cparmerlee
With StudioOne, I hit export and that's what happens. No muss, no fuss, and no lengthy explanations of why I didn't set my options just right.

 
I set up presets for all my export options, saves me a ton of time. And the export options with Mix Recall are fantastic. If the tradeoff is having to drag across a timeline before hitting Export, I can cope.

cparmerlee
With StudioOne, I hit export and that's what happens. No muss, no fuss, and no lengthy explanations of why I didn't set my options just right.

 
I don't think you're telling the whole story. Studio One is no different from SONAR: You have to specify the time over which it should export.
 
The only difference is that SOP sets a song length when you start, which defaults to 5 minutes. So it places an End marker automatically at 5 minutes. 
 
If you choose to mixdown something that's only two minutes, then you'll still export 5 minutes. That's a lot of wasted space. So, you need to move the end marker and specify an ending time if you don't want that to happen. Yes, you have to drag in the timeline to specify the region you want exported. You have to locate and drag a specific marker instead of just dragging, but you're still dragging in the timeline to set the end point where you want the export to end.
 
Furthermore, if the reverb extends past the End marker, it is not true the tail will be preserved. It will be cut off at the end even if it has another 10 seconds to go. Again, no different from SONAR...if you specify a time in either SOP or SONAR that indicates the end of the song and time-based effects spill over that, the tail will NOT be included in the export. I don't know of any DAW that can, based on analyzing a clip, determine how long a reverb tail will last and intelligently move the end of an export to accommodate it.
 
If you want the same behavior in SONAR, add a single marker and call it End. Now all you have to do is click in the timeline before the end, and you'll select the song from start to finish - the end you chose, not an arbitrary amount that was either chosen arbitrarily when you opened the project, or which you chose because you estimated how much time your project would take.
 
My guess is the reason why you think SOP is so easy is because your songs don't last longer than the default song time, you remember to always specify the mixdown to happen between the start and end points, and you have nothing where reverb or delay extends over the end point. Violate any of those, and you'll have the same issues as SONAR. Add an End marker in SONAR, and assuming you don't have other markers prior to it you'll have the same basic results as SOP. And if there are other markers, then drag in the timeline to specify the end...like you do with SOP.
 
FYI - when I first hit Export, even though there were clips in the project, there was a dialog that said I had to select a loop region or the start and end markers, because it had defaulted to selecting loop and I hadn't defined a loop yet. So no, you can't always just "hit export." Nor can you choose the various export options SONAR has, which brings up a very important point: with power comes a learning curve.
 
This is by no means a diss on SOP,  they made the decision to trade off power for simplicity. But because you want simplicity does not mean a program that trades off simplicity for power is any less valid. Some people are willing to study a program and learn it in depth in order to take advantage of that power. As I've said before, there are enough DAWs that there's something for everybody. It's just as meaningless for someone to deride SONAR for offering power as it would be for someone to deride SOP for ease of use. You just need to have your eyes open about what each option entails, and which fits better with your needs.

Craig, the thing is that you would normally set the beginning and ending markers once and forget about it, as soon as you have your song structure down anyway. Any project of mine might have anywhere between 5 to 15 exports between the initial sketch and the final mix going off to mastering. That's a lot of dragging on the timeline.

And of course it's not that difficult to press CTRL A of SHIFT CTRL A and drag across the timeline. But it's something very unintuive and sometimes I still mess up. This NEVER happens to me in Ableton, nor in Logic when I used it more.

John

BobF
IMO, an export option to have the time honor a pair of markers would make things really simple.

I have been exporting songs from Sonar for as long as there has been a Sonar. I have developed my own way to do an export. If new users need to know how to export the manual is a very good place to start. One thing that seems to have escaped this discussion is the nearly unlimited ways Sonar has to export audio.  A lot depends on how you setup a project.

... and I've been right there with you. 

Sanderxpander
Craig, the thing is that you would normally set the beginning and ending markers once and forget about it, as soon as you have your song structure down anyway. Any project of mine might have anywhere between 5 to 15 exports between the initial sketch and the final mix going off to mastering. That's a lot of dragging on the timeline.

As I mentioned, in SONAR you can designate one marker as an end marker, and one click in the timeline selects the region to export, from the start to that marker. That's not a lot of dragging on the timeline. In fact it involves no dragging on the timeline.
 
I feel it's silly to get hung up on this kind of thing. SONAR has more powerful export options that are more complex. SOP has less powerful export options that less complex. It shouldn't be a revelation to anyone that different software designers make different tradeoffs in the programs they write.

Starise
It has been said the software sounds good. I think it has a different sound. I'm not into the inner workings, a different summing mixer maybe? 

Fixed it for ya...(just kidding Tim, lol...)
 
Dan
 

dcumpian
It's now called "Always Stream Audio Through FX".

 
Thanks.  I never would have guessed that one. Mine was set off.  The "play tails" thing was supposedly on by default. It seems maybe this new option is off by default to save CPU/
 

Starise
Sonar already has many things that would either need to be done in other software or bought as an add on in SO3.

I agree with that. I used the mastering page in SO3 last night for the first time.  The work flow is great, but I found the plug-ins to be relatively primitive. Most of the "go to" plugs like EQ and MB compressor seem to lack the spectrum display, which is pretty much state-of-the-art in all plugs these days.  If I were using SO3 for my own projects, I'd ignore the Presonus plugs and use Izotope or whatever. But in my case, this is a collaboration, so we want to limit ourselves to the Presonus kit.
 
What I will probably do is use Izotope to get it sounding as good as I can, then try to carry similar settings over to the Presonus plugs manually.

Anderton
Also, if you have reverb that spills over the end marker in SOP, you have to move it. I know you said that SOP will preserve tails, but as far as I can tell it is not true that SOP can automatically shift the end to accommodate reverb or delay spillover. If you've found a way to make this happen, I'd like to know what it is. 

No, I'm just saying that because most of my work is either editing live recordings or else working with previously tracked material, the songs almost never grow. And I would probably never have a 10-second tail. So if I set the end marker a few seconds beyond the rightmost track, I never have to change it.
 
I will try the "select none" work flow in Sonar now that I know the option to stop moving the tails to the head of the next file.  That might be easier than what I have been doing.  If that doesn't work, then I guess the next choice is the marker technique you suggested.
 
It is clear from this discussion that some users see value in all those export options (I do not, but that is just me.) But it is also true that others find the export process quite tedious. This tells me that there is probably a way for Cakewalk to make the default export behavior much more intuitive so as not to drive off people who have not grown up on Sonar.
 

Starise

dcumpian

Starise
It has been said the software sounds good. I think it has a different sound. I'm not into the inner workings, a different summing mixer maybe? 

Fixed it for ya...(just kidding Tim, lol...)
 
Dan
 

Summin' like that :)
 
I kid you not. People say it sounds better. I can tell a difference. I say it sounds different, not necessarily better. It seems to have a softer sound, lends itself to a more glued together feeling at the mix bus. 
 
When I first heard it I didn't believe it either.

I hear you. I just think that you get used to something sounding a certain way, then you hear something different and your ear immediately thinks different=more interesting=better. Over time, if you get used to the "new" sound, when you switch back, the same will likely happen in the other direction. If you mix to a certain specific sound, you can replicate that sound in any modern DAW, no question.
 
Dan

I've also never been able to one click this. Unless your song starts at 1:1:000 I guess.
Which is almost never convenient.

I can one click between two markers and it selects that range. But I can't then shift click to add other between-marker-ranges. And that's again besides the point. I'm not arguing it's difficult to do any of these things. Just that the selection process is a relatively unnecessary step (at least other DAWs don't need it) and it's too easy to mess up once in a while.

konradh
Does Studio One have a Staff View?  I am not planning to change, but I am curious.  I do 80% of my work in Staff View.

Not as far as I can tell.  I think you have to buy Notion. But the good news is that Notion is somewhat tightly integrated with SO.  It is certainly more tightly integrated than having to export to MusicXML back and forth, but probably not as tightly integrated as Sonar's staff view.
 
In other words, I don't think Notion would work as smoothly as using Sonar's staff view for real-time composition. I do not have Notion, so I cannot speak from experience.

Not sure why some are having Export Tails trouble as I don't seem to (in fact my Preferences is set to 0:00), BUT... would bouncing each track with FX applied work?

I downloaded the Studio One demona few days ago (Mac version), really because I thought I'd see what the fuss is about and switch to it if I find it does a better job for me.

Now, bear in mind this is the Mac version and some of my initial impressions may not hold for the Windows version.

The first performance-related thing I noticed is that latency in S1 is worse than I get in either Sonar or Logic at the same buffer/bit depth etc. settings. Not much, but noticable. To get the same latency (actually very slightly less) 64 sample buffers give in Sonar or Logic (which perform equally) I have to drop the buffer to 32 samples. Which does not help cpu usage at all.

I find S1's way of doing many things fairly unintuitive, certainly harder to switch between than Sonar to Logic (or vice versa). I find myself reading the manual for quite basic things I could 'just do' in Sonar/Logic because how to do it was obvious. At least to me.

S1’s plugin management isn't particularly good, it shows the AU, VST and VST3 versions of plugs at the same time without distinguishing between them and duplicates a lot of entries in the list - e.g. Plugin X might be listed three times under the company name 'Plugin Maker' and again under the company 'Plugin Maker Ltd."

I'm not keen on the gui either, though that's a personal preference. Not keen on the meters either.

So far I'm finding it hard work to use and I'm not at all sure I'd want to use it as a main DAW. Having said that for someone new to DAWs it may be more easily understood. But the latency issue is a definite, reproducible downside and I need low latency for DAW-monitoring quite a few tracks at a time.

On the plus side it installed easily enough, it remains to be seen if uninstalling is as simple.

Another plus is that it tells you what the latency each plugin is adding is, which is very useful.