Sonar's Options and Preferences.

 Is it just me(very likely, it is, but I'm asking the board anyways), or are Sonar's options kind of a mess. I am learning to enjoy the software more and more, but the deeper I get, the more confused I get about the overlying -err, I dunno, philosophy?- philosophy of the layout. Like why this option is global, but that one is per project, or, like why this option has a button in the track options, but that button you have to go digging it out of Preferences, then you still gotta dig around to figure out whether it is global or per project and if it is per project then you gotta go and mess around with your Normal Template if you want it to stick.
 Before anyone feels compelled to tell me, I know that I can save at least a couple of those steps by making one of them opening the manual or help documents. My experience with computer programmes is not huge. My day job has me using off-the-shelf and turn-key windows software( email, a little bit of sign-making, SAP, MASS, ect ). My music hobby has me messing around with Ableton Live, Reaper, And Sonar. 
 I guess I should start trying to make my point here. Okay: Generally, dealing with computer programmes, when I need to change an option or preference, and I am not sure where it is, a lot of times I can find it simply by guessing " it's probably in with...(some other option or preference whose location I do know)". This is much more difficult with Sonar (worse now with X3, but still kinda wonky when I picked it up with 8.5).
 I am truly seeking guidance here. This is not a troll.
 
respek

Yeah they could probably do with some reorganization. The problem is that if they changed the options layout then they'd get the inevitable barrage of complaints along the lines of "I have used Sonar since the days of Cakewalk on DOS and now I can't even figure out how to reset my VST's" etc. 

Member Sharke touched on some of my last post while I was typing it.
 
 
 
minor grammar error corrected

I would love to see some way to save preferences as presets. You could save a lot of time.

I just mean something like putting the most common audio driver settings across three different menus. What may be a good decision from the developer's POV can still be a bad decision from the user's POV. But whatever, I think we all agree some reorganization would be useful :)

How often do you need to go into preferences? Most of it is set-and-forget for me.
 
As to distributing things over multiple screens, I assume one of the reasons is because you can access several pages from inside Sonar. For example, one Preference I do access a lot is snap to grid, but I can access that with a right-click on the toolbar snap button. Metronome preferences work similarly. 
 
I could see needing to disable ins and outs relatively often on the devices page so you don't have open inputs, but in that case, I would prefer to have the page allocated to seeing as much I/O as possible (as it's set now) compared to having all the other parameters on there that are set and forget, which would require scrolling through a smaller view of I/O devices.
 
There's always room for improvement, but given the set-and-forget and subjective nature of preferences, it seems not worth spending the resources. However, if people could come up with a use case for a specific change and why it's useful, I assume it would be considered but it would need to be universally useful. Here's an example: Currently, if you right-click on an audio track's input field, nothing happens. It could call up the preferences page for enabling I/O. But in that case, you probably would want to keep that function as a separate page rather than also jamming in things like whether to have the MMCSS option checkbox, which has nothing to do with choosing I/O. So while that change would work for me, it would work against those who want to see all the audio functions consolidated on one page...which would also work against people with a lot of I/O and want to see as much of it as possible...but would be fine if your're using a 2 x 2 interface.
 
So I guess the next step would be a preferences menu on how to set up your preferences... But again, how much do you really need to go in there? If it's something you do a lot, then I think it would make more sense to make it accessible from within the program, like you can with Snap to Grid.
 
 
 
 

Administrator Anderton posted his while I was typing mine. I hate that. It makes it look like I ignored Anderton's post.

Craig, I for instance need to switch driver modes, inputs and outputs, buffer sizes and that kind of thing a lot. I have my home/studio system which is fixed, but I bring my laptop to lots of places. When it's just my laptop and I'm doing some editing, I use MME just for playback because neither WDM nor ASIO4ALL give me any kind of stability. When I'm at one of my workplaces, I plug into the Behringer X32 that they have since it's already completely hooked up to everything else. I just finished a recording session using a borrowed RME FireFace 400 and when I have to bring my own box it's an M-Audio Fast Track Pro that I still haven't been able to afford to make obsolete.
 
My laptop also has different disk response so sometimes I have to tweak the buffers there. I don't see why we couldn't have a single tab with most of those things in one place, perhaps putting some under an "advanced" tab or button. While I realize this will still mean navigating multiple pages, the point is that right now it's not really clear where to look. For instance, I have to set the "driver mode" in "Playback and Recording" rather than in "Driver Settings". There's a whole bunch of other settings in the former page that could easily go in some kind of "advanced" menu. Just one example.
 
It's hardly a deal breaker and I appreciate that there are multiple ways of looking at this and many other features and niggles to add and fix first. But if someone says "do Sonar's preferences look like a bit of a mess to you" I have to say yes.

Anderton
How often do you need to go into preferences? Most of it is set-and-forget for me.

same here, makes me wonder why there's a shortcut key bound for opening the preferences dialog?

If it is primarily AUD.ini changes a bat/cmd file could handle it. If it involved registry changes maybe different Windows users would help.

 On the other hand, my aspiration to "Power-User" of Sonar is a lot stronger than my aspiration to "Super-User" on the RR SAP network. Maybe I dig deeper into Sonar. Maybe if I took my day job a little more seriously, I would be, right now, on the SAP user forum, asking why everything can't make sense just like Cakewalk Sonar X3e.

worstcaseontario
 I guess I could say that the Windows parts of Sonar came after the mainframe version, as well.

SONAR has always been a Windows application. The versions of SAP I have worked with ran on multiple servers and thousands of desk top machines. I don't think it is helpful equating a product like SONAR designed to run on a single Windows machine to a multi-user client-server business application. Is there a single user version of SAP which runs on a single PC? Anyway it would seem a distraction, if one is looking for solutions to SONAR issues.
 
I was hesitant to reply to this thread until Sanderxpander gave a specific use case. If my reply to Sanderxpander provided a solution to your issue even better.

One of the delightful aspects of SAP for me was navigating the help system and having it suddenly switch to German. Something SONAR has yet to do. Even more fun was watching Seibel and SAP consultants spend millions of other peoples money and produce nothing. Good times.