forkol
I would generally agree with that, but IIRC, you've been a big cheerleader for tools like the new EQs and Vocal Align features, both of which were available through other means.

There's a difference between core features and plug-ins. Including those plug-ins make SONAR more of an all-in-one package precisely because new users don't have to acquire them through other means and be forced to spend extra money. They were also available for sale to Mac and Windows users, independently of inclusion in SONAR.
 
I had nothing to do with the decision to create them, but I'm glad I have them in SONAR and don't have to spend the money on something similar from a different company.

To be fair though Craig, it seems that you didn't read the OP closely enough - he wasn't asking for a deep square pan, he said that his pad and power chord already have a deep square tremolo, and that he wants them to swim from right to left and vice versa (at least that's how I read it). So the deep square tremolo seems to be a superfluous detail that didn't really have anything to do with the LFO. And his wider point was that he would like some kind of LFO tool in Sonar. He wasn't asking how to do it with an envelope, in fact he stated that he knows he can do it like that. He didn't even mention drawing tools - Sanderxpander brought that up. So the discussion, as directed by the OP's request (and the title of the thread) was about whether or not Sonar should have an LFO tool built in. 
 
So then the question became "would an LFO tool be useful in Sonar." Which led me to point out that proper LFO tools are far easier to use, much easier to tweak on the fly and therefore more useful in a creative sense than automation drawing tools. That's why I issued the "challenge" FWIW. It was to show that periodic modulation as a creative tool is much more convenient when you have proper LFO controls. And I stand by that. When using LFO modulation in The Drop, I will sit for ages getting just the right amplitudes and phase settings for the musical effect I'm after. And it's not always "quantized" values either - oftentimes I will find that a phase value of something like 68 or 147 degrees is the value that "hits the spot." And if I want to ramp up an LFO's amplitude over time, I can do that with straight line in the automation lane applied to the amplitude control in the plugin. 
 

I on the other hand never said that LFOs were "horrible." I said that I question how important they are to people.

 
And herein lies part of Cakewalk's problem. Its user base is aging, and I don't see a lot of young folk picking it up. LFO's are a huge part of modern production, especially in the electronic styles, and this is where DAW's are picking up their new user base. The young bedroom producer. I pay close attention to those communities, and Sonar is not seen as an option by kids who want to start making electronic music in their bedrooms. Other DAW's are tapping into that market successfully, and I've always held that Cakewalk needs to do a lot more to rectify this. Even the young "real bands" are utilizing these modern production techniques in their music. It's not uncommon to hear electronic/synth elements mixed with real instruments these days. 
 
I browse the Sonar user group on Facebook sometimes. It seems to be mainly guys of my age (40's) and over. That's just an observation. Which is fine, as someone who's obviously no spring chicken I'm not going to knock Cakewalk's older meat and potatoes user base - I just think that questioning how important LFO modulation is to Sonar's existing user base loses sight of the fact that an injection of revenue from new young producers is going to benefit everyone in the long run. It would be prudent for Cakewalk to pay more attention to features like this even if most of the older guys here on the forum don't see a use for them. 

Thanks James - you seem to understand.
 

sharke
It's not uncommon to hear electronic/synth elements mixed with real instruments these days. 

And hasn't been for what, 45+ years now? Even Kraftwerk's early stuff (including Autobahn) mixed "real" instruments with ("real" hardware) synths. Most of the surviving psychedelic/electronica originators and pioneers are now in their 60s and 70s, and some are making a more electronic kind of music than ever before and appealing to a very wide age spectrum. That the people on stage might be old enough to be their grandparents doesn't seem to matter to lots of younger people now, though it did to the youth of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Maybe it's because some of the boomer generation have refused to grow old gracefully :-)

sharke
I just think that questioning how important LFO modulation is to Sonar's existing user base loses sight of the fact that an injection of revenue from new young producers is going to benefit everyone in the long run. It would be prudent for Cakewalk to pay more attention to features like this even if most of the older guys here on the forum don't see a use for them. 

Well, I'm in my mid 50s and I've wondered for many years why Sonar doesn't have a MIDI LFO plugin that sends CCs and can be routed to any function that can be MIDI controlled. It seems to me such an obvious thing to have, and some DAWs already do.

Kamikaze
Handed over my degree yesterday as part of a work permit application. 1997, flippin' 1997. 20 years ago. I am that 40 year old Sharke now describes. The music I listen and play to now, isn't the dance music I made back then. I liked DnB for a good while (still) do, and dubstep sprang from that. Just hearing those bassline now, I can see Sharke's point completely. I can't see why Craig is so resistant. A lot of small features I see demand for, Craig seems to digs his heels into. I see only one person arguing against in the thread, because he likes the way it works.
 
I seem to recall the same battle with recording synth outputs.

What you see as "so resistant" I see as Craig yet again looking for ways to do something with the tools within Sonar. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Yes I'd like an LFO but there's a ton of things I'd rather have much sooner than an LFO. And in the meanwhile, I always learn something from Craig's posts. All good.
I think many see Craig as maybe having a bigger vote in how Sonar progresses than they do. "Oh no - Craig's against it - we'll never get an LFO (staff view, etc, .....)". Not the case as I understand it. Just an uber user trying his damnest to help the community.

Craig,

I'm sorry, but I think you're kind of missing the point. I mean no offence at all, but you not feeling the need for an LFO plugin that can be used to control any MIDI accessible control in a DAW, including the "mixer functions", doesn't mean others don't or that you can achieve the same results by drawing envelopes.

I can think of quite a few uses for such a thing, and I'm certain someone with more imagination than me (and there are millions of such people out there) will come up with lots of uses that never occur to me.

Envelopes. Yes, it's possible to draw regular LFO-like functions as envelopes. Sort of. But if you want to experiment with different wave-forms, different LFO frequencies or simply change the envelope it involves a lot of work. And there are things that are seriously difficult to try and do by drawing envelopes.

Here's one example.

Let's say I decide I want a sine curve modulating a "widget controller" over two bars. OK, I can draw that. It's a bit of a pain if I want to try it over four bars as well, but let's assume two bars does the trick.

I now think "what would happen if I tried a frequency modulation on that envelope? How about a rising sawtooth over a period of an eighth note but with low amplitude? OK, let's try making that another sine instead.... and how about I ramp up the speed so the original wave period becomes two bars in this section.....?"

Drawing that kind of thing is slow at best and involves an awful lot of maths to work out the shape of the wave at best.

Use an LFO that can itself be modulated by another LFO and it becomes simple. Or at least the only difficulty becomes getting the LFO settings right, not drawing and re-drawing complex (or even simple) wave-forms.

And that's just scratching the surface. Not everyone thinks in tems of "a guitar sounds like and does "this", a piano sounds like and does "that"". And as for "whooshing" not being to your taste, millions of guitarists, synthesists and record buyers clearly disagree about that. Personal taste shouldn't enter into whether what someone finds a musically useful tool is provided or not.

Developing something like Logic's MIDI LFO and envelope plugin shouldn't be too onerous I would have thought. It's not even like it needs to be able to generate a sound. Be useful if it used more than the "ordinary" 128 7-bit MIDI steps though, maybe 14-bit instead. Not that 14 bits worth of values is likely to be needed, just something smoother than 128 to avoid the stepping problem.

Anderton
Why is ANYONE assuming I'm against an LFO tool? I haven't said ANYTHING that would lead anyone to believe I am against an LFO tool. If I misinterpreted what the OP wanted and didn't solve his problem, then that's my error. What I am against is saying that tools that are useable and have value are "horrible," then posting a video that's intended to show how horrible they are when I've never experienced those kinds of problems drawing a periodic waveform.

 
I guarantee you that if you asked 50 random Sonar users to use the shape tool to draw a sine curve of a specific size, position and shape, they'd have to screw around for ages to do it. That's what I'm talking about. Maybe "horrible" is a strong word, but then again, it's a word that springs to a lot of people's minds when they try to use a tool that's fiddly. One of the problem with drawing accurate shapes to order is that they are very sensitive to where you put the mouse. Like when you want to start a sine curve from 00:00:00 exactly, there's that uneasy feeling that you need to have the mouse pointer bang on target when dragging vertically to set the amplitude, and there's that grey area when the pointer is changing from the border dragging icon to the drawing pointer. It's so easy to be a little off in your mouse positioning and end up with something like this:
 

 
Not everyone is good with a mouse. I find it hard to work with very small and fiddly margins of pointer error sometimes. Same thing when I'm using Adobe Illustrator. 
 

I personally do not see an LFO tool as a huge priority compared to other feature requests that are relevant to ALL SONAR users of any age or musical inclination, like better controller support. This is why I ask questions about how relevant it is to people, instead of assuming that just because I consider something important, everyone else must think it's equally important. Also, not all newbies are interested only in beats, and people over 30 do know what beats are. Google "DJs over 40" sometime. I'm not into prejudice or stereotyping.

 
Yeah I'm well aware that there are plenty of people in their 40's and 50's who are into electronic music. I'm one of them. After all, the electronic dance music scene exploded in our youth, the late 80's and early 90's. Virtually everyone I know from back then is still into it. And yes, I know that not all newbies are into "beats." But that's where the bulk of the new DAW users are coming from - electronic bedroom production. The main reason being that you can produce complete commercial sounding tracks from start to finish on a laptop with a pair of headphones, wheres recording real instruments and bands is a whole different kettle of fish which involves a lot more investment, commitment and physical space. Like it or not, this is where the bulk of today's new DAW revenue is coming from. 
 

This is all about priorities, so I'll let you guys argue with the people who want better controller support, an improved staff view, variable speed, better MP4 video support, more arranging tools, a mastering page, DDP export, track sampler, new MIDI effects, parallel effects in FX Chains, having clip waveforms follow clip gain, etc. as to which is more important. I suspect an LFO tool would be relatively low on the list, but if I knew the answer, I wouldn't have asked the question.

 
But nobody is saying "we want an LFO tool instead of those things." It's just another suggestion in the long list of very useful things which would be great to have in Sonar.

I was looking for an indication of UK (As I know bedroom producers of Dance music has been a big thing for over 2 decades, and not for rock), Europe and worldwide, from the same stat source (Neilson) from the year before.
 



https://www.musicbusiness...ca-rb-rules-streaming/
 
 

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.

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.

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. 

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