And the beat goes on...
 
La de da de deeeee
 
la de da de daaaaaa

Are layers coming back?.. I doubt it.
 
Are there some issues with take lanes?.. yes. Do they need to be fixed? yes. Do they need to be improved?  oh heck yes. However...Are take lanes a better concept than layers?. yes..(imo, Just as x1 skylight was a better concept than a workspace consisting of a bunch of random independent uncontrollably disconnected windows).
 
It goes without saying that anyone with issues with take lanes behooves it upon themselves to file their comments in the correct place. just sayin ..
 
After all..
No bug reports = minimal chance of fix,
some bug reports = some chance of fix,
lots of bug reports = high chance of fix.

Keni

stevec
Like Jlien X said, I'd wait to see if something new is coming in the near future before making a decision.
 
Obviously a few folks on this thread do not like Take Lanes at all and much prefer the older Layers.  I never thought Layers were really all that and mostly prefer Lanes... with the exception of the height restriction - I would like to see that addressed in the next version.   Both Layers and Lanes have/had odd issues, but with Layers users simply learned what they were.   Any issues with Lanes seem a bit more difficult to pin down, though I don't personally run into that many myself... fortunately.
 

Hi Steve...
 
what's so hard to pin down... Wait... Let's make a little list (in no particular order than they come to mind right now) some are design issues and others bugs...:
 
Can't zoom large/small enough
Waste Screen Real Estate
Easy to confuse Tracks with Lanes at times
Can't control which clips are displayed when Lanes are closed
Intermittent difficulty moving/copying clips to other Lanes/Tracks...
Too many clicks and mouse movements required to adjust zoom
 
Anyone care to add more? these are on my mind right now...
 
Layers were totally comfortable, but in need of some bug fixes and a few added tools.... Conserved space and allowed me to see all my data within the same amount of screen space whether Layers were displayed or not....
 
Now a session almost never goes by without me being disturbed at working with Lanes... <sigh>...
 
Keni

The Zoom implementation is what kills it for me, and the main reason I finally started experimenting with another DAW.  I won't be jumping on the next release of SONAR, but I may try the demo to see if they clean up the take lanes.  I haven't completely jumped ship, but I am starting to like what I see elsewhere.  It's really hard to justify the upgrade prices that Cakewalk generally charges when there are other options that are easier to work with and more flexible in many ways.

Personally, I'm just giving up on what's next. Cakewalk can fix Take Lanes or don't; I don't care anymore. I'm not interested to see what X3 brings. I just want to work without the DAW getting in my way.

I'm sort of halfway in between the two extremes. The Take Lanes have bugs which I wish would be addressed, but, I use take lanes consistently for comping without any problems. As others have mentioned, it's possible to find a workflow that works in the way take lanes were intended to be used.
 
The most important technique for me is using the Isolate tool when editing (hold down Ctrl with the Mute tool to audition one take while muting all the others). The most important workaround is not to use V-Vocal on individual clips in Take Lanes. Most of the time it works, but it's better to wait until the takes are consolidated. I've never had problems in that context.
 
I wrote an article about various Take Lane workflows in the April 2013 issue of Sound on Sound; this documents the ways I've found to work with Take Lanes reliably. Of course I wouldn't mind if X3 has improvements :), but I do use comping with Take Lanes all the time without issues.
 
Perhaps the problem isn't so much the implementation as it is Cakewalk not writing up a "best practices" article similar to what I wrote for SOS so people would know about workflows that actually work.

I'm with you on the being able to use Take Lanes, and I do find lately that they can be handy for comping. Unfortunately, I've just had too many times when they were not behaving. I've been comping in tracks in a folder to sort of accomplish the same thing, then mix that down to a single track before adding FX or automation. I found that actually worked better for me in some ways, especially when it comes to navigating the the screen.

It's not impossible to work with the new system, but it's frustrating that Cakewalk would give up on a mature feature of their software, and replace it with something which is barely ready for release with no fallback to the old reliable.  It should raise questions about the way in which other features of Sonar may be changed in the future.
 
Also, comping takes was not the only thing I did with track layers.  Specific workflows may have been streamlined with Lanes, but I think that the loss of a fully developed feature set makes a broad range of other tasks more complicated.  For example, clip automation before allowed me to treat clips individually and independently of each other, perhaps to quickly adjust the volume envelope of a particular piece of audio independently of the track automation.  Now clip automation seems to apply to all clips in a given lane (when it works, that is), making that sort of action more cumbersome.

Yeah, I don't know; it's puzzling to me, too. Anyway, I'm done with it.

I find it unsettling when people make comments like "It took me a few months but I adjusted my workflow and now it's sort of ok". That's what Cakewalk wants you to say. "I know you've done things one way for a long time - we want you to do it this other way now". Why couldn't Cakewalk adjust their product to fir OUR workflow? It was so depressing to me to see all these people complaining about Take Lanes in X2, with so much hope that things would be cleared up in X3, and while I'm reading it I am using X3 and know these concerns were not addressed.
 
A bigger fallout from Take Lane Hell is that I no longer trust Sonar - I no longer assume that "there must be an easy way". I find so many poor UI decisions as I work that I now go into any new functionality ASSUMING I'm not going to have an easy time of it. That's the best way to lose customers. Get them to go into every scenario pre-pissed off.
 
I'm trying so hard to play along with Take Lanes. I'm about ready to uninstall and go back to 8.5, or Ableton. I've learned a lot about how to use them, but my god, people.
 
1. I want to either have a track minimized because I'm not currently editing it, or else I want it expanded INCLUDING IT'S TAKE LANES so that I can see the track in detail. AFAIK, to go from completely minimized to completely open, I have to first click the white double arrow at the right of the track info pane, then click the Take Lanes button. Why this extra step? If I leave the Take Lanes opened, then I can't minimize the track. I first have to close the Take Lanes, only then can I collapse it. So the simple act of moving around tracks and opening and closing them takes twice as many steps. And god forbid I want to minimize ALL tracks. If any take lanes are open, it can't be done, not without going to each track whose take lanes are displayed and close them one by one. Are you kidding me? Ok, then maybe I don't need to look at my project completely minimized anymore. Which would be ok, except, per #3 below, then I'm seeing clips TWICE, once in a take lane and once on the main track row itself. And they're the same frickin' color! After a lot of clip editing, it's then extremely difficult to step back and look at your whole project cleanly at a glance.
 
2. Why can't I solo more than one Take Lane at a time? This is completely aggravating. I am recording thick multitracked vocal lines. I will record a line maybe half a dozen times, then solo through them to audition them to select the three takes I'm keeping. Soloing through them is easy enough, but then if I want to combine a few takes to decide which three sound best together, I can't. I have to mute the ones I'm not keeping. Argghh. Seems a completely arbitrary and mystifying UI decision.
 
3. Why are the clips in the composite track row at the top the exact same color as the clips in the track lane? Come on, that's such an obvious UI call. It makes quickly looking through the takes so difficult, because essentially CLIPS APPEAR TWICE. So confusing.
 
4. It's way WAY too easy to lose takes, by simply dragging a take on top of another. I just have to remember not to accidentally do that, because I could slip up and a take is lost with no warning. And what if I don't notice until 30 actions later? Ok, so I have to be really careful. But it's not as simple as that. Because if I'm dragging a bunch of takes from one track to another, if there an't already enough empty take lanes available at my destination, Sonar just overwrites what's already there. If Sonar is so hot on this Take Lane concept, why not automatically add extra take lanes when necessary, rather than just replace clips? Making it difficult to accidentally delete information without warning should be Job One. It boggles the mind.
 
5. Vertical screen space is a premium in Sonar, of course. Why is it so hard to delete empty take lanes? Sure, I can right click on a clip in the track, but sometimes that option is available and sometimes not. And if they are ALL empty take lanes, then you can't remove them except by going to the X at the far left and going click click click click click click. Why does there have to be at least one clip in a track before you are allowed to delete empty take lanes?
 
6. I actually appreciate that when I vertically resize a take lane, that all lanes in the track resize the same (although other people I know have complained about that and I can understand that), but there's this arbitrary minimum height that's much larger than the minimum height of a regular track. Why? If I have twenty tracks with no take lanes I can see them all without scrolling. If I have ONE track with twenty takes in it, I have to scroll to see all the takes.  
 
 

Bad idea re-awakening this old thread, I think; it contains a lot of misunderstandings, misinformation, and unconstructive bashing by users who don't tolerate change well. Also much has improved since the first release. But many of your concerns seem valid. I hope you've filed feature requests for everything. I answered the deleting all empty take lanes question in your other thread.