar parts the same; I want chords and a basic rhythm generally. Even for orchestral parts, the PRV is just much more precise timing wise. Once I get it sounding right, it'll often look horrible in the staff view. I would basically need a parallel staff view that doesn't actually play anything. While that is an option, I'd then much rather use a dedicated notation program. My DAW is for getting things to sound right. My notation program is for getting them to look right.

I agree and look at scoring within the DAW the same way. That's why I identified the three distinct work flows.  From your comments it sounds you are of type 1, as I am most of the time.  If the score feature worked well, I might do type 3 for something simple like lead sheets.
 

CParmerlee
1) where the composition is done in one of the big notation programs like Finale or Sibelius, and the material is rendered in the DAW for the best playback quality.
 
2) where the composition is done within the DAW, and needs to be sent to one of the big notation programs for professional-grade engraving needed for publication.
 
3) where both composition and notation are done all within the DAW.  This last mode will naturally be the most seamless and could be very satisfactory for many projects.

 
But how long would it take you to transport a full symphony orchestration from Sibelius into a Sonar project, ready to start tweaking the final rendering?  That's a pretty tedious job -- so tedious that I don't mess with it.  If I use Sonar at all in the process, I render to WAV within Finale -- doing one section at a time (high strings, low strings, brass, ww, percussion), then put those WAVs into 5 Sonar tracks.  That is far from optimal, and lately I find I get about the same results if I do all the mixing in Finale then send a stereo WAV into Ozone for final mastering.  I'd like to think that with all that information readily available in MusicXML and MIDI files, a clever programmer could automate most of that tedium.  If that happened, then suddenly Sonar becomes a $1000 or $2000 value to me (don't tell Cakewalk) instead of basically being a $60 Reaper value as it sits.  In other words, I have no doubt that I would have happier clients willing to spend more money if I could give them a better sounding result without having to put in an extra 4 hours every time I want to render something.
 
And I should add, I am not sure there are very many people in type-2 today -- composing in the DAW and then needing to create beautifully polished scores for publication.  But I would suggest that if the process were more seamless, we could see such a (God I can't believe I'm going to use this word) paradigm shift.  In other words some people find it easiest to compose while looking at notes on a page and others compose best when immersing themselves in the sounds directly.  The software should not trap you in one world or the other.

I don't compose in Sibelius, I compose in the DAW. If I need live parts and people need sheets I'll write them. I wouldn't ever want to compose in a notation program, it's not really suited for quick idea trying, it doesn't support my sizable collection of VSTs, etc.

If anything, I would be type 2 (as would most everyone I work with) except I don't usually have to produce print-ready scores, more leadsheets or specific parts for people to play.

microapp
But on a strictly cost basis you should be using Reaper, yes?

Yes, but of the low price leaders, FL Studio gets the respect from me. Logic is subsidized by billions of dollars in smartphone sales, and Reaper is from the guy who sold Winamp to AOL and became worth something like $500,000,000 as a result. If any of the Bakers had $500,000,000, or a division that sold smartphones, I think they could sell SONAR for a lot less. And probably afford to hire more developers to work on staff view...

I like to compose using notation. For me and many others it's much easier than using the PRV. For composing orchestral music the PRV is a nightmare and now I'm having to compose in Notion and then export that midI to Sonar. This is alright, but to set up all the vsts in Sonar takes a good 10-30mins. After that I have to do midi CC editing. If either Notion would add draw able midi CCs or Sonar had better notation it would save me and others a lot of time. 
 
When I'm doing more  pop rock/jazz stuff it's also a pain because arranging horns/strings/winds for backing parts is much harder than it should be. Everything else in Sonar is getting optimized and easier to use, but the SV is still causing people headaches. 
 
I understand that code maybe old and they don't want to break it, but if that's the case, please make a notation skin over the PRV, and rebuild a new SV from that. Or even better make an optional add on for notation that integrates seamlessly into Sonar, so the people that want/need notation won't be left out in the cold. 

Look, I really sympathize with those who want a fixed/updated staff view. I've expressed my opinion that it would be a Good Thing if it was at least brought up to the level of being functional for the majority of those who want to use staff view.
 
But suppose you were in charge of SONAR. After several years of attrition, you're left with a tiny (and I mean tiny) dev team. You're bought by a company, and you basically have one big chance to get it right and get back on peoples' radar after X2 kind of drifted off into the sunset prematurely.
 
You have to decide where your resources are going to go. I know what took the greatest amount of resources to develop for X3: VST3 support, ARA integration, and speed comping.
 
You could update staff view by sacrificing any one of those. Now, probably the staff view advocates in this thread would happily sacrifice one of them. Maybe pitch correction, if all you do is instrumental orchestral works. Maybe comping, if all you do is MIDI. 
 
But consider the majority of users.

• Like it or not, pitch correction is part of modern production techniques and essential for a DAW to remain competitive. V-Vocal's code was deteriorating, would never be updated, was not owned by Cakewalk, and the source of a huge number of tech support calls due to incompatibility and stability issues. But ARA does much more that just support Melodyne pitch correction. It's the engine that powers VocalSync* and the upcoming Drum Replacer. The sooner ARA could be implemented, the better.
• VST3 has become a standard. Waves is pretty much limiting itself to VST3, which is also essential for many sound libraries and cool instruments, like Steinberg's PadShop. As more companies implement the VST3 spec more fully, there will be performance increases because plug-ins will need to be active only when streaming audio. VST3 affects pretty much every SONAR user who uses plug-ins.
• Comping is one of the main advantages of using a DAW, and IMHO "speed comping" is an extremely elegant implementation that's way ahead of the competition. It's a major selling point and again, something used by a huge percentage of the user base.

If faced with eliminating one of these features to do a staff view makeover the numbers just don't add up, either in terms of needs of the user base (at least according to the results of surveys dating back years) or in terms of allocating resources. 
 
 
For "X4," people wanted a more stable core program and improvements "under the hood," many going so far as to say they considered that far more important than new features. There were also multiple requests for the feature that ended up being Mix Recall. Again, cleaning up those issues - as well as essentially rebuilding the forum, store, distribution, and installation process from the ground up - monopolized Cakewalk's bandwidth. And again, the efforts toward improving stability were tilted toward those issues affecting the greatest number of users.
 
The lack of attention to staff view has nothing to do with "contempt" for classical composers, belief that they're all stuffy/snobby academicians, or a preponderance of rock and rollers at Cakewalk (I was trained on classical guitar and the only award I've ever won was for mastering one of the many classical projects I did; Noel is a hardcore jazz player; some employees are into experimental electronic music or EDM; etc.). On the contrary, it has everything to do with mutual support of their loyal customers. That's why they got better comping, VST3, and Melodyne/ARA integration - functions that are important to a huge percentage of users, and which used up a lot, if not most, of Cakewalk's bandwidth during X3's development.
 
However, hiring additional developers has been authorized for Cakewalk. I spent several hours at NAMM snooping around for suitable candidates. They are not in place yet, and no promises can or will be made about what will or will not get fixed, or when.
 
Cakewalk wants to stay in business, so decisions are made based on what will provide the greatest amount of benefit to the greatest number of users. If Bill Jackson's transparent and straightforward comments
(which he posted early on in the thread - post #11 - so obviously someone is paying attention) aren't good enough, then hope that a lot more people buy SONAR, as that would allow for more rapid changes that can drill down to smaller segments of the user base.
 
* Note: To those who say "Well no one asked for VocalSync," last time I checked there were twice as many views for that feature on YouTube than any other of the new features. There is a great deal of interest from people who realize that the cost of SONAR Platinum is less than the cost of stand-alone vocal alignment programs. This is a feature that will likely help in accelerating SONAR's overall success.