Apologies in advance, I felt inspired to write this post based on a few months of terrible frustration with the X3 workflow. I know it's a big spew of complaints, but I needed to do it. Also, please understand that in addition to my musical experience, I'm also in the software industry, so I know what's involved in building software. I'm not expecting any of this to change anything, but perhaps there are a few tidbits of help I can get out of it.
I've been an exclusive Cakewalk/Sonar user since 1989, when I bought Cakewalk 3.0 for DOS. I've written operas, video game music, films, solo albums, and a thousand other projects on it, having upgraded along the way probably a dozen times. My last version of Sonar was 8.5 until I decided to upgrade recently to X3. And after 25 years I'm >thisclose< to jumping ship in frustration. Before I do that though I thought I'd post some of my biggest issues here and maybe will get enough good answers that I can hang on.
(Apologies for not using the correct names of some tools and views below - I am typing this away from my Sonar installation and so can't see the real names, hopefully I can make myself understood!)
1. TOOL SWITCHING HELL
I use a dual monitor setup, and typically will have track view on one screen and piano roll on another. This is a nice feature in X3 that I couldn't do as easily in 8.5. However, in order to do anything I first have to hit F5, F6, F7, F8, F9 or F10 to switch tools. F5, the "Smart" tool, isn't as smart as it used to be. With the Smart Tool selected, I see a group of notes I want to move. I can't drag select with the Smart tool, so I need to hit F6 to invoke the select tool. I draw a box around my notes, but a few notes I don't want to move are also in the box, so I need to de-select them. But oh, I can't individually de-select notes with the F6 tool (why not???). To do that I now need to switch back to the Smart tool and move my hand to the Ctrl button to de-select those notes. Now to move them, I need to switch again to the Move Tool (F7), but that tool does not keep notes aligned vertically by default, so my hand has to go back down to the Shift key to Shift-drag the notes to their new location.
And the Delete Tool (F10) is much less useful than it used to be. I used to be able to hold down the mouse and drag over notes to delete them. I can still do that sort of, but the tool wants to create a box, in which every note in the box is deleted. Deleting a melodic line in the middle of a thick mix is nearly impossible without going click click click click on individual notes. So frustrating.
Lastly, I can't find where to change the keystrokes for these tools. I've had keyboard shortcuts for them for many years, but now I have to use the F-keys apparently.
2. ALL THOSE TAKES
I usually construct my pieces tiny bits at a time, which generates gobs of tiny clips. I used to simply select separate clips that belong together and Apply to Clip, simple. I don't know who designed the multiple takes functionality, but man, I sure hate it. I used to be able to look at stacked clips within a single track, select them individually, and do stuff with them as a group. Now I have to open this Takes View, which invariably consists of mostly blank space. If I've been working for a while, I may have 50 takes, each with their own row on the screen. I know there is a way to consolidate the takes, but without cracking open the help file, darned if I can find it. There used to be a right-click menu option to rebuild the clips and get rid of blank space. Why was that moved somewhere else??? And even so, it doesn't solve my problem. While I like the concept of being able to do multiple takes and then pick the best one, the execution of that feature is way harder than just leaving it the old way. Is it possible to flip a switch that makes my midi tracks behave like they used to? What's so confusing is that the main track just shows all the clips piled over each other, and to see them individually I need to open this Takes View, but now there are essentially two visual representations of the same clip on the screen.
3. While this isn't strictly an X3 problem, the other usability issues with X3 make this long-running frustration much worse:
Let's say I have a piece with a dozen midi tracks that I have been working on bit by bit. I now have a lot of small clips across all the different tracks. Also, I'm not quantizing anything because I like how it feels the way it is. Then I decide I need to repeat a 6-bar section in the middle. Anymore, merely thinking "This section needs to repeat" now fills me with Sonar dread. The mere act of inserting 6 bars into the piece and getting everything else to move is daunting. I can't just click somewhere on the timeline and say "Insert Time/Measures" because I'm not quantized and stuff will move or not move that I don't want. not only that, but I have to make sure everything or nothing is selected, or else only the selected stuff is going to move. and when I do that by mistake, I'd better be sure to Undo, because something may have moved that is off the screen. (And by the way, why is "Insert Time/Measures" NOT IN THE FRIGGIN' INSERT MENU??? but I digress...)
In order to simply repeat a section, an astounding number of careful steps must be followed or my piece will get completely messed up. I could just select clips, but like I said above, there will be a lot of tiny clips, and I can't see them in the track, I have to open the dreaded Takes View thing. So I might try to do it within Piano Roll View instead, but selecting notes in PRV that don't all appear on the screen at the same time is very difficult, and there is tool switching hell involved to add or remove notes from an existing selection. And I can't drag select anything but a rectangle. And oh yes, if I drag notes, the pedal markings don't come along, I have to drag those separately. And I hope I remember to do that.
In short, no matter how I slice it, doing something as important and frequent and seemingly simple as inserting some space in the middle of a piece is actually extremely difficult. Most importantly, this difficulty gets me completely out of the creative flow. With X3, I spend way more time fiddling with the software than making music.
4. TIME SIGNATURES / TEMPO CHANGES
I've started creating pieces with a 1/4 time signature, just so that I don't have to jump through the hoops required to make a single bare 3/4 in the middle of a 4/4 piece. Because if I don't take that into account when I later need to move things around, woe is me. Same story for ritards, fermatas, etc. Telling Sonar you want to insert measures in a piece doesn't mean it knows you probably also want these things to move also.
Bottom line is that Sonar doesn't think like a musician. BY DEFAULT Sonar should assume that what you have is a piece of music. If you want to move things around, Sonar should assume by default that what you're moving is MUSICAL ELEMENTS, and not merely "digital events". So tempo changes, pedal markings, time sig changes, markers, should move along by default. Sonar should understand what humanized playing is like. If I want to move bar 6 to bar 83, Sonar should understand that a note played a millisecond prior to bar 6 is probably part of bar 6. And that a note played a millisecond before the end of bar 6 is probably not in bar 6. It's the musical equivalent of Google understanding what you probably meant to type.
(I have actually fully quantized pieces before just to make it easier to use in Sonar, deciding that musical expression was less important than ease of editing in the software. So sad.)
And things I need to do a lot, musically important things, have teeny tiny buttons to accomplish them. The Time Signature dialog has always been terribly designed, but it's seemed like such an obvious shortcoming (and since I work in software I know how easily that could be improved), I'm amazed and su****ious it's never gotten better. How about big buttons that say 3/4, 4/4, 6/8, etc, and how about the ability to go back to the original time signature easy to do within the same dialog instead of creating two time signature changes with those microscopic plus and minus buttons? Obvious stuff that should have been improved years ago. The fog is lifting: Sonar doesn't think like a musician.
Anyway, it seems to me like my quarter century of Cakewalk habits are now working against me in a huge way. Before you start to reply that I'm doing everything wrong and the problem lies in my work methods, remember that those work methods come from all these years of Cakewalk use! Cakewalk seems to have abandoned me in favor of new ways of doing things. Which is fine I guess. But I'm in the business of making music here. I don't want to unlearn what I've learned over all these loyal years.
I've been frustrated at times with Cakewalk/Sonar over the years of course, but I've always stuck with it, assuming that switching to a whole new platform is far worse than figuring out how to do it efficiently in Sonar, and I think I've been right about that. But with X3 I'm finally not so sure.