I've tried to understand and use Take Lanes but its either been a mental block or a disaster.  I've given up on them.

For the folks that claim the Mute and Solo buttons in Layers are too small. They are. That should have been fixed. Heck I bought upgrade after upgrade hoping someone at Cakewalk would figure it out and make it happen. But it didn't happen.
 
When I work with Layers in SONAR 8.5 Classic Edition I simply select any clip I want and hit "Q" to mute or unmute.
 
When I want to "solo" some other clip I simply grab the clip that is not solo'd and grab a muted clip I want to solo (they are usually adjacent so I do it with one swipe of my H.I.D.) and hit "Q".
 
When I want to do it to clips in multiple tracks I just have them grouped and it goes SUPER FAST... select 2 clips and press "Q".
 
I do it on the fly during playback. My guests comment about how fast it is.
 
I'll be depending on SONAR 8.5 for as long as it works.
 
It is easy to see how stinky SONAR X2 Take Lanes are just by looking at screen shot.
 
Reading about people's first hand experiences confirms that Cakewalk successfully took an old boring idea that other DAWs are stuck with and half baked it into a total mess.
 
Layers make SONAR 8.5 special. The poorly imagined implementation of take lanes makes SONAR X2 especially undesirable to me.
 
I doubt that Cakewalk has the nerve to flush its bad idea and restore one of its best ideas. The operation seems to have decided it knows better than the customers who actually use its product. The results seem capricious, whimsical, and ill advised. The confidence displayed by the fact that it would actually charge money for such a botch job suggests to me that customers have no say in the matter.
 
 
 
best regards,
mike

mike_mccue
...When I work with Layers in SONAR 8.5 Classic Edition I simply select any clip I want and hit "Q" to mute or unmute.
 
When I want to "solo" some other clip I simply grab the clip that is not solo'd and grab a muted clip I want to solo (they are usually adjacent so I do it with one swipe of my H.I.D.) and hit "Q".
 
When I want to do it to clips in multiple tracks I just have them grouped and it goes SUPER FAST... select 2 clips and press "Q".
 

Not that I've tried, but wouldn't the same process work with lanes too?  Except with the "K" key, of course.
 
The one scenario where I could see more difficulty with lanes would be multi-tracked drums, if nothing else for screen real estate (I'd like smaller lanes too).   I don't record live drums myself, so maybe that's part of the reason why I don't have any real issue with the lane concept.  But using Mike's process, I'd imagine clips from different lanes in different tracks could also be grouped?  If so, then muting or soloing a clip/take on one track would mute or solo the same clip/take on a different track, effectively muting or soloing the same section of a performance.   Or am I missing some part of the equation...  
 

When cakewalk added layers in sonar 4 I thought they did a really good job. They were very useful with the mute tool for comping. The only bug I ever encountered was every once in a while clips would move to random locations during certain editing procedures. It was very had to pinpoint when or how this happened. Not sure if this bad behavior was in the original release of layers or if introduced in a later release. But for whatever reason it was something Cakewalk never got straightened out and a lot of people became vocal about.

Of course this is just my opinion but I think this is a great implementation of comping and where I expected cakewalk to be by this time after having a comping feature since roughly 2004...
http://www.youtube.com/wa...e=youtube_gdata_player

That is very powerful, yet extremely simple. There is an elegance to the way you preview the part you want to hear, selecting individual parts, creating multiple comps to preview, display of comped part in main track and the implementation of cross fades.

Layers or lanes, what ever you want to call them, need to make comping quick and easy. You don't need any other functionality in there like envelopes etc (except clip level gain and pan may be useful). That is a track level function.

Silicon Audio
In Sonar X1, I would often record multiple takes of 8 or more tracks of drums (kick, snare, toms, overheads, under-snare, etc).  You could then select take 1, take 2, etc on all tracks and then edit using audiosnap.  X1 was very good at knowing the take relationships across multiple tracks, selecting the correct layers on each track, and allowing you to edit everything from a given take using audiosnap.  No matter how much I try, I can't get Sonar X2 to behave the same way.  Either the take relationship across tracks gets lost, or the audiosnap markers suddenly disappear or change position all by themselves on the layer I am working on.  Sometimes audiosnap in layers just stops working altogether.
 
I don't know how users who are happy with take lanes are using them, but start doing some complex multi-track drum editing work, have Sonar muck up hours of work, and you are ready to scream.  I suspect some here are doing simple edits on single multi-layer tracks.  How many here record and edit live drums?  If your drummer lays down 4 or 5 takes, how are layers working out for you?
 
I want the functionality I had with X1 - I actually don't care if it's layers or lanes, but I don't want to upgrade and LOSE functionality.  For me personally, layers weren't perfect, but they were easier to use for complex multi-track, multi-take editing.
 
I love the cool things I can do in X2 with the new tools, but multi-track-multi-take editing went backwards in a big way.  Maybe I'm doing something completely wrong?  I dunno, I've been using Sonar/Pro Audio/Cakewalk since it was delivered on a single floppy disk and this is one of the biggest backward moves to date for the way I work.  Obviously it doesn't hurt the way others work.

 
^^^^ this struck a chord with me ^^^^

I always thought the old track layers were poorly implemented and useless, because I couldn't name them or mute or solo them. The new system is way better. The only problem I have is that I can't use the zoom tool on them, so I have to use the zoom slider instead. Otherwise they work great.

Saxon1066

cparmerleeI am curious how others are using (or trying to use) the feature.  It never occurred to me to have a button to clear empty take lanes because I never have 4 of them.  Are other folks using many more take lanes?  How long do you keep those multiple takes in your projects?  In my case, I always bounce "the winners" down to a single clip so I only have multiple takes for a short time.  I surmise my use is a lot different from others'.

I use layers (and would use lanes) for 10 takes of most guitar parts (sometimes 30 takes!).  Then I go back and choose or comp the best takes, often copying and pasting.  In addition, I record two mics on a guitar cab on separate tracks plus a DI track.  So now I'm talking 30 lanes per guitar part (or up to 90) to audition and comp.  I'm a uber-perfectionist, but that's how I was able to work with layers, and that's why I want a well-functioning lanes system that can be adjusted to a smaller height and won't flip out when I copy/paste into three lanes at once.

Hear, Hear!

Keni

mike_mccue
For the folks that claim the Mute and Solo buttons in Layers are too small. They are. That should have been fixed. Heck I bought upgrade after upgrade hoping someone at Cakewalk would figure it out and make it happen. But it didn't happen. When I work with Layers in SONAR 8.5 Classic Edition I simply select any clip I want and hit "Q" to mute or unmute. When I want to "solo" some other clip I simply grab the clip that is not solo'd and grab a muted clip I want to solo (they are usually adjacent so I do it with one swipe of my H.I.D.) and hit "Q". When I want to do it to clips in multiple tracks I just have them grouped and it goes SUPER FAST... select 2 clips and press "Q". I do it on the fly during playback. My guests comment about how fast it is. I'll be depending on SONAR 8.5 for as long as it works. It is easy to see how stinky SONAR X2 Take Lanes are just by looking at screen shot. Reading about people's first hand experiences confirms that Cakewalk successfully took an old boring idea that other DAWs are stuck with and half baked it into a total mess. Layers make SONAR 8.5 special. The poorly imagined implementation of take lanes makes SONAR X2 especially undesirable to me. I doubt that Cakewalk has the nerve to flush its bad idea and restore one of its best ideas. The operation seems to have decided it knows better than the customers who actually use its product. The results seem capricious, whimsical, and ill advised. The confidence displayed by the fact that it would actually charge money for such a botch job suggests to me that customers have no say in the matter.   best regards,mike

Hi Mike...

Much the same with me tho in different situations...

When I heard people asking for lanes to replace layers I kept wondering why would they want a system that's been improved upon with layers in Sonar.... Now it feels to me that in their current implementation, they prove to me how unique and cutting edge layers really are/were... And we now await the "possibility" (in the dark, of course) as to whether they've managed to get the features of both rolled together... Or for that matter whether they've addressed the issue at all...

So tho the wonderful little family that was Cakewalk and so close to its user base is no more... Now the corporate giant Roland seems to be (somewhat expectedly) inflate the distance...

...yet I still want to believe that the message is getting through and that the corporate entity realizes the importance of these issues. Hopefully will will be pleasantly surprised with the upcoming release.....?

Keni

Like most here, I am a Layers person.  I have X1d and will stay with it until I hear about Lanes fixes or removal in the next version of Sonar.  I have been hearing so many bad things about Lanes, that I don't want to upgrade.
 
 

I just can't understand why Cakewalk would throw out a fully developed unique solution.  It was a part of the software which differentiated them from the all-too-homogenous pack of DAW software.  It's not like anyone is going to switch to Sonar from Cubase because Cakewalk tried to imitate Cubase - on the contrary, I believe people are likely to move in the opposite direction.  Cubase's implementation of this is very similar to what Cakewalk tried to do, but it works.  Further, Cubase benefits from having developed their method over time, and that integrity shows when you discover all the interesting things you can do with it.  The old Sonar implementation, layers, offered a similar sense of well-traveled experience and possibility.
 
Another problem with the implementation of Take Lanes is that the button to open/close the lanes is hidden if the track is minimized.  With the old implementation (I'm familiar with 8.3), the button was in the track "header" area, next to the minimize button.  This becomes a bigger problem, because often the track is minimized, but the lanes are not collapsed.  In order to get rid of the lanes taking up space, you have to enlarge the track enough to see the open/close button.  The track header area often has a lot of wasted space in the new Sonar.
 
Clip automation seems really hard to use and having to go to the track area to manipulate clip properties seems counter to good sense.