You make some good points James. When I began looking for alternatives to Sonar I discovered how easy the competition made it to configure a control surface. I'm using it far more now than I ever did with Sonar. I tried Mixcraft because, as you say, I never used a fraction of Sonars features and wanted something simpler. Unfortunately 50% of their bundled content is 32 bit and I won't move back in time.
I've now moved on to Reaper. Their library of instructional videos is great and really gets you up to speed quickly. Had Sonar produced a tutorial collection of that calibre I'm sure they would have attracted many more users. The more I use it, the more I like it. Had the collapse of Sonar not occurred I wouldn't know how good things could be.

sharke
Reaper has a similar user unfriendliness in its mess of menus, but saves itself by virtue of the fact that it's only $60 (or free depending on how you look at it) and that it's incredibly customizable and you can trim away a lot of the scary stuff.

I think ease of use is really important these days and software design trends are headed along those lines. Kids are growing up with beautifully designed apps that are intuitive and efficient and they have certain expectations about how things should look and work. At one time I hated all this and thought "give me the geekiness and the complexity, I don't want any of this dumbed down crap" but I'm changing my mind about that now. I've come to realize that it's so much better to work in a clutter free environment without a million unused features, buttons and menu options screaming for your attention. I've gone all feng shui!

It's funny but I've heard loads of people on here express that "don't dumb things down, I like the complexity" attitude, but when you get into how most Sonar users work, they barely use a fraction of its features or power. My projects are often hardcore in terms of track count and complexity and yet I probably only use about 50% of Sonar's features, and from reading discussions on Facebook groups about how people use the program it seems that a large proportion of users make very light demands on Sonar, often never getting higher than 20-30 audio tracks with a few effects on each. Makes you wonder if they wouldn't have been better off with something far less complicated, I know I feel that way myself.

Lol, I actually originally wrote Samplitude and Reaper, but then deleted Reaper because I haven't really spent very much time with it, so I'm not really sure if there is a way to change any of that, but yeah I got the UI itself looking decent enough thanks to other peoples themes, but the menus and also the routing is a bit of a mess for me being used to the sonar way of things, that and no ARA which is an immediate option killer for me now that I've had it all this time. If azslow3 successfully pulls off his file conversion program I may have another look at Reaper then, because it would be daft not to all things considered.
 
As for project complexity, I doubt that I even get close to using 50% of what Platinum and it's predecessors can do, but I always went for the top spec as I figured that it was better to have the tools and not use them than to find myself needing them, but not having them and in truth once you'd bought in the first time the upgrade path made it a no brainer to stay with the all bells and whistles version each time.

ampfixer
You make some good points James. When I began looking for alternatives to Sonar I discovered how easy the competition made it to configure a control surface. I'm using it far more now than I ever did with Sonar. I tried Mixcraft because, as you say, I never used a fraction of Sonars features and wanted something simpler. Unfortunately 50% of their bundled content is 32 bit and I won't move back in time.
I've now moved on to Reaper. Their library of instructional videos is great and really gets you up to speed quickly. Had Sonar produced a tutorial collection of that calibre I'm sure they would have attracted many more users. The more I use it, the more I like it. Had the collapse of Sonar not occurred I wouldn't know how good things could be.

Yeah I'm finding that with Bitwig as well. Reading through the manual and playing with the program there are so many "wow, that's very good design" moments. Like the fact that tracks are just tracks and you can put audio or MIDI on them, doesn't matter, and you can put both on the same track together. If you want to bounce a MIDI clip to audio, just right click on it and "bounce in place," the clip immediately turns into an audio clip. And it's so easy to do things like multiband processing - there's no need to split up the signal onto different aux tracks for processing, you can split the bands within one FX chain and process them as separate chains before mixing them all back together at the end. This is all the result of developers recognizing that music production techniques are changing, and making them easier for our benefit. 
 
I think overall, music software design is moving away from the studio paradigm and becoming more aware of the fact that it's software which has the potential to be infinitely easier and more convenient than its hardware equivalent. Whereas when you look at the older DAW's like Sonar and Pro Tools, they're still very much designed  for people who are used to studio workflows. Of course they're a lot easier and more convenient to use than real studios, but the potential is there for them to be so much easier. 
 
I recall many times when, in response to a newbie expressing frustration that something basic in Sonar was so hard, people replied with "you have to realize that you have the equivalent of a professional studio on your computer - would you expect to be able to walk into a studio for the first time and record a guitar track without reading the manual?" I've made the same comment myself. Thing is though, newer software design is making that possible and there is no need for the kind of complexity you find in a pro studio. 
 
Honestly if Sonar gets bought out then my biggest hope is that they take the program in that direction and strip out some of the stuff that barely 1% of users even use. That's gotta make the program easier to develop and maintain in the long term (fewer features to test and debug) and it would probably make it more stable and less buggy too. 

paulo

sharke
Reaper has a similar user unfriendliness in its mess of menus, but saves itself by virtue of the fact that it's only $60 (or free depending on how you look at it) and that it's incredibly customizable and you can trim away a lot of the scary stuff.

I think ease of use is really important these days and software design trends are headed along those lines. Kids are growing up with beautifully designed apps that are intuitive and efficient and they have certain expectations about how things should look and work. At one time I hated all this and thought "give me the geekiness and the complexity, I don't want any of this dumbed down crap" but I'm changing my mind about that now. I've come to realize that it's so much better to work in a clutter free environment without a million unused features, buttons and menu options screaming for your attention. I've gone all feng shui!

It's funny but I've heard loads of people on here express that "don't dumb things down, I like the complexity" attitude, but when you get into how most Sonar users work, they barely use a fraction of its features or power. My projects are often hardcore in terms of track count and complexity and yet I probably only use about 50% of Sonar's features, and from reading discussions on Facebook groups about how people use the program it seems that a large proportion of users make very light demands on Sonar, often never getting higher than 20-30 audio tracks with a few effects on each. Makes you wonder if they wouldn't have been better off with something far less complicated, I know I feel that way myself.

Lol, I actually originally wrote Samplitude and Reaper, but then deleted Reaper because I haven't really spent very much time with it, so I'm not really sure if there is a way to change any of that, but yeah I got the UI itself looking decent enough thanks to other peoples themes, but the menus and also the routing is a bit of a mess for me being used to the sonar way of things, that and no ARA which is an immediate option killer for me now that I've had it all this time. If azslow3 successfully pulls off his file conversion program I may have another look at Reaper then, because it would be daft not to all things considered.
 
As for project complexity, I doubt that I even get close to using 50% of what Platinum and it's predecessors can do, but I always went for the top spec as I figured that it was better to have the tools and not use them than to find myself needing them, but not having them and in truth once you'd bought in the first time the upgrade path made it a no brainer to stay with the all bells and whistles version each time.

ARA integration is imminent in Reaper so you'll be able to cross off that objection quite soon. It's worth looking at some of the themes as well, many of them strip away the complexity for you. 

sharke
 
 
ARA integration is imminent in Reaper so you'll be able to cross off that objection quite soon. It's worth looking at some of the themes as well, many of them strip away the complexity for you. 

Yeah I've seen that, but I guess they will go with ARA2 so it will depend for me on whether there are any issues there with older versions of melodyne and even then they will still have some work to do on the routing side to get me close to wanting to use it.
 
I'm not blind to Sonar's little quirks and issues, but looking at the current state of the alternatives I also don't see any that offer me any compelling reasons to change.

"I think ease of use is really important these days and software design trends are headed along those lines. Kids are growing up with beautifully designed apps that are intuitive and efficient and they have certain expectations about how things should look and work. At one time I hated all this and thought "give me the geekiness and the complexity, I don't want any of this dumbed down crap" but I'm changing my mind about that now. I've come to realize that it's so much better to work in a clutter free environment without a million unused features, buttons and menu options screaming for your attention. I've gone all feng shui!"
 
Reminds me of my old guitar player who wanted to get into home recording again. I tried to get him to get Music Creator or SONAR, but he went with a BOSS digital recorder instead, because it "has a 'master' button".

"ease of use" is a dangerous term, as it has different meanings to different skill-sets, for example the teenagers who think it means "write and mix my song for me" - it implies that there's little or no learning involved, which for someone familiar with daws will find in studio one, it's very intuitive, but that teenager will still have the same lack of knowledge...

in fact, at work we have a big red button that's only function is to say "that was easy" when you press it
 

From reading audio production Reddits in which teenagers and young adults take part, I can tell you that they're not looking for a "write songs and mix them for me button," in fact they're becoming familiar with very advanced synthesis and production techniques quite early in their production careers. 
 
In general, technology takes over some of our brain activity and frees it for more important or creative things. Look at a programmer looking to draw a line on the screen between two points. He could look up the algorithm which determines the pattern of vertical and horizontal steps required to join two points, and then look up the algorithm which anti-aliases those steps to make them look smooth, or he could just load a graphics library and unleash a simple command which takes two points as arguments and does it for him. This frees him up to think about the wider functionality of the program he's writing (which we can presume isn't "drawing lines"). 
 
You have to ask yourself this: if physical recording studios had never existed, and audio production first came into practice today with the computer technology we have now, how different would DAW's look? Do you think they would look anything like Sonar or Pro Tools? So much of modern DAW design is a throwback to the traditional studio setup and would probably have been implemented differently if they had been designed from scratch today with no preconceptions of how a DAW should work. 
 
 

i'm not picking on teenagers per se, btw, i have 2 lovely ones, but half the devs i know would use that library and then browse reddit for the afternoon...