Yes, my first post-C64 pc. :)
It was a pc that I built with A LOT of help from a friend. Actually I just assembled it.
Actually I dont think I had Cakewalk until I graduated to the 486 DX4.  I used a sequencer that was bundled with the Pro Audio Studio card.  Memories...

vmw
There is an argument most of us have seen pop up from time to time as to whether a staff view should be in a DAW. For once let us conduct this simple request without all the pros and cons and upvote Sonar so they can see it makes a good sales point and makes a number of users very happy. Give cake a little push to devote some serious coding to produce a decent usable staff editor.
 
Regardless of what you think of Protools I urge you to go to their sight and see the Lynda.com demo of Protools 11 Score Editor, which is already a version behing the current release. The layout and time saving processes in many ways gives the same flexibility and logical behaviour as the Sonar piano roll view.
Protools competes in the same marketing sector as Sonar (right down to a monthly sub) and sad to say Protools is winning the race, which is further embedding it as the the pro engineer's tool of choice. 

I along, I am sure, with others that don't have a need for some features in the Sonar DAW; but nonetheless will support a fellow Sonar user. Don't divide or fragment our efforts, instead we should be building a killer feature (if just to stick it to Protools smugness).

As I said at the start let us not use this issue as an excuse  to push some other agenda - 1 progression at a time so as to NOT overburden the code engineer's meetings. :-)
 
 
 
 

Okay . . . another staff view extravaganza thread, I just can't not participate, in the distant hope Cakewalk will see that many here want it to be more than it currently is.
 
From the original first post . . . yes, what we have right now is basically a staff view player, but we staff users want it to be a better staff view editor. No, not a full and fancy notation type editor interface . . . but an improved Cakewalk  staff view that is more functional to make composing easier, for those of us who are wired the staff way. C'mon Cakewalk, throw us a morsel, anything, make triplets work properly, how about bringing back those nice note length buttons, or some macros to save editing one note at a time, anything.
 
How about a targeted Staff View survey/poll ? . . . to settle it for all time, to find out what percentage of  Cakewalkers actually want staff view improvements in the development dollars. If we win, we win, if we lose . . . we go away quietly (and never waste any more of anyone's time on Staff View promotion threads)

I use the staff view all the time and it works fine for midi editing. I use Finale for any serious sheet music, lead sheets, etc. I don't' see how Sonar could ever compete with Finale without stretching themselves too thin on the DAW features. I'd rather them concentrate on recording not notation as their primary focus.

noynekker
 
..........
 
From the original first post . . . yes, what we have right now is basically a staff view player, but we staff users want it to be a better staff view editor. No, not a full and fancy notation type editor interface . . . but an improved Cakewalk  staff view that is more functional to make composing easier, for those of us who are wired the staff way. C'mon Cakewalk, throw us a morsel, anything, make triplets work properly, how about bringing back those nice note length buttons, or some macros to save editing one note at a time, anything.
 
 

 
This is exactly what I would like also. IMHO an improvement in is the staff view is more music orientated  than the theme maker. YMMV
 

noynekker
 
How about a targeted Staff View survey/poll ? . . . to settle it for all time, to find out what percentage of  Cakewalkers actually want staff view improvements in the development dollars. If we win, we win, if we lose . . . we go away quietly (and never waste any more of anyone's time on Staff View promotion threads)

This sounds like a good idea.

noynekker
C'mon Cakewalk, throw us a morsel, anything, make triplets work properly, how about bringing back those nice note length buttons, or some macros to save editing one note at a time, anything.
 
How about a targeted Staff View survey/poll ? . . . to settle it for all time, to find out what percentage of  Cakewalkers actually want staff view improvements in the development dollars. If we win, we win, if we lose . . . we go away quietly (and never waste any more of anyone's time on Staff View promotion threads)

So the first paragraph in the quote is almost exactly what I wrote on this topic over a year ago.  The response after that was a few fixes here and there for problems I'd never experienced.  I use the staff view constantly and have for 10+ years now.  So then the argument became "you see! we're listening and fixing staff view bugs!" ... except that they weren't the bugs most of us staff view users had issues with (at least, I'd never seen any forum posts about them).  My guess is they were the low hanging fruit just to have "staff view" as a line item in the release notes.
 
As far as the surveys, I keep hearing about them but have yet to be involved in one.  I do trust that they exist but I'd like to see the data.  So these threads pop up every 6 months or so, we all get worked up, and nothing changes.  And as Anderton said, it's because there are too few of us.  Perhaps most left for Cubase or other solutions.  I've tried to like Cubase, I really have... I just can't.  "Too formal" is a good way to describe it, as someone said earlier.  And I think that's what frustrates me the most about this, is that Sonar's staff view is unique in its workflow, and that makes it feel like it's ALMOST THERE in terms of being really great.  But time takes its toll, and features have been wittled away (note buttons on header come to mind) and new issues introduced, like snap being messed up starting a few versions ago.
 
As far as 3rd party integration, I worry that it would become too similar to other score editors out there, and for that reason I'd rather them improve what they have.  As a programmer, though, I realize that the people who wrote Sonar's staff view are probably long gone, and the code is easily 15 years old at this point... probably 20.  Low user count + old code + specialized knowledge required = not worth it from a business standpoint.  I've made my peace with that.
 
And just in case the dead horse is still recognizable:
I don't want perfect printing or every musical marking under the sun. That's what Finale is for.  I simply want the long-standing issues fixed and maybe a small new feature every 6 months or so.  That would be enough to warrant my monthly subscription.  If we have to go the 3rd party route, I hope they choose a solution that mimics the current staff view's behavior.

bigfrog
Back in the 90s I used to do a lot of mouse-click composition with the staff view.  The tools available in Cakewalk for working with the staff view, albeit simple, were much better and easier to use back then. I'm a visual person and it was much easier to use my knowledge of music theory while composing. Meanwhile piano view does nothing for me.
 
Cakewalk doesn't need to provide the abilities to print orchestral scores or anything, but having a basic staff view/editor should be part of the basic package.
 
Last week I plunked down the $200 to upgrade to Premium, but I seriously considered switching DAWs, and one of the reasons was the clunky staff view.
 
Anyways, Cakewalk won this round but just because I get frustrated learning a new DAW and it was $200 vs. $700.

I wrestled with this same dilemma when the lifetime offer was put forward.  After a number of years with Sonar waiting for upgrades to MIDI I decided I really wanted a good Staff/Piano roll MIDI editor.  While it is only my opinion, I was finding Sonar to be lacking.   The answer seemed to be sitting between the lines in one of Craig Anderton's posts where he indicated that Cubase has a pretty a good Midi editing system.  I used the money I would have spent on the Sonar lifetime upgrade towards the purchase of Cubase 8.5.  Now I have both Sonar (sans upgrades) and Cubase.  It appears Craig was right (as usual!).  I have found that Cubase was not hard to learn and after six months experience with Cubase I am finding that the MIDI editing suits my needs. 
 
The good news for Sonar is that they are leading the way with many new features that today's musicians find useful.  Its just that Staff editing wasn't one of those features. 
 
Cheers,
Richard

jfcomposer
As a programmer, though, I realize that the people who wrote Sonar's staff view are probably long gone, and the code is easily 15 years old at this point... probably 20. 

None of the bakers know how it works anymore. That to fix things with out breaking something is too big a risk, and they may find themselves unwrapping an onion. So developing a more intuitive workflow, and expanding flexibility really means going back to scratch on it. And that's too big a commitment for them un-fortunately.
 
I've paid for full membership, that the last penny from me (Unless I see the Pro Channel Gate in a sale). I am overall positive about Cakewalk and think they have done an amazing job post Roland, but this has tainted my feelings, that I can never say I'm completely happy, as I feel let down here. 
 
 

For what it's worth (and it may not be much), I'm also in the "don't want/need" category. I'm probably in a strange motivation subset, however. As a saxophonist, I learned to improvise several years before I really learned to read music. So I do find staff view to be an anti-intuitive way to write music on computer for soft synths and MIDI. While the formal aspects of the nomenclature do easily transmit some aspects of rhythm and pitch, the controllers and many of the nuances do not translate with quite the aplomb. If you will (and perhaps oddly), the "audio" computer by itself comes closer to the way I first made music; the "visual" computer is kind of irritating .  
 
I submit as well, that for many of us, the writing/editing of sheet music represents a brain hemisphere change as we are then concerned with how the visual representation looks, as opposed to how the audio sounds (and there is a disruption of the compositional "flow" that is implied by the same process as well.)  Hence, when it is necessary to give a graphic account of what is written, in order to facilitate the entire stream of production, I switch over to Finale and generally do not look back (sheet music production is almost always the last step of the game.) This "partitioning" of the processes works pretty well and I do not resent the necessity to change software to fully realize this.

jfcomposer
 
As far as the surveys, I keep hearing about them but have yet to be involved in one.  

I've done 2 of them in the last 3 years.
they go to your purchasing email address.
 
matter of fact the last one they had they gave away a free 25.00 voucher to the cakewalk store.
I redeemed mine for a session drummer sound pack.
 
the survey's are long and very detailed, involved. asking many questions about many features.
thus my opinion, staff view users are a small group.

chuckebaby
thus my opinion, staff view users are a small group.

The surveys bear this out, and that's the disconnect: A small group of users wants something that takes a large amount of resources. IMO Cakewalk could likely justify it if a small group wants something that requires few resources, or a large group wants something that requires a large amount of resources.
 
Since it appears unlikely the group of users interested in staff will get larger (look at all the successful programs that include no staff view at all), then my guess is the only logical way this can happen with SONAR is if there's some option that requires resources commensurate with the amount of interest.