Next Sonar to get Groove Matrix

I'm actually not surprised - should make a lot of us Sonar users happy!

I wet myself with excitement.

From the looks of it, it looks like they might going over to the "new" universal Cakewalk UI, too. Which is also pretty exciting.

I don't own it (yet) but from watching many videos, I now see how many light-years Ableton Live is past this track. Gee what a surprise. Project5 makes an encore in Sonar. No-one saw that coming.

I don't own it (yet) ... 

Gee what a surprise...

No-one saw that coming.

Looks like we already have our opinions.

 I didn't say anything that hadn't been said already

 from the source  
 I would have used quotes but they seem to be more hidden in this new format

 supply your own context and make of it what you will

  or not at all

 

That would be nice.

 If Cakewalk is serious about this transition and serious about honoring our ridiculous loyalty, I would expect a deep discounted upgrade for registered P5 users.

  But let's not hold our breath for fear of apoxia's effects on reasoning and brain function and such.
 
  for example
  given a random sampling of P5 users how many actually use the Groove Matrix?
  my sense is < 30%. It may be a nice marketing point, but this would seem to have a lot more to do with potentially luring those considering Ableton Live than appeasing P5 users with a piecemeal migration of its features.
  but I'm not in marketing and no longer worried about CW products and revenue numbers
 

wrench45us


 If Cakewalk is serious about this transition and serious about honoring our ridiculous loyalty, I would expect a deep discounted upgrade for registered P5 users.

  But let's not hold our breath for fear of apoxia's effects on reasoning and brain function and such.
 
  for example
  given a random sampling of P5 users how many actually use the Groove Matrix?
  my sense is < 30%. It may be a nice marketing point, but this would seem to have a lot more to do with potentially luring those considering Ableton Live than appeasing P5 users with a piecemeal migration of its features.
  but I'm not in marketing and no longer worried about CW products and revenue numbers
 

I've doodled with the GM a few times, but have never really taken the time to bond with it. 

It's pretty obvious Cakewalk could give a cr*p about P5 users. Sonar is their baby. BTW, I can't figure out this new quote thing either. I miss the old way where you could edit down someone's quote to just the part you want to quote.

Groove-matrix-type stuff in Sonar is good I suppose. I agree with others that the arpeggiator over that crap one in Sonar would be awesome, though I tend to write my "arps" in and groove-clip the... umm... clip anyway. I actually prefer that over some arps, except perhaps arps like P5 or FM8 or Omnisphere, which are just too easy.

Thing about groove-matrix (imho):
- bulletproof audio is expected with that workflow... something I've not had with Sonar personally
- warping/stretching is at least implied with a session/groove view, and I would suggest it is expected, given that the only other real player in that game currently is Live, which warps... even non-groove apps like Logic and ProTools are warping these days... and there's a fairly significant performance hit to it. Managing the stretching/warping CPU hit alongside bulletproof audio is difficult
- IMHO, Sonar is getting a bit... long-in-the-tooth. Meaning: the code is pretty old. In my experience, and I have a bit where this is concerned, you end up with gobs of old code in old apps that have evolved significantly over their original implementation. Hope they're chunking a bunch of it. You can't just add new features forever, without occasionally spending a great deal of time refactoring and removing krusties. Sonar 8 supposedly did a bunch of this though.

We'll see. I hope they implement it well.

<mini-rant> My God this is the worst forum software I've ever seen. For the life of me, I can't get quotes working as expected, or previews at all, or a bunch of other forum features... on Safari or Firefox. It's HORID.
And the stupid "Full Version" reply behavior... ouch.
I like coming around, but this is just annoying.
Hope they didn't pay for it. Plenty of free stuff works SO much better than this piece of garbage.

Oh, just looked at the aspplayground website. Guess they paid $300 or so.
Cash it off as a bad investment, and throw it away please.
</mini-rant>

- zevo

There are plenty of good third-party arps such as Sanford and Catanya.

The thing that made (makes) P5 what it is in terms of workflow from the beginning is the edit pane. Until they find a way to incorporate that into Sonar, so working with MIDI is as fast and intuitive, it won't be a replacement for anything.

Groove matrix is great if you use it (I don't work that way, but cheers) but... for the life of me I can't figure out what that screenshot is supposed to be. It looks like somebody's program has hung halfway through a screen draw...

 for the life of me I can't figure out what that screenshot is supposed to be. It looks like somebody's program has hung halfway through a screen draw... 

  That screenshot is a series of panels that's being filled in as CW reveals the new and exciting features in the Sonar release. I saw a screenshot of it on KVR that had 3 panels filled in, includig the step sequencer. The interested party can find the current URL to see the current state.

  I'm sure marketing considered this a way to build excitement and anticipation for that next Sonar release. Such mileage may vary... 

   

Nick P


The devil will be in the details. If it's implemented well I think it could be a really cool feature. Especially for live performance. That would involve having it respond to external controllers like Ableton and the Akai APC40. I would love to be able to set up a tune in sections and be able to kick them forward or backward with a pedal. And of course DJs live for this type of on-the-fly arranging.

Sure.  But as folks have said elsewhere the big "devil" with features like this is to have an audio engine (like Live's) that supports gapless live manipulation of audio and midi.  Admittedly I haven't tried to use Sonar for this purpose, but from what I've read, Sonar's audio engine in it's current form might not be up to the task.  Could be wrong though...