I would like to be able to be in PRV mode with, say, 5 tracks displayed and be able to tell them apart more easily.
 
I have re-colored the tracks, but really when there are two dozen instruments in your piece, it can be grueling to color each one individually, and even if you do and save that as a project template, it's still hard to tell them apart. I've resigned to having a single color for a whole section, such as brass being orange, strings dark brown, vocals all white, etc. 
 
So.... if I want to look at, say, the whole wind section in PRV, something I want to do often for proper voicing within sections, etc., there's no way to tell which instrument is which note, except by making one the selected track, locking others, etc., but it's so hard to tell the grays apart in the list of tracks that it's sometimes too hard to tell which is the selected instrument anyway.
 
What I want is to have a feature I can toggle quickly, say with a toggle button in the toolbar, called "Highlight track on hover". So when I hover over a given note in PRV, it emphasizes all the other notes in the same track. Not selecting them per se, just letting you see what the other notes are for that instrument. 
 
Is there anything existing that will accomplish this?

It can be tedious with many track in there. I don't know of any real easy way to do this but...
 
The 1st button in the track view pane will make that track data visible/invisible.
 
The 2nd button in the track view pane will Enable/Disable the data and make it gray. So you could gray everything but the track you're working on.
 
The online Help may offer more insights to this.
 
Steve
 

jkoseattle
I would like to be able to be in PRV mode with, say, 5 tracks displayed and be able to tell them apart more easily.

Have you tried using Staff View? It's ideal for this.

My midi work sounds simple compared to yours. But I just kill the whole PRV, then select the one or two midi tracks I'm working on and call the PRV back up. It will just have those tracks. You have to use your imagination on the stuff you can't see but it's easy to edit. You'll still hear all the tracks.

Does it help to use the track list on the right to temporarily hide notes from specific tracks so you can see what you're left with?  I'm thinking that toggling them back and forth may help to visualize what's what.

I suspect a "Highlight Track on Hover" feature would prove nightmarish with different tracks flashing on and of as you move our mouse across notes from one track on your way to another. I'd be satisfied with a Track Pane what uses the same Track Name Highlighting scheme as the TV. When things get too busy for me, I either click the buttons in the Track Pane to hide some tracks, or remove them from the Track Picker temporarily.
 
In some situations, I've found it useful to transpose events in one track to another octave and put a complementary Key+ value in the track header so that is plays back correctly while displaying clearly in a higher or lower octave of the PRV. This is useful for editing harmonies that weave in and out of each other's ranges.
 
I think there's a limit to how much information you're going to be able to show in a single-lane PRV without having things get confusing, no matter how the display is implemented. Have you tried using the Inline PRVs instead?
 
 

Lots of good suggestions. 
 
Staff View - I haven't spent much time in it because too much of my editing deals with finessing the exact length of notes, and the details around velocities and just how quantized something should be would be lost. Plus, Staff View is only convenient if it understands what key you're in, and well, my music changes key a lot, and I've never bothered to set key sigs in Sonar - One more thing to worry about. However, it might be useful to look at in some instances. I should remember to try that, thanks.
 
Inline PRV - First off, that means I have to switch the edit mode for each track one at a time. (Brings up a whole can of worms about the amount of unnecessary clicking in Track View. Notice how you can select multiple tracks, but there is such a limited amount of things you can actually do with those multiple tracks? Can't attach sends, or set outputs, or much of anything. There used to be that semi-helpful triangle selector thing that would make Quick Groups or whatever they were called - what happened to that feature?) Also, this mode doesn't let me see the comparative voicings across tracks easily. 
 
Toggling in PRV - Imagine you're looking at a string section in PRV, perhaps 6 tracks, and you want to lock all but one of them. It requires at least 6 mouse clicks to do that. Ridiculous. In Photoshop, for example, you can say "Hide all layers but this one". Sonar should have something like that. Or how about "Lock all unselected tracks", so all I have to do is click on a track and everything else locks? Or even "Hide all unselected tracks"? Sometimes I wonder who is designing these things and how it is that no one spoke up and said "Hey - this is a real PITA, let's make it easier".
 
Truth is, I don't really care what color my tracks ever are. I just want to be able to tell them apart when I need to. How about a feature to automatically color displayed PRV tracks so that they can be distinguished easily? If that means they're different colors every time I open PRV, well that's why it would be a feature you could disable.
 
 

jkoseattle
Staff View - I haven't spent much time in it because too much of my editing deals with finessing the exact length of notes, and the details around velocities and just how quantized something should be would be lost. Plus, Staff View is only convenient if it understands what key you're in, and well, my music changes key a lot, and I've never bothered to set key sigs in Sonar - One more thing to worry about. However, it might be useful to look at in some instances. I should remember to try that, thanks.

It's easy to forget about Staff View. Most people use either SV or PRV, but not both. As they each have different strengths and weaknesses, they can complement each other. If you have 2 screens, try using them side-by-side.

Hey Jim of Seatle,
 
I was listening to your stuff. I am an instant fan! Brilliant!
 
One question: Did you take the recording of the little kid singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and harmonize the orchestra to fit? How subversive! I love it!
 
and don't forget "uvula spelled backwards is 'a luv u'".  Perfect!
 
Thanks for the smile!

IMO the note colors in the PRV are very easy to distinguish. In your case, I suggest you select the first track of each instrument type and change the strip color of them all with Ctrl held down to, say, red, select the second track of each instrument type and choose, say, blue, and so forth (this way you won't have to change the color of all tracks one by one). As for an option to unlock all unselected tracks, I agree. I suggest you submit a feature request (I did). But until that happens, I recommend hiding all notes in the PRV by "Hide all tracks" (you can assign a keyboard shortcut to this) and then click in the Notes pane, which brings up a pop-up list of tracks asking you to select the track you want to display.