Should I be able to find a keyboard shortcut in the key bindings manager in preferences?

sharke
Thanks, I just figured out the "do nothing" command! Boy did they make it as user-unfriendly as possible: "do nothing: use to block pre-defined accelerators" - huh? Yeah that's going to make sense to the majority of people isn't it lol! I think the keyboard shortcut manager in Sonar one of those parts of the program they never got around to updating, I bet it's over 20 years old!

paulo

sharke
It's a shame that these old looking parts of the program - stuff like the shortcuts manager, the drum map manager and the controller surface manager - never got a rewrite as I suspect they played a part in putting people off as they demoed the software. They're way too user unfriendly, both in look and function. People who have used them every day for 20 years would probably disagree, but it's when you compare them with similar features in things like modern Adobe apps, and Bitwig which I'm getting into now, you realize how simple and user friendly they could have been. And the manual doesn't exactly help matters because much of it is a confusing mess.

 
Take a look at samplitude and you'll soon feel much better about Sonar.

sharke
Reaper has a similar user unfriendliness in its mess of menus, but saves itself by virtue of the fact that it's only $60 (or free depending on how you look at it) and that it's incredibly customizable and you can trim away a lot of the scary stuff.

I think ease of use is really important these days and software design trends are headed along those lines. Kids are growing up with beautifully designed apps that are intuitive and efficient and they have certain expectations about how things should look and work. At one time I hated all this and thought "give me the geekiness and the complexity, I don't want any of this dumbed down crap" but I'm changing my mind about that now. I've come to realize that it's so much better to work in a clutter free environment without a million unused features, buttons and menu options screaming for your attention. I've gone all feng shui!

It's funny but I've heard loads of people on here express that "don't dumb things down, I like the complexity" attitude, but when you get into how most Sonar users work, they barely use a fraction of its features or power. My projects are often hardcore in terms of track count and complexity and yet I probably only use about 50% of Sonar's features, and from reading discussions on Facebook groups about how people use the program it seems that a large proportion of users make very light demands on Sonar, often never getting higher than 20-30 audio tracks with a few effects on each. Makes you wonder if they wouldn't have been better off with something far less complicated, I know I feel that way myself.

paulo

sharke
Reaper has a similar user unfriendliness in its mess of menus, but saves itself by virtue of the fact that it's only $60 (or free depending on how you look at it) and that it's incredibly customizable and you can trim away a lot of the scary stuff.

I think ease of use is really important these days and software design trends are headed along those lines. Kids are growing up with beautifully designed apps that are intuitive and efficient and they have certain expectations about how things should look and work. At one time I hated all this and thought "give me the geekiness and the complexity, I don't want any of this dumbed down crap" but I'm changing my mind about that now. I've come to realize that it's so much better to work in a clutter free environment without a million unused features, buttons and menu options screaming for your attention. I've gone all feng shui!

It's funny but I've heard loads of people on here express that "don't dumb things down, I like the complexity" attitude, but when you get into how most Sonar users work, they barely use a fraction of its features or power. My projects are often hardcore in terms of track count and complexity and yet I probably only use about 50% of Sonar's features, and from reading discussions on Facebook groups about how people use the program it seems that a large proportion of users make very light demands on Sonar, often never getting higher than 20-30 audio tracks with a few effects on each. Makes you wonder if they wouldn't have been better off with something far less complicated, I know I feel that way myself.

Lol, I actually originally wrote Samplitude and Reaper, but then deleted Reaper because I haven't really spent very much time with it, so I'm not really sure if there is a way to change any of that, but yeah I got the UI itself looking decent enough thanks to other peoples themes, but the menus and also the routing is a bit of a mess for me being used to the sonar way of things, that and no ARA which is an immediate option killer for me now that I've had it all this time. If azslow3 successfully pulls off his file conversion program I may have another look at Reaper then, because it would be daft not to all things considered.
 
As for project complexity, I doubt that I even get close to using 50% of what Platinum and it's predecessors can do, but I always went for the top spec as I figured that it was better to have the tools and not use them than to find myself needing them, but not having them and in truth once you'd bought in the first time the upgrade path made it a no brainer to stay with the all bells and whistles version each time.