bapu
SONAR's about box tells you when your current membership expires.
 
Simples.
 
Note: at least it does for me and I'm on a yearly paid up front plan.

And it does that correctly outside US (that was fixed in one of updates)

Another stupid thread... Doc's GAO/McNamara discussion  of unknown unknowns was cute and Craig's betting story were interesting and then the long decent into garbage... 

Christmas is on the way and I'm be very excited about any special gift from our bakers.
 
-Markus

williamcopper
... Did anybody need "route anywhere"?  Probably not.

You're kidding... right?     Patch Points + Aux Tracks (along with synth recording) seem to be among the most discussed new features so far this year, and it's only been what... a week? 

It was another great year for traditional musicians and project studios and another goose egg for EDM producers and song writers. (Yes I know there's some overlap, here, so no one cries ) No updates to MIDI editing, automation, Matrix view, or drum maps. No warping feature, Arranger or Chord track. 
 
Maybe 2016 will be our year.

Notecrusher
It was another great year for traditional musicians and project studios and another goose egg for EDM producers and song writers. (Yes I know there's some overlap, here, so no one cries ) No updates to MIDI editing, automation, Matrix view, or drum maps. No warping feature, Arranger or Chord track. 
 
Maybe 2016 will be our year.

Yes I think sooner or later Cakewalk are going to have to bite the bullet and bring Sonar up to date for the electronica crowd. I've said this many times before but it's an absolute nightmare to control synth and plugin parameters with a controller. Just a little thing like mapping a rotary to the cutoff of a filter plugin is awkward and fraught with frustration whether you're using ACT or the Cakewalk Generic Surface. Last night I discovered that if you try to map a controller to an FX Chain control in a CPU heavy project, and you have the plugin window open (so you can see what you're doing), the mapping is so laggy that if you sweep the control from min to max it just jumps straight from min to max with nothing in between. Close the plugin window, and it's fine. Little things like this make performing with controllers absolutely horrible in Sonar and the whole thing is screaming out for attention. You should be able to assign a controller to an automation envelope in one step and draw the envelope with the controller during playback. Simple as that, yet we're screwing around with ACT and all of its horrible bugs and quirks. I watch tutorials of other DAWs and they're doing this stuff without thinking about it. 
 
And yes, arrangers and chord tracks are becoming a standard part of workflow too, especially among the electronica crowd. It's not as if Cakewalk hasn't thought about the young EDM market, because clearly much of their bundled MIDI and loop content is geared toward modern genres. Loops are not what we want though, we can get those anywhere. We need solid, robust, well designed features for recording, programming and performing with synths and plugins. 
 
Part of the trouble is that you wont get very far complaining about this stuff on the forum because I think the majority of people here are older guys who specialize in more traditional style of music - to them, Sonar's audio recording and editing capabilities are of #1 importance, not twiddling filter cutoffs. I'm in that "in between" age where I've grown up with both traditional styles of music AND modern electronica, and so my ultimate dream for Sonar would be if it was rock solid for both styles of working. Right now it's not. 
 
 

charlyg
You're right, I could give a rip about electronica. I sometimes wonder if it should be called music.....
 
I'm 64

I'm sure your grandparents thought the same way about rock 'n' roll in the 50's.

sharke

charlyg
You're right, I could give a rip about electronica. I sometimes wonder if it should be called music.....
 
I'm 64

I'm sure your grandparents thought the same way about rock 'n' roll in the 50's.

 
Yup.... although there is a consistency to the beat and familiar tones(excuse me, timbre) in 50s R&R.
And the biggest factor for me, the music comes 'round again....

sharke

Notecrusher
It was another great year for traditional musicians and project studios and another goose egg for EDM producers and song writers. (Yes I know there's some overlap, here, so no one cries ) No updates to MIDI editing, automation, Matrix view, or drum maps. No warping feature, Arranger or Chord track. 
 
Maybe 2016 will be our year.

Yes I think sooner or later Cakewalk are going to have to bite the bullet and bring Sonar up to date for the electronica crowd. I've said this many times before but it's an absolute nightmare to control synth and plugin parameters with a controller. Just a little thing like mapping a rotary to the cutoff of a filter plugin is awkward and fraught with frustration whether you're using ACT or the Cakewalk Generic Surface. Last night I discovered that if you try to map a controller to an FX Chain control in a CPU heavy project, and you have the plugin window open (so you can see what you're doing), the mapping is so laggy that if you sweep the control from min to max it just jumps straight from min to max with nothing in between. Close the plugin window, and it's fine. Little things like this make performing with controllers absolutely horrible in Sonar and the whole thing is screaming out for attention. You should be able to assign a controller to an automation envelope in one step and draw the envelope with the controller during playback. Simple as that, yet we're screwing around with ACT and all of its horrible bugs and quirks. I watch tutorials of other DAWs and they're doing this stuff without thinking about it. 
 
And yes, arrangers and chord tracks are becoming a standard part of workflow too, especially among the electronica crowd. It's not as if Cakewalk hasn't thought about the young EDM market, because clearly much of their bundled MIDI and loop content is geared toward modern genres. Loops are not what we want though, we can get those anywhere. We need solid, robust, well designed features for recording, programming and performing with synths and plugins. 
 
Part of the trouble is that you wont get very far complaining about this stuff on the forum because I think the majority of people here are older guys who specialize in more traditional style of music - to them, Sonar's audio recording and editing capabilities are of #1 importance, not twiddling filter cutoffs. I'm in that "in between" age where I've grown up with both traditional styles of music AND modern electronica, and so my ultimate dream for Sonar would be if it was rock solid for both styles of working. Right now it's not. 
 
 

Well put. But as they started getting serious with audio I'd like them to finish off and perfect it first. And get on with improving and speeding up the work flow. Zoom bugs at this stage in the game should be resolved. Zoom needs improving Get those take lanes sorted as well. Scroll the screen keeping the time line in center of the screen. For the love of god improve audiosnap. Varispeed! Concentrate on get that functionality excellent (and bug fixes!!!!!!!!) before moving on. Touch is the future wheather you like it or not. Take note of the suggestions in feature requests esp the ones that other DAWs can do. Some of the lessons learned will help moving forwards... And allow Sonar to do it better than ableton ever would.

I can cope with third party solutions in the meantime to handle my sequencing needs. I'd rather do it in Sonar but we are where we are. Make piano roll more like melodyne and you are onto a winner.

Yup controllers are a bugbear!!!

I'm not interested in unique selling point functionality and mini vanity projects until Sonar has all round improved. It just delays the other meat and potatoes stuff that is way overdue. When the baseline has been raised then you can get on with that sort of stuff.

Cheers..

MIDI editing is most important for me. There is much room for improvement.

Can we have Chord Entry + Pattern Entry --> populated to a MIDI Track [something like BIAB/Jammer] ?

Anderton
As to electronica (do people really still use that term? didn't it die with the 80s?) 

I still hear it bandied about. I use it as a catch-all for music which is primarily programmed and/or sequenced using synths, samplers and drum machines. "EDM" is a term that really only took off in the past few years, we never called it that. And it's funny but much of what the kids call EDM these days really sounds to me like the cheesy mainstream dance music that took off in the mid 90's. Before then the scene was largely underground and organic and the music we were dancing to at illegal warehouse & forest parties was still very acid-tinged, 303-based psychedelic trance and the beginnings of drum and bass (or "jungle" as it was called back then). Around the mid-90's you had the rise of superclubs like Cream and the Ministry of Sound in the UK and with them a whole new cheesy style of pop-tinged dance music. It also heralded the start of the superstar DJ culture - before then, I don't think we ever looked upon DJ's as celebrities. 
 
So a lot of the EDM I hear now is very much the child of that superclub/Ibiza sound. And since it's so easy to get hold of the tools to make it, you have thousands of bedroom producers churning the stuff out off a conveyor belt. As a result there's a whole lot of crap out there. To me it sounded a lot better when the people making it had to commit to hardware and things like recording tracks onto DAT, I guess that separates the wheat from the chaff lol. Not that I'm complaining about how easy it is to use DAW's and plugins now, I think it's great. It just means you have to search a lot harder to find the good stuff.