Sidechain Enhancements
SONAR's method for sidechaining certainly works; however, it would be nice to see some alternative methods for setting up a sidechain. As it is, setting up a send is pretty straightforward and easy, especially if the send is going to be routed to a new bus or aux track, since those options are readily available in the list.
However, if you set up a sidechain far enough along in a mix session when there are a lot of active plugins, the list gets really long and can take some time to hunt down the specific instance of the plugin you're looking for. The DAW That Shall Not Be Named has a fairly slick method whereby in the actual plugin window, there's a sidechain key option that lets you select the track you want to feed from. This can still result in a long list if you have a high track count, but in many cases plugin instances outnumber track counts so this method is more efficient, plus you have the benefit of looking for an actual track name that you've created as opposed to the generic name of a plugin.
Not sure if that's making sense the way I'm explaining it, but basically it would be nice to be able to look at the plugin itself and set up a sidechain from that as opposed to going to the source track and scrolling through a long list of similarly named plugins to find the right one. It would look something like this:
Go to the instance of the plugin you want to route audio to via sidechain.
Right-click on the instance to see a "Sidechain" option, then select from a track list to designate the source.
SONAR automatically creates a send from that track to the plugin instance.
(Or, similarly, instead of a right-click option, open up the plugin and see a "Sidechain" option in the window that would do the same thing.)
Certainly not a "must have" since sidechain does work as is, but just a little something to make things a little more streamlined when there is a high plugin count. Given the awesomeness that was introduced with the patch points and aux tracks (STILL my favorite SONAR addition to date), I'd think this extra routing flexibility would be fairly straightforward to introduce.
Sonar Platinum | Win 10 Pro/64-bit | Core i7-6700K | 32GB DDR4 2400 RAM | ASUS Z170-AR | ASUS GeForce GTX 970 | Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 | Yamaha HS8s