I downloaded and installed DP Friday night, with the plan of trying to decide this weekend whether I want to go for the reduced crossgrade price that expires this coming week. I'd already read through the Getting Started guide, and browsed a bit in the User Guide, and had been favorably impressed by the documentation, though not without having a few concerns relating to screenshots. Also, I knew ahead of time that DP 9.5 does not support ARA for the tight integration with Melodyne Studio and Vocalign Pro that I regularly use in SONAR Platinum, and that was a big concern, which is a big part of why my main intention for my evaluation was to try some form of quickie project with lead and background vocals (I use Melodyne on all of those and Vocalign, which is the upgraded version of Vocalsync, on backgrounds and lead doubles).
My first order of business, though, after installing the software, was to get it to recognize my VST plug-ins since all my instrumental tracks are softsynth-based and I have a raft of audio plug-ins, too -- SONAR reports I have 944 plug-ins, though there are a number of redundancies there (e.g. 32-bit and 64-bit versions, VST2 and VST3 versions, older versions of newer plug-ins that I keep around for compatibility with old projects, etc. -- if you're curious about why so many, beyond the redundancies, feel free to check out my Equipment and Software list at
http://rickpaulmusic.com/equipment-and-software/). Unfortunately, after I pointed DP at my 64-bit plug-ins folder, then said OK to the dialog box that said something about reconnecting the audio engine (very possibly badly paraphrased or totally inaccurate, other than that there was a dialog box and OK seemed like the obvious option), DP froze. At first, I thought it was just taking a long time to scan my plug-ins, since I do have a lot. Nope. Several hours later, it was still in that state, and, after killing DP and coming back to it, there were only a very small number of VST plug-ins available (and which ones seemed curious -- maybe from some system default directory that I wasn't using?). After repeating the exercise a few times (but not giving it as long in the hung state before killing it) Saturday morning, and finding nothing on-line to suggest what the issue might be, I tried using the Cancel button for the dialog box instead, thinking this wouldn't scan the plug-ins at all. What it did do, though was save the plug-in path, so that the next time I started DP, which was shortly after saving the path and hitting the Cancel button, it did start scanning.
Scanning took somewhere north of an hour, maybe even more than two hours, but it did eventually complete for that directory. Unfortunately, it told me it had scanned 422 plug-ins total (way short of my overall number), of which 299 had no problems and would be loaded, while 143 had serious problems and would not be loaded. Looking at which plugins failed, the main common pattern was that all 32-bit plug-ins failed (DP does not support those natively. I think it may be possible to use jBridge to work around this, but, at least for now, I can't afford the time to deal with figuring out how to do that and doing it for 143 plug-ins (or however many that ends up being since I also have a 32-bit plug-ins directory that some plug-in installations use by default when I let them install both the 64-bit versions and the 32-bit versions, and that might account for the differences in numbers). However, that wasn't the only discrepancy as some of my newer 64-bit plug-ins, such as the ujam Virtual Guitarist products and the full version of TH3 also failed.
It was also missing the Cakewalk plug-ins that SONAR's installation installed elsewhere, so I added that to the VST path for another round of scanning. Unfortunately, when it got to Rapture Pro (64-bit) the scanning hung. I let it go for at least a half hour, probably over and hour, but no go. I eventually just told it to skip Rapture Pro, and it did finish. After closing and reopening DP, I tried the Rapture Pro scan again, but it hung again, so that one appears to be a no go. (I'm not sure what gives there at this point, but I will say that Samplitude X3 Pro also did not find Rapture Pro in its scanning of plug-ins, though it didn't hang, either. It did get the 32-bit plug-ins and the ones I'd noted that were not 32-bit that DP failed to load, as well as some 32-bit DXi's I'd converted to VSTi's to with DX Shell for use with 64-bit SONAR, but DP didn't get those, either.)
It might be worth noting at this point that I have only been testing the 64-bit version of DP since most of the plug-ins I use these days are 64-bit, with only a subset of the 32-bit ones being things I actively use (the rest are there mainly for backward compatibility and/or for use in other programs that don't support 64-bit).
"Getting down to work", or at least intending to -- all the delays in the plug-in scanning didn't leave me with anywhere near as much time as I'd hoped to spend -- the next big challenge as simply trying to get a project started. Though I'd read the Getting Started Guide, one of the things I'd noted was that many of the terms DP uses are far from intuitive compared to any DAW-type programs I've used. I mean "bundles"??? Also, many of the mouse/keystroke movements don't follow standard Windows conventions. Case in point: After inserting a MIDI track (and having to manually attach it to an instrument track since DP doesn't have combined instrument tracks like SONAR and Samplitude do), the (obvious?) first thing I wanted to do was rename it from the default ("MIDI-1") to an instrument-specific name (I think it was "Piano" at that point). So I tried clicking on the field to get into it. Then I tried double-clicking. Then right-clicking to see if maybe there was a "rename" option. Nope. I finally ended up searching the PDF user manual (or maybe it was the getting started guide) and found that you had to Alt-Click. Duh! (Sarcasm intended.)
Then there is the matter of the teeny fonts, which made it hard for me to figure out what was what in the track headers. My eyesight with my glasses is reasonable -- I'm well past the point of needing bi-focals (or graduated lenses) for normal stuff and reading differences, but I work at a computer all day long, and it is rare for me to have to adjust font sizes for that purpose. In this case we're not only talking about "microscopic" (slight exaggeration) fonts, but ones that are pretty illegible, though some of the different skins for DP make the legibility slightly better than others (and I tried all the included ones). Doing a bit of searching, I found that the case for help in track headers is hopeless, but the track information itself can at least be helped somewhat by doing vertical expansion of the tracks. Perhaps I'd get used to not being able to read certain things over time? I'm pretty skeptical at the moment, though.
The combination of several of the points above (i.e. bizarre names, unintuitive UI use, and tiny fonts), where your own personal preference-type setting at the operating system level are not honored due to a developer's insistence that they know best what every user should want reminded me of a certain hardware vendor's products (whose computer systems DP exclusively ran on until a few years back) and also Flash-based websites (ugh!!! -- though, also, to be fair, many websites that were designed before the need to become mobile-friendly forced use of designs that take screen size into account).
I was running out of time yesterday for more testing, so I decided to temporarily skip the idea of recording a new song. Instead, I'd try loading a MIDI Type 1 file from an old project for which I also had good project documentation to tell me what virtual instruments and patches were used. When I imported the MIDI file, it initially seemed to disappear. Looking closer, the command was actually "Import MIDI file as sequence" (yep, another weirdity of DP's terminology, though it actually does remind me of my early MIDI days where I was using a "sequencer" -- first hardware, then software, before the audio side of things came along). I eventually was able to find it -- the trick was that the more or less blank project I was starting with had a default name of Seq-1, and I had to switch the sequence in various views to be the one I'd loaded. I won't pretend I understand this stuff at this point, and maybe I'd eventually get used to it. Maybe...
I did have some more luck messing around afterward. On the bright side, I'd heard a lot about DP's notation feature, and it at least looks really nice (I didn't get as far as trying to actually use it for the sort of things I would want to use notation for in a DAW that have frustrated me in SONAR -- I have Finale for polished notation). I also did get some initial MIDI connections made for the instruments I needed to add from my notes and connect to the MIDI tracks I'd imported. I was also intrigued to see Melodyne Studio's showing up in some dialog box in DP, though I can't for the life of me remember where that was -- maybe it has a ReWire interface or some such thing?
I had one issue with loading a KONTAKT instrument, Chris Hein Guitars' full electric guitar multi. There was a dialog box that came up to warn that it was replacing the entire multi, but it came up as a pop-under in DP -- under the KONTAKT window itself, which was floating in front of everything (kind of like 32-bit plug-ins under BitBridge do in SONAR). I couldn't see it at first, but could only see the instrument wasn't loading. I could never get it to come up in front, but I could use Windows' task bar to see what it was saying, and, luckily, it responded to a keystroke in lieu of being able to push the button with my mouse, and that loaded the patch.
While I do still want to spend a bit more time with DP before making a decision on the deal, I have to say I am currently extremely skeptical. I did go for the Samplitude X3 Pro Suite deal ($149) when I first heard about that since I figured the SpectraLayers Pro that came with it should itself be worth the price of admission if I didn't end up liking Samplitude. (I'd actually used an old low-end version of Samplitude for audio-only stuff before I got Cakewalk's Pro Audio 9 and eventually went through all SONAR versions through the final one. Its interface was strange, but it actually "sounded better" on the audio front than other products I was using at the time.) While I haven't spent much time with it to this point, it did load most of my plug-ins just fine (I even tested it with the DX Shell-wrapped version of the 32-bit DreamStation DXi2 that was one of the earliest softsynths in SONAR), and I have generally found information to let me do what I've needed to when I've run into learning curve-oriented road blocks. But those road blocks are more about differences in where to find various elements, as opposed to basic "how to use a user interface" issues like those that have added to the learning curve issues with DP.
I should note at this point that I'm still hoping a permanent SONAR option will emerge, and I will give that some time. My investigations at this point are more along the lines of educating myself as to the other options and figuring out backup plans in the event there is no change in SONAR's status after 3-6 months (or a year at tops). (See
http://rickpaulmusic.com/thoughts-on-the-demise-of-cakewalk/ I at least hope to try several of the major DAWs (DP, Samplitude, Cubase, Studio One, Reaper, and perhaps a few others like Mixcraft, Mixbus, and/or Ardour -- maybe even Pro Tools). I'll do that using evaluation/demo versions where possible, but may end up purchasing more than one if I want to keep them on my medium-term short list for longer term considerations. For now, my DP considerations are simply to decide whether it is sufficiently likely to stay on my short list to take advantage of the short-term cross-grade deal before it expires.