Well said Dave!
Great minds think alike?
So far, iPhones (have I told you I HATED my iPhone? They bounce well though!),
and the iPad just don't "work" for me.
The whole "touch" thing: results are ALWAYS unpredictable.
Love my CS (FW-1884)!
 
Tom

Are we forgetting about using the effects in Pro Channel ?? I haven't tried to max out the number of effects possible in PC, but it seems like I can do almost everything I want there, and rarely use the effects bin...

Mod Bod
I completely understand that if the user base doesn't use the Console

I use Console View 90% of the time.

Yes, DJ Wayne the ProChannel is a great way of saving space and tucking away information that you don't need at the present.  However, when it's hidden, how can you tell which tracks have been compressed or have a gate applied?  (I'm not talking about 16 track projects, which, in my past, SONAR handled just fine.)  The ProChannel concept needs to fold in neatly with the FX bin so that when the ProChannel is hidden, you can see what plugins are active in the ProChannel as well as the FX bin.  So far the only thing you can see in this way is the track EQ and that doesn't help me if I prefer to use a Waves Ren EQ.

In the PT section at Gearslutz, Slate is in a tug of war with his new AAX implementation of his Virtual Console Channel which he wants to present wrapped in a rack type GUI similar to the ProChannel vision.  And that's just fine if you don't want to know exactly what plugins are in the rack when the GUI is closed.  He's getting a heck of a lot of resistance from users who don't want to click a widget to see if a compressor is active on a track.  Slate is convinced that if he presents users with a Rack concept that everyone will see the light and stop using any other plugin product but his because "his is better" and after all, it's in a rack.    No, been there, done that.
 
Now, if every other 3rd party plugin manufacturer made ProChannel compliant plugins....  but that isn't going to happen.

I posted many many years ago the notion of an project overview that would allow all the routing and sends and such to be seen all on one screen. Something that was zoomable and graphic. If anyone remembers the Logic environment that was what I had in mind. This would apply to MIDI routing as well. 
I still think it would be a great enhancement to Sonar. 
 
A vector based CV instead of the bitmapped one we have today would be resistible and better looking. 
 
As to the idea of more sends being shown on the CV I vote yes to that. 
 
 

Well I have a full selection of effects in my Pro Channel. With the VKFX chorus, delay and overdrive, along with the Concrete Limiter, the TSAR-1R reverb, Breverb, PC FX's chain...I've got plenty of effects to work with and don't need any other third party effects...X3's effects are all good enough for me and are saving me a bundle on third party effects I don't really need. Sonar's effects quality is right up there with anything else I've used. 
 
Once you get used to using the Pro Channel, you don't need anything else.

Anderton
Bumping because I'm kind of curious why there are 94 views and no comments. I guess everyone either thought "Duh, that's obvious," "I don't care," or "Wow, that's really a dumb post" 

 
 
Craig "thank you" for always looking out for ways to improve our workflow with the current program structure and open some dialog with users about our favorite daw. Your advice/tips more often than not applies to me and has brought improved workflow changes! 
 
Like most long time users here, I also use the points you have listed above all the time minus the screensets. I want to, and I tried for a while, but with X3 more so than X2 or X1; switching/loading screensets is slow. Apologies to FBB.
  
I'm with anyone who thinks the sends user interface needs improvement. Some things I smh about:
 
1) Not being able to add or delete multiple sends in one action

• dislike dragging a mouse carefully to select a single send in the Win 3.11 ish pop out window. I would rather have a modern pop out window with scroll bars and check boxes to select or deselect multiple sends.

• The sends are shown in last created order and lumped into one long list with buses and plugin side chains all sharing the same space. Messy is not meant as an insult here, but it is messy.

 2) Not being able to right click on a send to open the connected bus for editing. Biggie for me.
 
3) Yes - instantly see / touch the sends in the console view. It's head scratching that isn't part of the foundation of the console view.
  
Maybe the sends could reside in the much wider prochannel - aka Sends Module?? That would probably be a programming nightmare. 
 
 
 
 

Some REALLY good ideas here...FYI this is just me asking, I'm doing anything official on behalf of Cakewalk. However I am indeed always looking out for ways to improve the program, and there's no better way to get ideas than a dialog with the user base..
 
Putting the sends on a flyout seems promising. I use the "flyout ProChannel with Quick Group" function a lot; although I still need to scroll horizontally to see everything, with two monitors and narrow channel strips I can see a lot of what's gong on with the effects. Like DJ Wayne I've gotten to the point where I use the PC more than the FX bin, so the PC flyout is particularly helpful for me.
 
Obviously flying out the FX bin to see GUIs would be impossible due to the non-standard nature of 3rd party GUIs, but sends are a different story. I also like the idea of eliminating "button redundancy" through the use of color. The tradeoff of course with anything like that is the status is no longer intuitively obvious compared to a button that says "post" or "on/off," but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and say RTFM to those for whom it is not obvious.
 
I've been really getting into sends due to multiband processing. For this type of application being able to see the architecture of what's going where isn't as important as being able to see the send settings and manipulate sends beyond their usual "set and forget" context.
 
What we're talking about seem to me like pretty substantial structural changes that I imagine would not be simple to implement. However, the Bakers do think far ahead about what they can do to improve the program. Although CW is very unusual in that the CTO himself as well as their A-list staff comes in and interacts with the community, one of the services I hope to be able to provide Cakewalk in the future is digesting all the great information in these forums, and coming up with "hey, what about this?" proposals that represent a sort of "greatest hits" of various comments.

The flyout code seems to have already been written for the Quad Curve. I'm not a programmer but I'm assuming it wouldn't be too hard to apply it to other areas of the program (and there are quite a few things that could benefit from a flyout IMO). However what would this flyout contain? Only information for the sends on that specific track or a complete Sends overview or options for both?
 
A lot of the issues people seem to have is just not being able to see those extra sends all at once right in the CV. I like ModBod's idea which is the most elegant solution. I personally find the lack of control over how the CV is displayed to be a bit of a problem and I typed up a diatribe in long gone thread about it.
 
We can currently hide/show various components of the CV strips. Being able to have an option that exposes the entirety of the sends or FX bin or whatever is obviously useful for this, especially for those of us with a single screen who make heavy use of the dock which is limited in height. I would actually like to be able to show/hide modules on a strip by strip basis so that way if I have a bunch of sends on one strip but no FX (or don't need to see the FX bin) then no Sends but lots of FX on another (that I'd like access to) then I could set up each strip to show what I need to get at on the fly instead of scrolling or screwing around with screenset (which can be a little finicky) or mess with changing the show/hide status of the entire CV...
 
Now THAT would be a pain to code but would definitely be worth it. I spend far too much time navigating around the CV to get at stuff when I should be listening and tweaking. It would be nice too if there were some kind of Dock option (like a keybinding... say Shift D if that isn't taken) that would keep everything in the dock actually docked but go full screen then disappear with a simple D keystroke as usual. That would allow more of not only the CV to be viewable from the dock but some of the larger VSTs, the PRV, plugins that have controls inaccessible with the dock stretched out to full capacity, etc.
 
I don't have a huge screen but it's big enough yet still many times I am itching for more access to docked items. I couldn't imagine screwing around like that on my smaller laptop screen.
 
Okay... I'll stop now. lol

djwayne
Well I have a full selection of effects in my Pro Channel. With the VKFX chorus, delay and overdrive, along with the Concrete Limiter, the TSAR-1R reverb, Breverb, PC FX's chain...I've got plenty of effects to work with and don't need any other third party effects...X3's effects are all good enough for me and are saving me a bundle on third party effects I don't really need. Sonar's effects quality is right up there with anything else I've used. 
 
Once you get used to using the Pro Channel, you don't need anything else.

That and a Rode NT1a and you're golden, I guess. 

Hey Cakewalk Marketing Department - mark this one as a success.