vintagevibe

Andrew Rossa [Cakewalk]
There were no changes to the Staff View. Focus was on stability, workflow, and technology like VST and ARA.

Why has Cakewalk ignored the staff view for decades?

vintagevibe

noynekker

vintagevibe

Andrew Rossa [Cakewalk]
There were no changes to the Staff View. Focus was on stability, workflow, and technology like VST and ARA.

Why has Cakewalk ignored the staff view for decades?

Multiple choice:

1) The Cake Staff View bakers have moved on
2) They perfected it decades ago
3) No one has made any recent meaningful Staff View feature requests
4) Recent survey of users panned it
5) Not enough Staff View threads on the forum
6) Recent development focus has been on stability, workflow, and technology like VST and ARA
7) Midi editing is so 1990's
8) Coming big time Staff View improvements in Sonar X4 being beta tested now.
9) Most of the above is rubbish

10) It's deep diving into the code and they have put it off so long they don't think they'll ever get it put back together if they went that deep. 

jsg

Andrew Rossa [Cakewalk]
There were no changes to the Staff View. Focus was on stability, workflow, and technology like VST and ARA.

Actually there are some small improvements, at least compared with X2a:
 
1.  The snap-to function now works better, it is now possible to place, say, a quarter note, in its exact position even if the snap value is on 32nd notes. 
 
2.  Right-clicking on a note that is below the staff, on a ledger line calls up the note properties dialogue box without a struggle, something X2a had an issue with.
 
For midi inputting and editing, the staff view is quite adequate.  Completely up to snuff?  No, of course not, the tied/dotted triplet issue and 32nd note dotted and tied notes, and 64th notes do not display correctly.  Since I do all my scores in Sibelius, this doesn't matter much to me because Sonar plays back these all note values accurately, which is the most important thing for me.  Any skilled composer should be able to use the staff view to enter and edit MIDI, taking into account the display limitations. 
 
For those that long for the note icons on the toolbar as in previous versions before X1, all I can say is I was frustrated when I first became aware of that.  But honestly, using keybinding not only resolves that issue but makes inputting even faster.
 
q    quarter note
e    eighth note
s    sixteen note
etc.
 
Shift q   dotted quarter
Ctrl q     triplet quarter
etc.
 
Cubase's notation has more options regarding printing scores, but since I never print from Sonar, this is not an issue for me.  Digital Performer's notation is OK, but even DP doesn't display dotted triplets correctly (or tied, I forgot, one of those).  All DAW notation editors cannot be compared with Sibelius, nor should they be.  Sibelius isn't a DAW, it's a notation program!
 
And, the event list in Sonar is the best.  Why?  Because you can color code types of events, patch changes, controller changes, etc. can all have their own unique color.  The event list, in DP for example, is very difficult to look at, tiny text and no color options, same with Cubase.  For those that use the event list, color differentiation between types of events really helps a lot.
 
I am very happy with X3.  It's very stable, all VSTs, audio and midi recording and editing is smooth and without issue. 
 
JG
http://www.jerrygerber.com/symphony8.htm
 

pbognar
 
However, using two programs, back and forth, for composing is a buzz kill for me.  My preference would be to do it all in X3 and if I really needed to print, I'd use a program like Musescore.
 
 

harmony gardens

noldar12
I wish the situation was different, but for all intents and purposes I suspect Staff view has long since been orphaned to be nothing more than what it already is.  In previous years, the ongoing issues with the Staff view were raised quite strongly, but to no avail.
 
It may well be that Cakewalk has determined that the costs to upgrade the notation features are greater than the revenue that fixing it would bring in.  In any case it will be interesting to see what happens in the DAW world over the next few years given what has happened with both Notion, and the former Sibelius employees (Finale's situation is by no means certain either).

But the same thing happened when people wanted the groove matrix and we got that.  ;) 
 
 
 

dubdisciple

Did anyone actually ask for groove  matrix? I think it was something that was cheap and easy pseudo-Ableton thing to implement.  They have made a few minor improvents but it probably gets touched less than staff view.  I doubt there are many users who are dependent on it.

Brando
Cityrat - 
Along the same lines, Vielklang 2's "hybrid score" view is the same type of thing - 
http://www.zplane.de/products/images/stories/vielklang/vk2_hybridscore.png
I would like this as a view that could be flipped from PRV - basically switching between the piano keys/note names view and the "hybrid" score type view.
I wouldn't see this as a replacement for improvements to the Staff View either - just a way to make MIDI composition from the PRV more amenable to working for wide range of users.
 

dubdisciple
stevec..thanks.  I really had no idea there was actually a demand for it.  Were you among them and did it meet the expectations?