Markers as a hindrance to drag-and-drop arrangement

Seems like a valid feature request kind of thing.   Since that would be a kind of 'copy special' maybe you could request that the default for copy and cut be a configurable thing made from the already available check boxes you get with copy special. 

Here's hoping some kind of arrangement feature is in the pipeline - hints have been dropped that the spring lineup will be teased soon. I have always used markers heavily and I'm experimenting with marker clips these days, but you're right that some kind of relationship between the two would be handy - maybe if markers could as an option be locked to a given clip start as opposed to a particular spot on the timeline it would be useful...

There are many things pestering me in hindsight of this year, and as they linger the S1 crossgrade appeal is gaining momentum. I definitely agree the investment of time makes things harder but generic functionality should be flawless.

Just a review of the features forum upsets me enough that I hid it on my phone.

What registration system does it use? Offline for non-online studios? Does it need a Copy protection dongle?

289 € Crossgrade @ Thomann, Germany.
Sounds OK.

Cheers for the Studio One comments, guys. I've spent years being the 'maybe I'll leave Sonar soon' guy and have cried wolf on that enough times to have earned my own show on the Discovery Channel, but time is the major limitation on my music these days and if I need a new tool to cut the time I spend arranging songs, so be it.
 
Just the single feature from 1:04 to 1:35 in this video is enough to make me install S1 as soon as I have the cash. I've been using Sonar since before it was even called Sonar and I can't tell you how much time I've wasted simply trying to tell it "select everything in these 8 bars, now copy everything there to a different 8 bars". If I left-drag and select everything, Ctrl-C, click a blank area in the timeline, then Ctrl-V, it puts the clips on the wrong tracks!
 

GregGraves
It would seem to me you are overdoing the marker thing.  I don't understand why you would use markers when laying out an "arrangement".

 
So I know which part is which, without having to preview all of them and then mentally remember "The bit at measure 3 is the big Cm sequence, the bit at measure 19 is the double guitar riff, the bit at measure 35 is the guitar harmonies with the tom pattern, the bit at measure 51 is the double guitar riff repeated from measure 19" etc etc etc. This is nearly impossible to start with, and almost entirely impossible once I've started actually moving things.
 
I might have anything from 10 to 50 different named sections in a songwriting project. The final song will probably only use 10 to 15 of those, but until then, I need to keep track of them. Like you, these are 'just draft ideas I move about to lay out the structure', but I don't know which section is which just by looking at it.
 
In an ideal world - by which, I might cynically say is the world I had in the 90s with trackers and FL Studio - I can try these different sections in a different order without moving them about at all! Crazy! But if that's not practical, it would be great to be able to very quickly and easily move entire sections - which other DAWs handle elegantly (eg. the video at the top of this link - skip to 5:38 and just watch the next 30 seconds.)

mudgel
1. Create two Markers designating the area you want to move.
2. Select a track and press Ctrl+A. His will highlight all project data on all tracks.
3. Go back to the time line and when you move the cursor between the two markers it changes.
4. When it changes left click and ALL data on all tracks in that vertical selection will be highlighted. Then it can be copied and pasted or dragged and dropped as you choose. The only constraints maybe what your default copy and paste selections are

...leaving 2 orphaned markers behind, and no markers with the moved or copied material. Hence this thread.

As Mudjel said, easy enough to do same thing in Sonar, except you don't need to do his "Step 1".  The solution is "don't use markers when working out song structure".  You move things and copy things about until you have a structure laid out.  If you can't keep track of what clips are what, do one of 3 things:
 
1.  Create a bunch of tracks, with each track a part of the song, like Intro, Cm, this is where I scream into the microphone.  This makes frankensteining the structure easy.
 
2.  Use Clip/Properties/Name and give the clip a name.  Read the name and copy/paste/move.
 
3.  Turn off your computer, and take your guitar or pi-anny, and play the song through, just like Mozart or Benny Goodman.  Then record a guide track, just like you would if you had a major label deal, and were sent into a corporate studio.
 
This whole concern about Markers being sufficient to abandon Sonar seems quite the non-issue.  I wonder if you are a troll from a competitor. 

Sylvan
I do what you are doing all the time in SONAR.

 
Thanks Charles for such a wealth of information in a single post.
 
 

Paul P

Sylvan
I do what you are doing all the time in SONAR.

 
Thanks Charles for such a wealth of information in a single post.
 
 

You are welcome. I truly believe in this product and it benefits our whole community when other users can get more familiar with it. I have more to learn too, especially with the MIDI side of things. This forum is a great place to come and be a part of.

GregGraves
Hey Sylvan --- Kasperky marks battlefrost.com as a dangerous website, and won't let me go there.  Don't know why, but that can't be good for your business given all the millions that use KIS.  If there is no reason for this, I'd contact Kaspersky and ask them to update their database, or to have a look at your webpage.

You're not missing anything, the page is blank except for the title (and Norton doesn't complain).
 
By blank, I mean that there is very little content, even at the html level.  The page is just about empty, it only contains the title and an invisible table filled with non-breaking spaces.
 

GregGraves
All the stuff I do now, I do everything myself, nobody to blame, vocals, guitars, bass, keys, drum programming and think the most number of tracks I've ever used was less than 70, and that number is simply because I am laying out different sections of different instruments/vocals on separate tracks.  The greatest amount of markers I've ever use was maybe 10.  Did not want to offend, simply did not understand what your work flow was/is.

No offense taken. My track list is like this:
 - about 6 guitar tracks (2 rhythm, 2 lead, 2 or 3 clean), typically via VST effects
 - 1 bass guitar track
 - up to 20 synth tracks (MIDI and Audio in each case)
 - 1 drum MIDI track
 - 9 drum audio tracks
 - a handful of others (eg. sample tracks, acoustic guitars)
 
The drum audio tracks contain no data (they're just synth outputs) so I typically have something like 15 - 20 tracks I need to represent a given section of the music. (Half of the synth tracks are also just output and contain no clips, but I put them in a folder with the MIDI so they're visible and 'in the way'.) What I do during composing, is write and record into several of those tracks, then stick a marker at the top to tell me what it was. Usually it won't be as simple as 'Verse' or 'Chorus' because I don't know that yet. Instead it'll be something like 'Em power chords with arpeggios, variation 1'. I might do 2 or 3 similar variations with a view to revisiting them later. Think of them as compositional takes.  I'll generate a bunch of these ideas with the intention of arranging them horizontally on the timeline to make a song. It's not uncommon for me to have 30, 40, 50 such ideas in one project.
 
This gives me several reasons why I wouldn't create a new set of tracks for each section I write:
 - duplicating all those tracks is an extra step I'd like to avoid;
 - duplicating the synth and drum MIDI tracks require me to be careful not to duplicate the audio tracks as well;
 - the duplicated synth tracks would have to be 'divorced' from their audio track, making mix and effect application more awkward;
 - duplicating the plugins on each track would probably kill my CPU in no time (especially things like Guitar Rig and convolution processors)
 - most importantly, 50 ideas x 15 tracks is 750 which is Far Too Many.
 
So really, I just want to compose 'horizontally'. I think a lot of people compose offline and then capture their results in Sonar, not using it as a scratch pad like I do, which probably means they rarely have so many sections that it is difficult to work with. They can either have each section in different tracks, or they can just keep them horizontal and have few enough that it's obvious which one is which. Neither way works for me, so I use markers. But I'd like to be able to drag and drop everything to work more quickly... hence this thread.

dcumpian

GregGraves
Hey Sylvan --- Kasperky marks battlefrost.com as a dangerous website, and won't let me go there.  Don't know why, but that can't be good for your business given all the millions that use KIS.  If there is no reason for this, I'd contact Kaspersky and ask them to update their database, or to have a look at your webpage.

Barracuda flags it as well: Spyware.Exploit.BRTS.battlefrost.com
 
Regards,
Dan

Must be being blocked here too.  All I see is a black page with the title at the top

Makes sense. I think the main difference here is just the sheer quantity of experiments in one project, and the number of unique tracks needed in each one. (I could ditch one of the 2 rhythm tracks, but the rest are essential.)