Regarding complaints about the pie chart, ultimately what matters in determining whether bedroom music producers is a market worth pursuing is sales figures. Pro Tools by itself, which is hardly an EDM program, way outsells FL Studio, Ableton Live, and Reason combined. Add in the other not-really-EDM programs along with Pro Tools, and you get the picture - one which although it doesn't correlate exactly to the pie chart, is not that far off. 
 
Mind you that I love EDM and have been making that kind of music for decades. I think it's really unfortunate that Draconian local laws designed to close clubs in the 90s didn't allow dance music to flourish in the United States to the extent that it has virtually everywhere else in the world. However it's not the only kind of music I like. This is why I have both SONAR and Ableton Live, because each excels at functions that the other doesn't. Of course, it would be very convenient if one program had everything needed to make any kind of music, but so far no program has been able to achieve that ideal and I don't even know if it's possible. 
 
Put in a feature request, try to define what's needed as precisely as possible (asking for "an LFO tool" is open to a lot of interpretations - I interpreted it as being able to create LFO automation waveforms, so it would be important to specify that it has to be real time with the option to record as automation), and see what kind of a response it gets. If there are a lot of positive comments, and Cakewalk doesn't have to rip the Console apart and start from scratch based on a more synthesizer-based matrix modulation model, then it could happen.

Pro Tools almost completely dominates the commercial studio market, so if it's outselling other DAW's then that has to be a huge factor. The other DAW manufacturers know that there is little point spending their marketing budgets on trying to usurp Pro Tools from its commercial domination, so they're all fighting each other for the biggest share of the non-pro market instead. I'm guessing Cakewalk's strategy meetings aren't centered around getting commercial studios to ditch Pro Tools. They're focused on amateurs and semi-pros instead. Of course they're always going to use the fact that some professional mixer or composer uses Sonar in their marketing content, but it's hardly a parade of industry names is it. 
 
If you have sales figures for all the major DAW's Craig then how about sharing them? I wasn't aware that the likes of Image-Line, Cakewalk and Ableton shared their sales figures publicly, so I'd be interested to know where you got them from. 

And since you won't have an LFO tool tomorrow, while you're waiting...
 
This article tells how to use the Z3TA as a signal processor specifically for rhythmic effects. It does arpeggiation, arpeggiated LFOs, tempo-synched effects, works in real time, has MIDI learn, etc. etc. It even has an envelope follower. Because it's an audio plug-in, anything the mixer can do (level, panning, processing signals going to or returning from sends, etc.), it can do. 
 
Of course this is not an LFO Tool per se, and yes you do have to set up matrix modulation within the processor instead of having everything normalized (although you can always save presets), but that's why I keep inquiring about musical applications. If you want to control panning in multiple ways, in real-time, with MIDI learn, and automate levels with a ruler-flat automation line, I don't think there's a difference in the end result between using a plug-in to do the panning and controlling the panner on a console with a dedicated tool.
 
Yes, I know this isn't what y'all want in terms of having a pre-configured, plug-and-play solution, so please, don't go there. But for those of you who are willing to put in a little effort programming the effect you want, it will give you most (if not all) of the same results while you're waiting for whatever it is you do want to come along.

Craig, thank you for keeping in the spirit of this forum area. This area is intended to discuss how to use SONAR NOT feature requests. Threads here get buried pretty fast.
 
To create a feature request fill out this form http://bakery.cakewalk.com/Post/Idea
To vote and discuss feature requests go to http://bakery.cakewalk.com/Ideas/Latest
To read more about this area go to http://bakery.cakewalk.com/How-It-Works
 

sharke
Pro Tools almost completely dominates the commercial studio market, so if it's outselling other DAW's then that has to be a huge factor.

 
It's not really. The number of commercial studios is small compared to the total universe of Pro Tools users. 
 

The other DAW manufacturers know that there is little point spending their marketing budgets on trying to usurp Pro Tools from its commercial domination, so they're all fighting each other for the biggest share of the non-pro market instead. I'm guessing Cakewalk's strategy meetings aren't centered around getting commercial studios to ditch Pro Tools. They're focused on amateurs and semi-pros instead.

 
It's nowhere near that simple by any means. Pro Tools has a lot of "soft" support, e.g., the people who jumped to Logic when the price went to $199, and the ones who jumped to Studio One, Ableton, and Cubase depending on their requirements when Avid implemented the Adobe "subscribe or die" model.
 

If you have sales figures for all the major DAW's Craig then how about sharing them? 

 
I can't. It's copyrighted/proprietary/confidential information from MI SalesTrak that Gibson purchases at considerable expense. I can't even share it around Gibson. If you can find someone who subscribes, and persuade them to share the info with you, you'll find my comments about the industry, market share, dollar share, etc. are fact-based. 

Regarding the pie chart: obviously, as you have had access to the actual sales figures, I accept what you say as regards to the popularity of the various DAWs. Thanks for the information.
 
However, it was a bit naughty to use information regarding the popularity of different arbitrary music genres in the US to support your assertions the worldwide popularity of DAWs.
 
Wibbles,
BSc Statistics
 
PS
EDM? I shudder at the very term. How is it the people managed to make what has now been reclassified as EDM decades before the term existed? 

Wibbles
EDM? I shudder at the very term. How is it the people managed to make what has now been reclassified as EDM decades before the term existed? 

Back in the day it was just called "dance music." Or "electronic music." I'm genuinely baffled when I hear people talk about how EDM has only just become a "thing," i.e. commercialized and successful. I started listening to acid house on and off in the late 80's and started going to raves through the early 90's, although we never called them raves, just "parties." They were either in abandoned warehouses, outdoors in the forest or on remote beaches, or in student houses (we'd have a different DJ on each floor of a 4 story house). It wasn't commercial at all and I don't recall ever paying for a ticket to one of these events - all very hush hush, sit in the pub until someone came in with a secret location written on a piece of paper, then it would be into the car and a long dark drive which seemed endless until eventually you'd hear a distant "thump thump" and see other similar cars full of wild eyed looking ravers on the road, then you knew you were on track. Very fun times. 
 
Sometime during the mid 90's the big superclubs like Cream and Ministry Of Sound started to take off and it was all a very different sound to the stuff we'd been enjoying before. It was more polished, less gritty, more vocal and poppy. Gone were the intricate polyrhythms and 303 mayhem. That was the point at which I felt it had become commercialized. It attracted a whole new crowd of people who had previously shunned the whole rave culture. And the music sounded very cheesy to our ears. The aesthetics started to change as well - gone was the psychedelic imagery of the early rave flyers, and now they were using ornate fonts and scantily clad girls to sell events. Then you had the big headed celebrity DJ's and stories of them doing lines of coke off girl's breasts backstage etc. 
 
So when I hear people say "oh, EDM really took off in the mid 2000's" or whatever, it's usually some young Millennial who clearly has no idea what the scene was like before. And much of the big-room EDM which kids are dancing to now is completely old hat. The production techniques might have changed but it has that cheesy, poppy club sound that the mainstream clubbers were bopping to at Cream in the 90's. In fact if you went back in time and dropped a current EDM anthem into the set at Cream in 1995, nobody would have batted an eyelid. 

Wibbles
PS
EDM? I shudder at the very term. How is it the people managed to make what has now been reclassified as EDM decades before the term existed? 

I've never understood the objection, but maybe the acronym is more common in the US. It's just an easy to communicate a type of music that is mostly synthesized sounds. In my mind, I think of it as Electronic/Dance Music because not all EDM is "dancey." I assume this is common knowledge, but maybe not.
 
It seems to me that all the genres and subgenres that fall under EDM are too numerous for the average person to keep up with or even care about.
 
Pardon the off-topicness.

Wibbles
Regarding the pie chart: obviously, as you have had access to the actual sales figures, I accept what you say as regards to the popularity of the various DAWs. Thanks for the information.
 
However, it was a bit naughty to use information regarding the popularity of different arbitrary music genres in the US to support your assertions the worldwide popularity of DAWs.

 
Well, the correlation was pretty close...and in the public domain . BTW stats aren't perfect, because few companies are public, retail isn't much of a factor, and downloads can only be estimated. Furthermore, lots of people use cracks and that doesn't get measured at all. For example FL Studio is pirated massively, so it probably has a higher market share than sales would indicate...although I guess it's not really "market share" because it's not taking place in a market context.
 

EDM? I shudder at the very term. How is it the people managed to make what has now been reclassified as EDM decades before the term existed?

 
Yeah, it is a dumb name...sounds like it should be associated with something like "EDM Roof Repair" or "EDM Tire & Brake."
 
Anyway, as to how we got here, at one point someone replaced "dance music" (and prehistoric variants, like the "twist," the "mashed potatoes," the "waltz," etc.) with "disco." Then that ran its course, the hi-hat was mixed down, and so the labels tried "electronica"...but that didn't stick. Then the whole category did the Darwin thing and mutated into more specific names, like House, Trance, Psy-Trance, Goa, Electronic, Hardcore, Hard Trance, Trance Over Easy, etc. No one could remember all these names, so someone got the bright idea of referring to all of it as "electronic dance music." However people have a hard time saying anything with more than three syllables, so it was shortened to "EDM." Next year it will probably just be "DM," and then, "M." You heard it here first 
 

Hmm... I best not start arguing the toss over statistics on a forum about Sonar.