dubdisciple
The assumption that those who don't  regulalry use the staff view cannot read or write music is pure snobby stereotyping. I have been reading music since 3rd grade and I know plenty of people with degrees in music who simply do not use it in their DAW. It's those kind of comments that have always lessened my sympathy for those complaining  about staff view.

You're right, even though that's not how I meant it, I apologize, I didn't mean to offend you.   It's probably related to the powerlessness I feel when it comes to having a notation editor in my DAW that works correctly.  

jsg
What I don't really know or understand is why this indifference to this part of the program exists and why, update after update and version after version, they make few improvements (making the staff view track pane dark was a welcome change) and add new bugs.  It makes no sense.
 

It may be that no one still at Cakewalk knows anything about the internals of the staff view editor.
 
Or that it was so badly written no one has been able to figure it out.
 
It seems evident that whatever is needed will require a lot of work.  More than the tweaks the rest of the system gets on a regular basis.
 

I'd also like to request improvements to the staff view. It's more useful than people think. I don't need the ability to print perfect notation, but it would be nice to have triplets that work and notation that you don't have to fight with. People are using it and more people would use Sonar if it had a better notation. There are composers who I'm sure would switch to Sonar if it had notation improvements, so I think even slight improvements would be beneficial for cakewalk and current customers.

 
Maybe we should organize a demonstration in the Problem Reports forum.
 
Bring your placards.
 

I use tablature more than notation due to my personal preference to play guitar more than keys and I think that I can import my tabs into sonar and do things that way if I want to see what my tabs will sound like using the midi to play synths and such. I am thinking keyboardists have had it lucky over us guitar players who for many years could not record midi and build compositions using our guitars without having to spend major money on a roland guitar synth. That we can now play in that midi composition arena using our main instrument is sooooo cool and I am hoping you guys get a better staff view or at least a way to function using another notation editor that can be rewired into sonar. 

Paul P
It may be that no one still at Cakewalk knows anything about the internals of the staff view editor.
 
Or that it was so badly written no one has been able to figure it out.
 
It seems evident that whatever is needed will require a lot of work.  More than the tweaks the rest of the system gets on a regular basis.

I suspect you might be right. If nobody's been there in 10 years, chances are everyone is afraid to touch it. I've worked on code like that, you pull on one thread and what was once a ragged sweater completely unravels. If they want fix one thing, they'll probably have to fix everything.
We had a UI guy once who didn't believe in function calls much less OO design so he wrote the entire UI in one function, it was completely unmaintainable, it took us 2 years to fix it. There were dozens of magic numbers, off by one tweaks, and floating point fudges where the math was wrong. The code worked for the most part and didn't crash but it also had some pretty idiosyncratic behavior.

Here's an idea. If Cakewalk doesn't want to fix it, maybe they should crowd source it.
On second thought, never mind. They'd never do it and the suggestion just distracts from the issue. Cakewalk really should invest in fixing the problem, we're paying them for the feature.

Bill Jackson [Cakewalk]
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.

The main reasons I bought Platinum are 1) bug fixes and 2) vocal align 3) additive drums 2. And to be honest, the new features are nice but I can do alot without them. At this point, the real improvements would be the small details fixed and increased stability rather than new workflow features. I did report issues with linked step sequencer clips many versions ago and I still get some issues with step sequencer clips after many years (after you copy paste unlink step sequencer clips enough times Sonar doesn't play them correctly anymore). Also I still get midi "dropouts", press play and Sonar forgets to start and play many VSTis, one needs to stop playback and play again.

CadErik
 Also I still get midi "dropouts", press play and Sonar forgets to start and play many VSTis, one needs to stop playback and play again.

Dropped notes usually indicates too small a "Prepare Using nnn Millisecond Buffers" in Preferences > MIDI > Playback and Recording. Try increasing the value to 500 or 750.
 
edit: corrected path to setting

Staff View is one of the most overlooked features of Sonar because people seem to think that you either use it OR you use Piano Roll View, not both. Really everybody should be using both, as the the two views each provide a different perspective. PRV is better for fine detailed editing, but SV is better for viewing the overall arrangement and seeing the bigger picture. If you have more than one screen then you can use them both together. Even as it stands, without any new improvements, SV is still very useful. I urge skeptics to try it.