Jeff Evans
I picked up a nice digital food thermometer while travelling recently and I have found it very handy. On the back it suggests for fish 139 degrees F in fact. I have just cooked salmon would you believe and normally I use deg C over here but thought I might go F for higher resolution.
 
I rub lightly with olive oil and add some salt too and bring to room temp. I like it with skin on and cook on a hot clean plate. You can flip once and you get crispy skin and nice on the other side too.
 
The temp rises quickly and you have to be on the ball in getting it off. A selection of measurements is required too. But 139 deg F is not undercooked anywhere but very juicy and soft, not dry at all. Perfect for those who dont like the undercooked version.

When I read this early this morning I thought you found a digital musical thermometer & cooked your salmon in the key of F instead of your usual C!
The best way to test doneness is to use your fingers while checking transpency & flakiness.
USDA recommendeds 145F but the trend these days is on the raw side.

Back to our normal scheduled programming.

Anderton
Fortunately, the big argument that started between Doktor Avalanche and Beepster about whether or not to rub the salmon first with olive oil was settled amicably offline. Eventually Beepster conceded that it would help hold in moisture, even though he wasn't wild about the subtle alteration to the taste. 

I find this offensive. You sir a fishface. I STEAM my salmon. If you don't understand how to cook fish I suggest you go to the boil in bag forums.

It has come to my attention this thread is becoming fishy. Will people please stop posting snide comments about my cookary in future... Thankyou ;)

(Edited, changed to fishface, genuinely had no idea what codface means in america, in UK it just means a fat face.. Sorry!)

There's a plaice for this sort of discussion.
 
I'll let myself trout

dlesaux
Gearslutz is not a Sonar friendly place!

 
Now that's an understatement if I ever heard one!  LOL
 
I make sure to don my virtual Kevlar when I head there.

I've learned never to discuss DAW's at gearslutz.  Plugins, hardware, technique, instruments - all fairly safe, although plugins can get a bit dicey too.

This thread got pretty long since I saw it last, so not sure I caught everything in context. The two things that caught me the most were 1) the importance of time (i.e., not everyone has hundreds of hours to invest) and 2) that video tutorials that are "short and sweet" (i.e., scripted and on point) are incredibly beneficial.
 
Mixing or individual features tend to get most of the focus with videos, but the average person (sans 1000 hours under their belt in SONAR) simply wants to make "something" and learn as they go. Videos on song creation/composition by genre, targeted at new users might prove more helpful to kick starting people using SONAR (and also show off what it can do). From a development standpoint, workflow is also quintessential to people getting material composed in the quickest amount of time. Again, time required by the user get from point A to point B is pretty much all that matters to them. Music is a commonality that links us all (selling point #1).
 
In thinking of an example of what I mean here, I remembered a video I once saw created by a Geist user. I just watched it again and he goes through the major components of beat creation in 10 minutes - sampling/slicing, sequencing, mixing, scene creation (and could have done song creation in the last 45 seconds to simply capture the scenes). Pretty much the "guts" of the program in one quick pass that ends with "usable product." This is a link to that video, but another caveat is also that videos require time to watch, so scripting them is important (too many videos are errant and waste a viewers time by being this way).
 
I think some people tend to be jaded by the 1000s of hours under there belt, and forget the (needless) growing pains they went through to avoid the (workflow) landmines which should be fixed. New users are significantly less tolerant of these (especially as the market shifts to the Millennials who know loyalty to nothing unless they are getting something from it).
 
BTW, the salmon tip was a good one

dubdisciple
To play devil's advocate, it is unrealistic to expect literally every DAW to have a subforum. If gearslutz really thought the lack of coverage of a particular DAW was hurting them, I am sure they would include that DAW. Sonar has a much more helpful forum than most DAWs so the demand is less to have one at gearslutz. What would a subforum there offer that is lacking here?

I thought about the possible reasoning of this situation for about 3 seconds and I think this was what I came up with too if I understand you correctly dub. The reason there are not many many more Sonar posts at gearslutz is that this forum is - by my understanding- easily the most popular DAW forum.

KPerry
I'd argue the 3 most important gaps for SONAR in terms of getting more credible are:

1 - Performance. It shouldn't be the be all and end all but, like cars having great 0-60 figures, it matters. SONAR needs a decent audio/VST performance boost so it can compare favourably with others (which it doesn't in the unfortunately commonly quoted performance tests).

2 - Compatability. There are issues with VST compatability still - it's not bad, but there do appear to be more issues with SONAR than other hosts from reading various forums, and SONAR's methods seem to be criticised (wasn't it Acoustica who recently said that SONAR's thread handling was just wrong which caused problems with their plug-in?). This then reflects in plug-in companies testing with SONAR, which reflects on its popularity which reflects on companies testing with SONAR which... Same applies to control surfaces: Cakewalk should bite the bullet and write the surface dll'ls, not expect the controller manufacturer to do (I'm pretty sure that it's usually the DAW manufacturer who does this).

3 - Reliability. This is a tricky one as - apart from the rare issue I've seen, usually due to plug-in compatability and the Bakers erring on the side of caution with dealing with errant plug-ins - SONAR is no less stable than anything else (hell, I get Windows Explorer crashing more than SONAR!). But there's a perception of it being more unstable, crashing more easily and being more picky about hardware than other platforms. On shared forums, I don't see reports of DAW x stuttering and glitching with one or two audio tracks: I do see these reports about SONAR. This probably ties in with performance above to some extent.

All of these are technical issues that have a direct impact on word of mouth marketing and advertising (especially point 2). They're non-trivial to solve or they would have been, but would need a technical, marketing and charm (money?) offensive to address - eg. Pick a big plug-in manufacturer who doesn't currently support SONAR and work with them to get is supported, learn from them why SONAR is 'difficult', pay for their testing/technical expertise and re-write parts of the code accordingly.

Financial investment in plug-ins is probably greater than that in the DAW itself (all of which are ridiculously cheap for what they offer), so a professional (in terms of making a living from recording/mixing) will choose to follow the plug-ins rather than the DAW, so getting that relationship and compatability right is probably the first step.

 

Doktor Avalanche
1) Link to quote please ?

 
As someone's already posted, DAWBench is the web's unofficial offical DAW benchmark. I think it has a lot of flaws, but it's the one that is referenced in, sayy, Sound On Sound magazine, and has been discussed here and on places like KvR.  I don't know why SONAR is no longer benchmarked there (whether it's down to it not being cross-platform or because the site's owner has had some issues with Cakewalk over the years), but the latest discussion I can find http://dawbench.com/dawbenchdsp-x-scaling.htm - which is very old, admittedly - puts SONAR's performance so far behind everything else's as to be laughable.  Mud sticks, unfortunately, and if that's what the stats seem to say, then it's very hard to shake people's belief in them.

Doktor Avalanche
2) Plugins apart from buggy plugins work perfectly well. Just because Acoustica says so (URL?) does to mean to say it is true. Frankly I doubt it when thousands of plugins work perfectly well..

 
But if a certain plug-in shows that you are doing something fundamental like thread handling differently from "everyone else", especially when combined with (1) above, you'd better have a damn good reason for doing it, or you're going to have more compatability issues than others.  I'd find the thread if I could remember either the plug-in name or the company name for sure.
 
And found it about 10 seconds after posting!  Damn people spelling their company names so similarly :-)
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/x99-i75930k-amp-sonar-platinum-thread-balance-m3234101.aspx
 
with corresponding thread on Acustica (not Acoustica) forum:
 
http://www.acustica-audio.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=28728&start=84
 

Doktor Avalanche
3) Sonar is reliable. It's people's systems that are unreliable. What is Cakewalk going to do gag these people who scream at great heights crying wolf? Admittedly there are still very visible bugs that need addressing (how long must I go on about that) but they aren't stability issues.

Well, I find is reliable.  But when you hear repeated stories (not on this forum) of SONAR glitching with 2 audio tracks, no plug-ins, or crashing when other DAWs don't, you have to understand that this is what perceptions are.  Sure, it might be for good technical reasons (I think the Bakers code more by the book than others, which is why there are more VST incompatabilities than with others who just get VSTs to work like Cubase!), but that's not really something that bothers end users: why spend days troubleshooting something trivial when another application will work with no effort?

According to the Acustica forum thread, Acustica contacted Cake but got no reply.  That's as much as us mere mortals know :-)

Doktor Avalanche
1) Link to quote please ?

 

KPerry
 As someone's already posted, DAWBench is the web's unofficial offical DAW benchmark. I think it has a lot of flaws, but it's the one that is referenced in, sayy, Sound On Sound magazine, and has been discussed here and on places like KvR.  I don't know why SONAR is no longer benchmarked there (whether it's down to it not being cross-platform or because the site's owner has had some issues with Cakewalk over the years), but the latest discussion I can find http://dawbench.com/dawbenchdsp-x-scaling.htm - which is very old, admittedly - puts SONAR's performance so far behind everything else's as to be laughable.  Mud sticks, unfortunately, and if that's what the stats seem to say, then it's very hard to shake people's belief in them.

 

Doktor Avalanche
Well as you state very very old. A benchmark of Sonar 7 running XP. That is in a galaxy far far away...
It's time for new benchmarks. If I were Cakewalk marketing I would run their own benchmarks as a comparison, if they are convinced they are good enough (which I suspect they are) I would be contacting journalist, or hire a firm to create independant tests which they can blog about and use in marketing.
 

 
Indeed, that would not be a stupid thing to do :-)  Still needs work, as you have to compete with what people are used to (like I said, it's like 0-60mph figures for cars...they may be unhelpful, but they're a well-known reference point).  But as I said originally, that's a perception that needs to change, so we're agreeing that performance is a perceptual issue, even if not an actual one.
 

Doktor Avalanche
2) Plugins apart from buggy plugins work perfectly well. Just because Acoustica says so (URL?) does to mean to say it is true. Frankly I doubt it when thousands of plugins work perfectly well..
 
You've given us the URL to the thread, this is the interesting post within it however:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3236581
 
If Cakewalk haven't had any contact you can't blame them. Who know maybe afterwards it happened and things got smoothed over. Nobody can assume however there is a problem with Cakewalks code here from this information.
 

 
Er...actually, I think you can.  There is a definite implication that SONAR bounces/bounced threads between cores which is i) unusual and ii) definitely not good for cache locality and hence performance (that's an unarguable fact of multi-threaded processing).  The latter is reflected in the general statistics and reports that show SONAR is/was significantly worse performance-wise than other applications (still, not just SONAR 7 on XP).
 

Doktor Avalanche
3) Sonar is reliable. It's people's systems that are unreliable. What is Cakewalk going to do gag these people who scream at great heights crying wolf? Admittedly there are still very visible bugs that need addressing (how long must I go on about that) but they aren't stability issues.

KPerry 
Well, I find is reliable.  But when you hear repeated stories (not on this forum) of SONAR glitching with 2 audio tracks, no plug-ins, or crashing when other DAWs don't, you have to understand that this is what perceptions are.  Sure, it might be for good technical reasons (I think the Bakers code more by the book than others, which is why there are more VST incompatabilities than with others who just get VSTs to work like Cubase!), but that's not really something that bothers end users: why spend days troubleshooting something trivial when another application will work with no effort?

Doktor Avalanche
As I've stated, when there are serious stability issues these forums go beserk about the same thing with reproducible steps. All we see right now is stability issues with specific PC configurations. If there are issues with third party VST code Cakewalk cannot be called out for that, bare in mind the vast majority of VST's work fine. I think the actual problem is that third parties are testing their code with cubase but are not with Cakewalk, again no fault of Cakewalks. If the plugin claims to support Cakewalk they should bloody well test it under the platform IMHO. Users should be writing to the third parties and ask them how they do their QA under Cakewalk, is it just a matter of waiting for customer complaints and fixing them?

 
I'm not referring to these issues: look outside these forums and you'll see general stability/reliability issues that affect users on SONAR and not on other DAWs on the same hardware.  It's tough, but the conclusion that gets drawn is that SONAR is finickety/unstable - there was an entire range of audio controller chips that SONAR wouldn't work on a few years back (DICE 2 IIRC) that nothing else had problems with.  Why's that?
 
And, yes, there should be testing with SONAR in addition to Cubase, but that doesn't seem to happen, and we already see a number of plug-ins where SONAR isn't on their compatible list.  Why is that?
 

Doktor Avalanche 
BTW the only way is to do it by the book. If Cubase screws up an implementation, and Cakewalk does not, Cakewalk should not be expected to bend their implementation to be like Cubase's buggy code, what Cubase should be doing is fixing their code. It would end up being a spagetti situation for third parties otherwise, i.e. what happens if Cubase then fixes their code to be like Cakewalk's again.

Unfortunately, that's not how the world works.  If 9 out of 10 DAWs are written to "behave like Cubase" and yours doesn't, then yours is de facto the incompatible DAW.

Not to mention having a forum where we can get away with a lot (in terms of - hopefully constructively - criticising Cakewalk/SONAR without being shut down, mentioning other products).  Some people do abuse that sometimes, but in general, a forum with more rather than less free-speech is a good thing.

We also have Anderton here.  Great resource, but I'm not sure how exclusive he is to Cakewalk as far as vendor supplied forums go.