Kev999

ronboy1952
...there are not enough Sonar users that read music well enough to demand that Cakewalk develope a better notation editor!...

 
It's unfortunate that this attitude prevails. As long as CW developers continue to regard traditional music notation as a specialist tool only used by classical musicians, then Sonar's Staff View will never receive the overhaul that it deserves. But really there is no good reason for any users to ignore SV for midi editing. It's a useful tool. PRV and SV complement each other. We should all be using both of them rather than one or the other.

I think the attitude that not enough Sonar users can read music well enough is a big problem. It creates an elitist attitude that has no place here, especially when the purpose of this thread is trying to garner support for better notation in Sonar. Actually I thought ni the comment and the support for it shows a complete lack of understanding of the average Sonar user or the people that develop it.

They should at least offer it as an extension if they don't want to include it as a main feature. The beta test would take forever though.  
 
I can read music to a certain point if not fluently. To a certain extent, many people don't exploit CAL and if they somehow combined that with the Notation side of things it would make a Sonar possibly a 1-stop solution.

I am the OP of this thread and I don't believe I remember a thread about this topic lasting this long or getting this many pages of comments! I hope that that in itself will be enough for Gibson or Tascam to sit up and take note that we users that want a working integrated notation feature in Sonar is DEFINITELY growing in numbers!
I notice that there have been more comments about if we had this or that working properly Sonar would be a one stop DAW all in itself. That should get the bakers thinking how close they are to having an all-in-one complete workstation package and tidying up the loose ends to give us just that!

ronboy1952
In my opinion, there are not enough Sonar users that read music well enough to demand that Cakewalk develope a better notation editor! Until the demand goes up Cakewalk will probably continue to keep notation editing and printing on the backburner!
 

I think you'll find that many musicians that read or score use daws other than Sonar.
That's a valid enough reason to fix or develop it further.

OK, I've been recalcitrant adding my 2 cents, but I'm impressed with the length of this thread! I would greatly prefer to work in standard notation when composing, but the staff view is not nearly full-featured enough. Working in an external notation program and then importing into Sonar is, for me, a terrible workflow. If the staff view had most of the capabilities of Presonus Notion, I would be very happy.
 
But I can see where there are serious programming obstacles to accomplishing something like that. The PRV is much more suitable for making the minute edits required to get things to sound just right. Doing that kind of tweaking in a notation program is very difficult, or it is for me anyway. 
 
That said, I'd love to see at least some improvements in the staff view to where it would be at least more suitable for initial note entry.

ronboy1952
In my opinion, there are not enough Sonar users that read music well enough to demand that Cakewalk develope a better notation editor! Until the demand goes up Cakewalk will probably continue to keep notation editing and printing on the backburner! This is one of my biggest complaints about Sonar! I keep Cubase 4, and Logic Pro 8 and even Finale 2008 around for midi and notation!. I even use Print Music 2011 on my laptop and a few other computers to do notation but I actually think if Sonar developed it's staff view more I'd use just Sonar!
 
Boykin

 That's because they are now Cubase users.  I wonder for Sonar to have improved staff view they would have to rebuild from scratch and the resources devoted to that are not worth it.

Most programming is modular, so whenever they are making changes and improvements, they are not rebuilding the entire program from scratch. So surely it would be a case of reinvention of the current score view by creating a new one, if the programmers find the changes causes too many other issues. After all, isn't the Score View just fonts represented values in symbols. The same information can be viewed 3 ways - PRV, List Editor and the current score view.
 
So my school of thought would be to team up with a 3rd party developer who actively designs and codes Score View.
 

There are some differences between the PRV and the staff view that as a programmer, I see. PRV allows for precise positioning of events along the timeline and for intricate control over CCs. Both of those things have historically been the bane of notation programs. In the PRV I can shift the timing of events so they work better with the library I'm using. Perhaps the attacks are a bit slow so I can shift the notes forward in time until they sound right. In staff view, this can cause the notes to be mis-drawn. This is true of dedicated notation programs as well. 
 
 

DRanck
There are some differences between the PRV and the staff view that as a programmer, I see. PRV allows for precise positioning of events along the timeline and for intricate control over CCs. Both of those things have historically been the bane of notation programs. In the PRV I can shift the timing of events so they work better with the library I'm using. Perhaps the attacks are a bit slow so I can shift the notes forward in time until they sound right. In staff view, this can cause the notes to be mis-drawn. This is true of dedicated notation programs as well. 
 
 

You can make two versions of your works. One to sound good, another to be notationally accurate (to the extent that Sonar's limited staff view will allow. Which is what this thread is hoping will be addressed someday...).

interpolated
Most programming is modular, so whenever they are making changes and improvements, they are not rebuilding the entire program from scratch. So surely it would be a case of reinvention of the current score view by creating a new one, if the programmers find the changes causes too many other issues. After all, isn't the Score View just fonts represented values in symbols. The same information can be viewed 3 ways - PRV, List Editor and the current score view.
 
So my school of thought would be to team up with a 3rd party developer who actively designs and codes Score View.
 

Not long after the current Sonar was released Noël Borthwick spoke about Cakewalk having sought expertise outside for work on notation without success. So in the programming world it's a very specialised skill set needed. I think a more reachable set of fixes and updates as posted in this thread by jsg, is what is most likely to be realistically and successfully brought about.
Noël made it very clear that Cakewalk have a deep desire to get to the notation issues in Sonar but desire and ability are 2 different things. Now that Cakewalk is backed by a stable parent perhaps many of the latest Ng standing issues will eventually get fixed. It can't have been an easy road for the employees either over many years of instability at the corporate level and still have a demanding customer base to satisfy..

I would be interested to know how many different posters have contributed to these 440 posts.