I want a platinum album feature.

make the instruments in the TTS more exspressive and realistic, so we dont have to create CPU munching extra instances of (ex: DimPro) for ensemble building...

fantastic list! I see there are mostly Steinberg features which are definitely missing in Sonar.. would be great to get these. I really hope a few even make it into Sonar 8. My favourites:

ORIGINAL: rdolmat


2. No time-slider in Import>Audio or Rip CD dialog?! What?!?! What if I want to hear the last 12 seconds of a 5 minute file?

3. Plugin delay compensation bypass. ie: I'm at 99% of my finished mixdown (with plugins and UAD plugs etc), but got inspired to add one more piano MIDI track. I will get 100ms of latency with all the plugins, so I have to bypass every single effect bin in every track and group...blah... One button would solve this.

6. Console/Track highlighting. Another feature I thought would be obvious. Select a track in the track view, the same channel highlights in the console. Simple. Smart.

8. "Select All Following" - hit a key command, and all the clips FOLLOWING the NOW TIME get highlighted. SUPER important when editing for film, dialog etc.

9. "Move to Now" - select a clip, hit a key command and the clip snaps to the current NOW TIME position. VITAL when syncing effects etc for film etc...

10. Macro Recorder. For the ability to chain several Sonar commands in a row and trigger it by a single key command.

12. The ability to scrub clips WITHOUT having to turn off a mute button or putting the channel fader up. Handy if you are importing someone else's OMF and need to hear what a specific clip is without going through more steps/mouse clicks.

13. Perhaps simmer down on the vertical scroll? ie: I'm zoomed in to see two audio tracks at a time, and I want to ALT-SELECT a region across several tracks to remove silence..when I bring the mouse cursor down to the bottom of the track view...the page just TAKES OFF and I'm suddenly looking at my last track (and have WAY more tracks selected than I wanted). Can we SMOOTH the vertical scroll a little more (instead of JUMPING track by track?)

18. Ability to automate mute & solo buttons on busses/groups!?!?!?! How can you miss this one?!?!

21. Make a more obvious indicator in the FX bin when editing a plug. So I double-click a compressor plugin, perhaps highlight/circle the compressor name in the FX bin with a bright red or light blue color so I know which plug on which track I'm working with? especially helpful when having 4 plugins open at once.

22. Where the heck are the simple RW/FF controls? Yes, I know we can go measure-by-measure, or spend all day making markers. But what if I just want to RW back a few beats in front of the current bar?

23. How about the simple ability to ENABLE WRITE AUTOMATION while already in playback?!

24. Some kind of indicator on controls that already have automation? (check out REASON for this feature). Highlighting or circling the control with a green colour to show it already has automation? (of course, this will be user optional in the prefs.)

27. Simple Waveform drawing tool (to take out 1-sample ticks etc....). Very basic, Very obvious, Very useful...please?!?!

28. A MUCH more accurate (aka: LESS WILD) scrub. Something smooth with shuttle option on single tracks.

29. The ability to assign the track name to all clips on the same track. ie: I dbl-click the track name, rename it and hit SHIFT-ENTER, and that will also rename all clips to the same name.

30. Please tell me there's a way to GROUP CLIPS in the track window? PLease!?!?! please tell me. I can't find anything in the help file.

31. A useable AUDIO POOL (like Cubase SX)!!

32. Make the GRID LINES IN THE PIANO ROLL change to the same as grid value. ie: if I select 1/8 note for grid, put some darn 1/8 note grid lines! If I select 1/16 notes for grid value, then show some 1/16th note grid lines!

33. Give us at least a LITTLE flexibility with fades on audio clips!!! (ie: more than 3 basic fade curves, the ability to use points in a fade-curve option window etc)

34. Please make it possible to turn on/off the audio metronome during playback.

40. Treat the bus channels more like regular mixer channels! ie: we should be able to Actively SELECT bus channels (the same way as tracks), and ALSO MAKE THE SELECTED BUS CHANNEL SHOW UP ON MY MCU'S SELECT LIGHT TOO PLEASE!!!

41. another 'inspector' type of window for showing audio clip information (ie: total clip length, start time, end time etc..) in user selectable time bases, ie: ms, samples, beats, smpte time etc... IN REAL TIME. Not some kind of right-click>show info window...

43. Make the 'un-solo ALL' button work for busses too please! Please do not treat the busses so differently from the regular audio channels (ie: allow selectable busses, allow mute/solo automation etc).

44. When dragging/dropping midi or audio clips from explorer to the track view, please make it a more obvious display of where we're dropping them? (ie: make a long vertical bar pointer at the beginning of the clip along with a tooltip stating current bar position?!)

46. Capture last take as recording ( if you just play around with your song on a miditrack whithout being in record mode, you can press a key and Voilá what you just played is now recorded, like magic. Logic and Cubase have the feature since years ago)

47. Legato "quantize" Your midi notes will be shortened or lengthend( is that a word?) to just reach the next midinote and not overlapping

49. The ability to change project sample rates WITHOUT having to start a new project and re-import the tracks and re-create the busses and the mix levels etc.

51. introduce a track delay positive or negative, I've found only Time+ for midi, But Audio?

52. Pen tool to draw out single sample clicks etc...!!!

1. Keybindings to scan codes rather than just alt+ctrl+ whatever so I can bind the transport controls on a modern multimedia keyboard!!!

2. Less limiting MIDI keybindings - why do I need a shift function to enable them?.

3. The step sequencer to work more like a drum machine i.e when you hit a note, the row on the grid flashes for that note - this makes a lot of sense when you're using a drum map. Also when recording, I'd like to hit a note e.g on a drumpad and have the step sequencer record it, then on the next pass if I hit that note at the exact same time, it's erased, just like those ole-fashioned drum machines used to work....

4. Lose the modal dialogues (as someone else has said). Do it, please do it.....

5. Ability to define multiple loops and enable/disable each one independently, rather than just the single current loop

6. Play order lists

7. Some kind of configurable full-duplex control surface plugin that both sends and receives MIDI messages. Or make ACT full-duplex and not require a PhD in rocket science to figure it out....

8. Vertical track view. This is a new paradigm where the tracks flow in vertical lanes rather than horizontally. A split screen gives you faders at the bottom which line up with the tracks at the top, so this is kind of a hybrid console/audio view. I would love this as, to me, it doesn't matter which way time flows (left to right, top to bottom, so what?) and you could then do a LOT more editing easily on a single screen.

ORIGINAL: ruudvee

My wish:

Show my keystrokes on my synth on the pianoroll, please, please, please......

+1

And find a way to display arps from synths (even just for CW synths).

oh yeah, this one would be awesome although it will probably never happen:

When working in Wavelab, you can grab and move the the meters outside of the application's window. You can shrink the app's window and still see all the meters, and move them freely around the screen. Also the borders of the meter's windows don't have the ugly blue MS window border. Working like this is a real liberating feeling, esp. with multiple monitors. I wish all of sonar's windows could do this... console/ track view, etc. No need to resize the app's window to perfection everytime you switch to one monitor, then back to two.

Console view:
Please make it so that when I hide EQ/FX/Sends etc, in Console view, the bottom of the window is the part that I really want to see not the top. I want to always see the track names, outputs, and fader. Currently the resulting redrawn window almost always cuts off this information, making the whole purpose of 'hiding' in order to see more, a wasteful exercise.

Any news on when we'll actually GET a Sonar 8?

Wow, some new features I had never thought about popped up in this thread:

+ indicate keystrokes in PRV (SO helpful, I realize I use this with NI synths all the time)
+ multiple track view windows (assuming with very different zoom settings)
+ turning the PRV so it scrolls up/down instead of left/right. This would put the virtual keyboard on the bottom, oriented so it's easier to figure out parts

Good job folks!

I'll repost the ones I posted before for the version 8 list, since I'm pretty sure they won't be implemented in the version 8 release.

Grabber Tool
If Sonar had a grabber tool like the one in Photoshop, it would make our lives so much easier. Right now the only way for me to get around a giant full page of Piano Roll is to use the scroll bars or the scroll arrows, with no way to jump around to the octave/track I need to be at very fast (Navigation view doesn't help in this case since it doesn't work with the piano roll). If Sonar had the grabber tool, we would be able to move around extremely fast.

For those of you that don't use Photoshop, the grabber tool is basically like this: You hold down space bar, and then you click and hold anywhere on the canvas, and then simply move the entire canvas in any direction your mouse moves, at any angle. Something like that for the Piano Roll would be awesome.

Improve Envelop tools
I think the envelop tool is pretty clunky right now. Often I want to select only one node but a bunch of other nodes will get highlighted, and sometimes it's hard to select a node if the now time cursor is in the same spot. It's also hard to select the envelop to change the curve too, as the line is sometimes too thin and you end up selecting everything else around it instead, no matter how hard you try. I use envelop automation extensively (to get a more expressive playback from my orchestral instruments), and it really annoys me.

We need to be able to:

-Select any node we want without accidentally selecting other nodes too.
-Precise control of how to select one or more nodes. Right now you can ctrl+click to select more than one node, but I can't seem to select all nodes by shift+click between two nodes on opposite ends of an array of nodes.
-Once I ctrl or shift selected more than one node, if I want to go back to selecting just one of the already selected nodes and deselect all other selected nodes, I'd have to click outside the envelop to do it. There just be another way? Why can't I simply click on the node I want to remain selected and it'll automatically deselect the other nodes?
-Easier/more accurate ways to select anything about the envelop, since it's so tiny.

In Cubase's Piano Roll when you press a note on MIDI keyboard, corresponding key on the virtual PRV keyboard blinks. Maybe not a big time feature, but I'd love to see it in Sonar.

ORIGINAL: Vovchik

In Cubase's Piano Roll when you press a note on MIDI keyboard, corresponding key on the virtual PRV keyboard blinks. Maybe not a big time feature, but I'd love to see it in Sonar.

Oh hell yeah! That would be awesome!

I would like to be able to rename the display names of fx instances in the fx bin (the same way synths can be renamed in the synth rack) and have the new names also be indicated in the title bar when the fx instance is opened.

Question about autoscroll is the most frequently asked question ever.

Followed closely by: "When will SONAR <X> be out?".

BTW, when will SONAR 9 be out?

Serioulsy, I want number 9 (number 9, number 9) to be ALL about features (even "fixed" ones) rather than new plug-ins.

1. Customizable Interface.
2. All Effects Bypass/Reset to Previous State (maybe an effects folder that others propose?)
3. Runs on USB stick.

I would love to see segregation abolished and the Bus Pane become a thing of the past. Make bus objects or whatever marketing name sounds good and let me put them where I want. More and more I find the Bus Pane to be an obstruction. Why not integrate them into the track view, Shift B can then hide/show the bus objects and ctrl+shift B can hide/show the track objects.

I can even imagine that a bus object could function something like a folder and be able to show all the tracks feeding that bus as a means of sorting. I would love to see my Drum Submix bus at the top or bottom of my drums tracks without a whole lot of scrolling and track/bus zooming. That would make it so handy when trying to locate an "over" or any specific transient event.

Sonar needs Rosa Parks on the development team. No More Segregation!

ORIGINAL: Marah Mag

ORIGINAL: bapu

BTW, when will SONAR 9 be out?

Early upgraders should start receiving their Sonar 9 in approximately 365 days.

I was looking for something more concrete.