This just in....

This is great-
"That became actually the big Beatle policy. It was always to put a really serious B side on there – so you got "Strawberry Fields" with "Penny Lane," and people now talk about that. That was a factor of the Beatles' success, I think. It was always a killer B side, which people often thought was as good or better than the A side."

 

I use Cubase...it's a heavy-weight DAW...feature wise
(especially MIDI) miles ahead of Sonar.  No it doesn't 
have the PC,...but, while the PC looks killer...it's only a 
secondary (but placed Primary) FX Bin, a "redundant FX Bin"
which are VST's with a proprietary interface, so technically it's
"eye candy" with no true benefit other then ease of access to 
controls and looking way kewl...it also causes the program
to use more memory, both RAM and Graphics, to accommodate it.


As far as the interface goes in Sonar, I love it...but there are
DAW's that have taken the docking concept way beyond
what Sonar does...

If Sonar ever gets their MIDI up to par, they'd probably be
getting a lot more customers.  IMO, Sonars MIDI editing is
horrendous....but that's just MO...I've used $50 DAW's
that edited MIDI better then Sonar, and had better Scoring
capabilities...Cake targets the "Audio Recording" Musician,
at the expense of (and loss of sales to) the MIDI Musician.
They need to stop giving "Fluff" and starting adding real
world usage enhancements to capture a bigger market.

Cubase does both...hence its ranking in use...in Europe
it's used more then Pro Tools...

Ok, you can throw rocks now...

That should finish him off!

wow... u all gots me lookin at cubase... haven't used it since the ol' atari days! I notice lots of cubase users in the orchestral field... 
 
I was gonna post, the more important question being: what would Lennon use?  He was the visionary in so many realms which resonate with my spirit.  Meh on McC...
 
but the cubase discussion has piqued my interest... actually, being able to see more and quickly, as was depicted in the recent shreddage video... and other vids I've been consuming to acquire insights into orchestrating...and eligantly depicting/editing data... don't know if it's my clutziness or lack of skill and will try to figure this first... but as I work on bigger trackloads...
 
bottom line for me.... it ain't about the money.... money is but a figment... it's about effective creating and knocking out videoable fragments to elicit change...
 
My buddy keeps pimpin' Ableton, after buying x3pro at my urging and finding it didn't resonate.  He just moved on... no ugliness, nasty posts... all a waste of time...
 
My bigggggg issue is cumbersome Kontakt/midi and audio tracks visualizations and not really fealin' capable of keepin' track of it all, which will only get worse with Albion's huge track load to come....Navigating this quickly is important to me as I want to produce climate music quickly/elegantly as I can muster, without the clugyness of programs...I DON'T read music, but would love any midi/notation assistance in quickly generating powerful ostinatos (sp) which will scream... and now I have shreddage!  (thanks Andrew)
 
Oh what to do, where to go...

Kroneborge
I've tried Cubase a couple of times, but the work flow just never made sense to me.  Maybe I just never gave it a fair enough shake.  But Sonar just made sense.   Most times when I'm want to do something that something is in a logical (for me place).

For me just replace Cubase with both Reaper and Studio One Pro and the above resonates.
 
I'll probably never really have the time to delve as deeply in those other two as I do in SOANR but I will try.

cclarry
I use Cubase...it's a heavy-weight DAW...feature wise
(especially MIDI) miles ahead of Sonar.  No it doesn't 
have the PC,...but, while the PC looks killer...it's only a 
secondary (but placed Primary) FX Bin, a "redundant FX Bin"
which are VST's with a proprietary interface, so technically it's
"eye candy" with no true benefit other then ease of access to 
controls and looking way kewl...it also causes the program
to use more memory, both RAM and Graphics, to accommodate it.


 

Sadly, there is a lot of truth to the above statement.  If the PC could be an option (I guess for looking cool?), and all of the PC FX could be put in the FX bin, and have the console view consisting of modules with drag-able sizing (especially sends and FX), might actually be more useful.  I guess that would have to make all the PC FX a VST as well...probably something that will never happen.

strikinglyhandsome1
That should finish him off!

If that's all it would take, he can have mine and I'll buy another one.

jimusic
Me too Larry.
I switched to Cubase last summer when I got a great deal for it, including HALion 4 [now 5] for free, just a month or so before Sonar X3 was released - all the while waiting & wondering & waiting some more & wondering even more as we all were, during Cake's ridiculous 'cone of silence', instead of giving some very simple replies that they absolutely refused to honor their loyal customers with.
 
Remember???
 
That's when a number of us jumped ship.
 
Cubase is way ahead, particularly for MIDI, which is 90% of what I do.
 

 
I remember.
 
For me it was the removal of the Layers feature that was in X1, to be replaced with the new & buggy Lanes feature in X2. Then the paid upgrade to fix them in X3.
I have X3c installed but since working in Cubase I haven't used it on a project in over a year now.
I might again someday, I have alot money invested in Cakewalk products since 1999.
Both daws have strong & weakpoints but Steinberg's getting my $ now.

Can't imagine trying to do my latest projects in X3. Not having nested folders alone would drive me mad.

For me Sonar's biggest problem is stability, especially if you're using a lot of VSTi's. I think one of the reasons the problems in this respect don't get more mention is because its user base is weighted toward the audio guys - indeed if you take a look at the song forum on any particular day, 90% of it seems to be audio recordings of real instruments as opposed to electronica or other MIDI-heavy projects. You don't see many techno guys using it. 
 
I like to go nuts with synths. Lots of them, and tons of automation on each one. I'm forever loading synths, deleting them, replacing them, loading new ones etc. And this is where I think Sonar falls down. The longer I work on a project, the more weirdness, instability and corruption creeps into it. I've had projects that have taken 10 launch attempts before I can load them without crashing. I also have a very annoying and ongoing problem with Native Instruments effects that reset all of their dials to zero whenever the project starts playback. It's been happening to me for almost 2 years, ever since I bought Komplete, and has even followed me to a brand new machine with a fresh install of everything. Having invested so much in Native Instruments stuff (2 versions of Komplete with upgrades to Ultimate), it's a real pain and means I'm never 100% confident about using the instruments and effects that I want to use. The problem seems to have perplexed the Bakers so far (fingers crossed), and Native Instruments say they have never heard of it (perhaps because the vast majority of their customers use other DAW's).
 
I've also started to see a problem whereby a project with Melodyne in it crashes every time on load (and the error message tells me it's Melodyne's fault). Going to send that one to the Bakers when I get the chance. 
 
I have a few Sonar projects that have become so corrupted and problematic and crashy that I've had no choice but to abandon them and reconstruct them from scratch. As you can imagine that's a huge amount of work and not really acceptable. Luckily this is just a hobby for me at present. 
 
Another huge problem in Sonar is moving large amounts of data around - inserting measures, deleting measures, that sort of thing. It has never worked properly for me and I've heard a lot of other people say the same thing. When inserting or deleting measures (i.e. empty space), you just want the rest of the project to move left or right accordingly. More often than not, you either get crashes or the automation you've painstakingly constructed doesn't move with the clips (even if you have that selected in the options). Lassoing the whole thing and dragging it manually is also very problematic and very rarely works properly. This for me is one of the biggest disappointments of Sonar. Moving around whole blocks of a composition is a fundamental part of the arrangement process and should work seamlessly and intuitively. It seemed that way when I used Pro Tools, never had a problem. With Sonar it's so problematic that it affects my composition choices. Shall I insert those 8 extra measures I've been thinking of? Better not - I'm likely to go through a whole evening of problems just getting the rest of the project (including automation) to slide along 8 measures. When you're letting the technical limitations of your DAW dictate something so musically fundamental as the arrangement of the song, it's not good. When you were looking forward to an evening of right-brained musical creativity and you end up spending the whole night wrestling with left-brained technical problems, something's wrong. It's especially painful for me given that work & personal commitments mean I only have a limited amount of time every day to be musical. 
 
So yeah, I've thought about and continue to think about other DAW's all the time. I really need something which can handle very synth-heavy projects without crashing, something which facilitates the creation and manipulation of a ton of complex automation seamlessly and without confusion. I need something which works with my creativity, not against it. Right now Sonar isn't working for me in that respect. I stick with it though, a) because I don't want to spend the money and the time buying/learning another DAW, and b) despite these problems, there is a lot about Sonar which I love, and I've become sort of attached to the little blighter. So I'm sticking around in the hope that the problems which sting me every day get sorted out eventually. Maybe I'm mad 

vintagevibe

sharkeI also have a very annoying and ongoing problem with Native Instruments effects that reset all of their dials to zero whenever the project starts playback. It's been happening to me for almost 2 years, ever since I bought Komplete, and has even followed me to a brand new machine with a fresh install of everything. Having invested so much in Native Instruments stuff (2 versions of Komplete with upgrades to Ultimate), it's a real pain and means I'm never 100% confident about using the instruments and effects that I want to use. The problem seems to have perplexed the Bakers so far (fingers crossed), and Native Instruments say they have never heard of it (perhaps because the vast majority of their customers use other DAW's).
 

I used to have similar issues with Kontakt and Battery.  If I recall the fix had to do with right clicking on track MIDI controls and checking "disable".

There is a fix for this.  Somewhere in midi settings there is a set controllers to zero box you need to uncheck.  Can someone chime in on this?  Not in front of my DAW right now.

vintagevibe

sharkeI also have a very annoying and ongoing problem with Native Instruments effects that reset all of their dials to zero whenever the project starts playback. It's been happening to me for almost 2 years, ever since I bought Komplete, and has even followed me to a brand new machine with a fresh install of everything. Having invested so much in Native Instruments stuff (2 versions of Komplete with upgrades to Ultimate), it's a real pain and means I'm never 100% confident about using the instruments and effects that I want to use. The problem seems to have perplexed the Bakers so far (fingers crossed), and Native Instruments say they have never heard of it (perhaps because the vast majority of their customers use other DAW's).
 

I used to have similar issues with Kontakt and Battery.  If I recall the fix had to do with right clicking on track MIDI controls and checking "disable".

What exactly do you mean by that? The only MIDI track controls I can see that have that option are the pan, volume, chorus & reverb controls, and all of those are set to "disabled" by default anyway. In my case, the problem isn't so much with Kontakt and Battery as it is with NI effects, including Reaktor FX and Guitar Rig. None of them have MIDI input enabled. For example, I've recently been having a problem with an instance of Guitar Rig on a track. All it has in the rack is Psychedelay, and 5 out of 10 times I launch the project, that effect has its controls zeroed. I also use the Resochord effect in Reaktor quite a lot, and that has this ongoing problem whereby all the controls reset to zero when I first hit play when the project's loaded, or even if I just hit W to rewind back to the start of the project. 

sharke

vintagevibe

sharkeI also have a very annoying and ongoing problem with Native Instruments effects that reset all of their dials to zero whenever the project starts playback. It's been happening to me for almost 2 years, ever since I bought Komplete, and has even followed me to a brand new machine with a fresh install of everything. Having invested so much in Native Instruments stuff (2 versions of Komplete with upgrades to Ultimate), it's a real pain and means I'm never 100% confident about using the instruments and effects that I want to use. The problem seems to have perplexed the Bakers so far (fingers crossed), and Native Instruments say they have never heard of it (perhaps because the vast majority of their customers use other DAW's).
 

I used to have similar issues with Kontakt and Battery.  If I recall the fix had to do with right clicking on track MIDI controls and checking "disable".

What exactly do you mean by that? The only MIDI track controls I can see that have that option are the pan, volume, chorus & reverb controls, and all of those are set to "disabled" by default anyway. In my case, the problem isn't so much with Kontakt and Battery as it is with NI effects, including Reaktor FX and Guitar Rig. None of them have MIDI input enabled. For example, I've recently been having a problem with an instance of Guitar Rig on a track. All it has in the rack is Psychedelay, and 5 out of 10 times I launch the project, that effect has its controls zeroed. I also use the Resochord effect in Reaktor quite a lot, and that has this ongoing problem whereby all the controls reset to zero when I first hit play when the project's loaded, or even if I just hit W to rewind back to the start of the project. 

Yea it sounds like a different problem than I had.  Patch/Bank change?  Just shooting in the dark.

Wow, shark... Never had a clue! I, like you had perpetual stability issues which also followed me for years. Recently upgraded my power line out to my cottage and its largely disappeared. Even though i had a high quality line conditioner apparently it couldn't handle my flaky connection. I can't believe the difference.

I will hope midi/notation gets a huge upgrade next... The bakers have gotten the rest pretty nice

As to inserting measures, I WOULD LOVE TO BE ABLE TO HIGHLIGHT AREAS, LIKE IN COMPING AND JUST RT CLICK AND HAVE AN OPTION TO ADD, CUT, PASTE, DELETE
MEASURES... Something more elegant and intuitive.

I did watch a number of cubase vids. Which were interesting...but my attempts to try other daws todate (ableton/presonus) has me running back and glad for X..

I am still challenged by the depiction of midi/audio tracks on large kontakt/multi tamberal instruments but I'm sure it's my own ignorance or my brains age which makes such things challenging... If the bakers could come up with a way to revolutionize using these instruments like they did with comping i would b stoked...

vintagevibe

sharke

vintagevibe

sharkeI also have a very annoying and ongoing problem with Native Instruments effects that reset all of their dials to zero whenever the project starts playback. It's been happening to me for almost 2 years, ever since I bought Komplete, and has even followed me to a brand new machine with a fresh install of everything. Having invested so much in Native Instruments stuff (2 versions of Komplete with upgrades to Ultimate), it's a real pain and means I'm never 100% confident about using the instruments and effects that I want to use. The problem seems to have perplexed the Bakers so far (fingers crossed), and Native Instruments say they have never heard of it (perhaps because the vast majority of their customers use other DAW's).
 

I used to have similar issues with Kontakt and Battery.  If I recall the fix had to do with right clicking on track MIDI controls and checking "disable".

What exactly do you mean by that? The only MIDI track controls I can see that have that option are the pan, volume, chorus & reverb controls, and all of those are set to "disabled" by default anyway. In my case, the problem isn't so much with Kontakt and Battery as it is with NI effects, including Reaktor FX and Guitar Rig. None of them have MIDI input enabled. For example, I've recently been having a problem with an instance of Guitar Rig on a track. All it has in the rack is Psychedelay, and 5 out of 10 times I launch the project, that effect has its controls zeroed. I also use the Resochord effect in Reaktor quite a lot, and that has this ongoing problem whereby all the controls reset to zero when I first hit play when the project's loaded, or even if I just hit W to rewind back to the start of the project. 

Yea it sounds like a different problem than I had.  Patch/Bank change?  Just shooting in the dark.

I've never knowingly initiated a patch/bank change myself, and wouldn't know how to see if Sonar had initiated one behind my back. Would this apply to effects though? They don't have MIDI input enabled.

sharke
 
Luckily this is just a hobby for me at present. 
 
Another huge problem in Sonar is moving large amounts of data around - inserting measures, deleting measures, that sort of thing. It has never worked properly for me and I've heard a lot of other people say the same thing. When inserting or deleting measures (i.e. empty space), you just want the rest of the project to move left or right accordingly. More often than not, you either get crashes or the automation you've painstakingly constructed doesn't move with the clips (even if you have that selected in the options). Lassoing the whole thing and dragging it manually is also very problematic and very rarely works properly. This for me is one of the biggest disappointments of Sonar. Moving around whole blocks of a composition is a fundamental part of the arrangement process and should work seamlessly and intuitively. It seemed that way when I used Pro Tools, never had a problem. With Sonar it's so problematic that it affects my composition choices. Shall I insert those 8 extra measures I've been thinking of? Better not - I'm likely to go through a whole evening of problems just getting the rest of the project (including automation) to slide along 8 measures. When you're letting the technical limitations of your DAW dictate something so musically fundamental as the arrangement of the song, it's not good.
 
Maybe I'm mad 

sharke - that doesn't sound like your usual chipper self.

Have you tried for arrangement shuffling the simple technique of Select All, then Select By Time (under Edit), then either Cut Special (and Paste Special to open up a bunch of measures (as in paste the chunk you selected 8 measures later than where you started the cut).

Similarly, Select By Time and copy, cut, delete, paste anything (including all tracks and markers and automation) anywhere to suit your right brain's creative inspiration of the moment.

Totally works, flawlessly and surgically. I've never had an issue and it's very easy to do.

Just wondering if this is something you've tried (hoping to get you back in the sweet spot).