Re: Piano Roll / Pick Tracks missing?
2017/09/06 00:12:50
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So I guess a few months ago the Piano Roll "Pick Tracks" menu item/command has been removed and all we have now is the Filter for ALL midi tracks in a project in ONE Piano Roll View window. That's very disappointing to me.
I work a day job for a living and don't have time to have detailed, intimate knowledge of every single new change as they're rolled out, I count on some basics I've always known in Sonar just always being there for me.
One of the unintended consequences of this new method with Piano Roll View that doesn't work for me is that I manually choose my own note names for some of my MIDI tracks, but not all. This new method forces my manually chosen Note Names to be on all MIDI tracks.
If memory serves me correctly, I was able to have multiple Piano Roll windows before with whatever pertinent settings I choose in each window. So for me, one window would have all my drum midi tracks, with my manually chosen Note Names reflecting the drum sample for each note. Another Piano Roll View window had midi tracks with synths, etc with standard "Assigned Instrument Setting" where I can see the musical notes clearly.
Working that way has worked for me ever since I started using Cakewalk, before Sonar, when it was called Pro Audio 9.
I really think in the haste to always be changing and "improving" there ends up being a lot of confusion and often mistakes are made or unintended consequences occur. It's made me a "less happy" Sonar user over the years although with Gibson/Tascam ownership it's seemed much better than when Roland owned the company.
This is just another disappointment for me. I want to be able to have fun working on music both for myself and for clients and not being able to rely on some standard interface functionality is frustrating. It takes away from the fun and flow of music work and certainly looks unprofessional to my clients when everything grinds to a halt to figure out a new feature or change in user interface.
Before anyone chimes in with "you don't have to update..." please don't reduce my opinions and (I think) valid concerns to a case of "he doesn't get it, go away". I'm very interested in seeing Sonar evolve in good, useful ways. I'm very interested in new features and improvements on old ones. I just wish it wasn't mandatory that things change... give more consideration to changes before implementing just for the sake of launching something new. Some of us have been using this product for a long time, we have workflow expectations.
I hate to say it because I've been with Cakewalk for SO long, but I almost made the change to another platform when Roland had everything all screwed up. Big improvements happened with new ownership but I see the appeal of what some people call the "industry standard" platform. It's still, in it's basic form, exactly the same as it was a decade ago, 2 decades ago. That's stability. That's uniformity. That's VERY appealing.