Sonar Playlist

It would be very very great if the Sonar Playlist could be manipulated via MIDI :
 
Example
 
Song 01 is accessible with * (press a MIDI key to choose a bank) and * (press a MIDI key to choose a song within that bank) That would be so useful live ! I could not find any sequencer program that do that. Cakewalk could be the first to implement this simple feature in his flagship app

yes. i would definitely make use of that :-)

I'm planning to use Sonar Platinum on a laptop to run a live show...in addition to controlling the playlist playback with time delay and computer keyboard (which is somewhat OK), it sure would be nice and convenient to be able to assign a midi channel and note to start/stop each project in the playlist. That way, any member of the band can manually start the playback of the project from a controller without having access to the computer keyboard directly.  Another feature that would be useful would be to have the ability to select if the next project in the list should automatically load (but not play) after the end of the current project playback.  This function would 'cue up' the next project so that it is ready to go when in a performance situation.  Some of the drum kit VSTi's have rather large sample libraries to load!  (Note - This may already be the case, I haven't messed with playlists too much yet (still building the projects), but I believe the project loads after the keyboard input is received.)
 
Hope others find these suggestions useful and they can get added...it would make the playlist feature much better in my opinion!  Thanks...and keep the updates coming!
 
- Jeff 

The new "Floating Window" playlist is bad because there is no longer a "Pin to Top" button. It does stay on top but the focus doesn't stay with the playlist and the "N" key doesn't work unless you take your mouse and highlight it first. Also, and for my purposes has made it unusable is the scroll line is mostly invisible in this version when using the playlist. We use it in a live production setting where we have visible cues on the project and we need to see when they are coming up. Without the scroll line, we can't. This new version seems to load the next song slower than before and time is of the essence in our productions. I can say that the command center does a great job in reverting to earlier versions. I needed to in this case.

FreeFlyBertl
 
Hi Jeff,
I would not go on stage having drum VSTi to load for individual songs ... I wouldn't even load a single (unless you trigger them live via e-drums but in that case I would put the VSTi on a different machine to distribute loads) ... anyway, you may want to read up on some of the recent threads on the playlist, there are some really advanced long time users of the playlist around (look maybe for Kicksville posts)

Thanks FreeFlyBertl...I am using V-Drums (and other triggers/controllers) to fire the VSTi's, so I do need to have them running, as well as different kits/patches for each song.  We are still working out the details on the tech side and will be doing some testing soon.  I suppose it would be possible to run the 'live' drums and misc samplers off our backup machine, and have the main machine just play the tracks.  Thanks for the suggestion on that...well worth considering!  Seems like the few standalone hardware vsti players that used to exist have all but vanished.  If anyone has any leads on something still out there PM me the info if you would be so kind, that might also be a viable option.

Notecrusher
I used the Sonar playlist on a gig once. It was one of the most disastrous gigs I've ever played. That thing needs an overhaul if it's going to become a serious live tool.

Ever since we use the playlist live (X3e) it has worked fine for us, but we might have different expectations, equipment and degree of testing ...

Cactus Music
the time counter set to count backwards but of course Sonar doesn't have a solid ending does it... songs are all infinite.  

that should be doable for Cake because in the playlist songs (i.e. Sonar *.prj files) are actually finite. The prj file is read when a song is added to the playlist and its actual length determined (which is important if you have songs to start automatically one after the other like we do).