I call them Half Bake Take Lanes.

I liked the Half Baked Layers better too.



Why can't Cakewalk just do something good without abandoning a bunch of obvious gotchas into the work flow?

Why is it that features get rolled out in such a way that demonstrates Cakewalk's inability to anticipate what seems immediately obvious to an actual end user?

There's a reason Roland has a desperate need for structural reform of the Electronic Musical Instruments Business. 

It should treat it's customers with more respect and anticipate that customers don't like getting stuck with gotchas.

It's disappointing... but unfortunately it also seems predictable.

It's even more disappointing to consider Cakewalk's well earned reputation for rolling out a half baked feature and then ignoring the feature and its gotchas for a decade while it focuses on half baking other features.

:-(

Someone at Roland or Cakewalk should do something about changing how this happens year after year after year and set about working out the details with a focus on eliminating disappointing gotchas.


I'd pay for that.


best regards,
mike

I'm okay with the take lanes meself, and love the automation lanes to bits (yeah, I know they're different). 

Perhaps it would have been nice for there to be a preferences option so that we could use layers or lanes? I wonder if they could still do this?

Well as you might imagine, dimbulb me has never tried to use either Layers or Lanes.  Although I think I'm gonna give those lanes a whirl in my new "dern it, I'm gonna actually use all these dang gee-gaws that Sonar has provided...well, at least some of them...and really learn this dang program that I've been producin professional tracks with lo these twenty years or so" paradigm.  I even bought a video!!

I use these here thangs called "tracks" instead.  Maybe you've heard of em.  Oh it's a passel of work to actually click down to the next one and put it in record mode.  But I ain't ever been afraid of "heavy liftin".  They seem to work just dandy when doin multiple takes of stuff and then compin a winner.  But that's just me.  YMMV.

So...as soon as I get back from my Turkey Day extravaganza it's Katie-Bar-The-Door and Take Lanes here I come!!

yorolpal - you'll probably find the new lanes extremely useful.  They Layers gave us a lot of capabilities that many of us integrated into our workflow.  In X2 some of these capabilities that were integral to our work flow were "taken away".  If you never used lanes before you won't miss anything.

I like 'em better than layers but there is definitely room for improvement. If you don't want Sonar to create a new lane every time you have to go into the Preference settings (I forget which sub menu) and uncheck the box that says "Always Create New Take Lane" or something to that affect. It only works when there is blank space in the lane above it though. 

Lots of other stuff I could (and will) say here but I'm gonna get some tea in me and wake up a bit more first.

I gotta agree with the OP here. I really try to avoid speaking in hyperbole here (I've never really had a head for foreign tongues), so I'm not going to go on a rant, but the lanes implementation really does need fixing. The random inserting of lanes labeled T0, the vertical size limits and inability to determine which clip is on top when collapsed, the fact that they don't collapse when the parent track is minimized (probably not a bug, just something I'd like to see)....yeesh. They are a difficult feature to love.

BTW, I always enjoy your rhetorical style Ol' Pal. I keep expecting you to someday preface a post with "I'm just a humble country lawy...uh...sound engineer...". I know it's almost certainly wildly inaccurate, but in my head you've sort of become Matlock with a mixing desk 

Dean

Thankee Kindly...but I'm MUCH better lookin than ol Matlock (sorry Ange).  Why just look at my bucolic visage over here on the left.

Alright... so yeah, there's lots of weird stuff about lanes that kind of bug me but I do find them better in the sense that they are just easier for me to work with than lanes. Layers would get so tiny after a while that they were no longer editable. If they had just made it so that you could scroll through them and continue to stretch out the track that wouldn't have been a problem but the track would lock into place and you couldn't do anything about it.

Personally I like the new mute/solo buttons however I wish they had made it so you could solo multiple takes like you can with tracks. Seems odd they did it that way but I think I know why. The takes when played together seem to screw up the sound... like badly. It's like the waves are fighting each other and the result sounds like crap. I have given up using them to comp because of this even for fading in and out of clips. Instead after I have the takes I want I toss the take into a new track and blend them that way. Well... I do a little more than that.

This is how I've been doing my solos....

First I'll record a bunch of takes for each individual part. I'll ctrl+z anything that I know right away is crap but if I get close I'll mute it and keep recording takes until I have fairly large pool of takes to choose from. I do this for each section so I end up with dozens of lanes. For this reason I'd like it if they made it so you can hide takes. I don't need to see all takes for all sections at once and after you get a certain amount of takes you can no longer see the track controls so having to scroll up to get at them is annoying.

After I've got a good pool of takes to choose from I'll listen back to them one at a time and make notes on each take about their strengths, wekness, which other elements in the project they work best with and what tweaks need to be done (the notes section is AWESOME IMO... don't know how I lived without it). I'll compare everything and widdle it all down to the best takes then write "Final" on the ones I choose (sometimes I can't decide so I'll write Final on a few different takes and choose when I'm mixing). This takes a little while but it's worth it and far easier than having to try to remember what's what or renaming the actual clips which get truncated anyway so you can go into too much detail. It also doesn't force me to make decisions right away when I don't have a full idea of how everything is going to work out.

Then because as I said the takes don't like to play well with each other sonically I'll clone the parent track and delete all the takes except the ones that contain "Final" take(s) of the section I want and name it accordingly. I also make sure the track is labeled Final or Mix or something to differentiate it from the original track which eventually gets hidden and just becomes my pool so if I decide I want to take another look at some of the other takes I can. I repeat this process for each section until every part has it's own track.

Now this is where it becomes a pain. I don't necessarily want to link the tracks in case I want to adjust their levels or effects differently but obviously I want them to be at least in the same ballpark. So what I end up doing is while I'm mixing I'll copy then mute the original effects on the first section that I used to track with and then tweak the second instance(s) to my liking then copy that over to the tracks of the following sections (and mute their original effects... I keep the original instances there so I can a/b between the two). I try to avoid doing any complex adjustments to the Pro Channel setting because I haven't quite learned how to save those settings and copy them to other tracks so instead I opt to do my Pro Channel stuff on the buss so it's applied to everything.

Quite the ordeal n'est ce pas?

What I would like to see happen is that sonic fighting between the lanes get eliminated so I can keep all the takes in the same track and then have a little volume knob on the takes so I can easily adjust their levels without screwing around with envelopes. If I need to get into the effects I can just do it on a clip per clip basis (that's a pretty cool feature). If they did it this way it would save me a ton of time.

All in all takes are cool but they need some improvements. If they were just a little bit more like tracks (like with a volume knob) and they blended properly then I'd be pretty happy.

Yes... I know. I may be a little insane. Cheers.

Hi Gang...

I guess many of you wondered when I'd appear here, eh? ;-)

I was against the Lanes concept before Cakewalk even decided to switch to them. I waited to see if they found ways to abate my dislike of Lanes.

They did not. If anything I'm more certain that I prefer layers than I ever felt before. Layers had some issues (small buttons and a few buggy commands such as the rebuild), but they increased my workflow even with them.

Lanes on the other hand, have added so much workload and frustrations that I shudder everytime I have to deal with them.

I'm using too many X2-only tools to comfortably go back and forth to X1 (where I have not been happy anyway), but at least Layers are available again... <sigh>...

All of the reasons I see stated above I agree with. I even found something I like about Lanes tho it's far from enuf to balance the negatives I'm experiencing and that is we can zoom the wav display as we can for tracks.... All the other things I would gladly live with again in preference to all my grievances with Lanes...

...and I'm actually enjoying a lot of X2 other than these issues but they are so fundamental to my workflow that it takes the wind out of my sails...

Wasted Screen real estate
Very poor zoom options
Zoom Limitations
Buttons that require constant re-sizing to access

I did not like the Event Filter addition to X1 but I find it far preferable to the Envelope Lanes we've been given. But of course at least there I can simply use the X1 edit filter system and be a lot closer to my preference than the Lanes allow me. At least they left a choice. I wouldn't mind having Lanes available as long as Layers were available too! Or if they can (quickly) address these issues and amend them.

If I could display the Lanes within a track instead of below it...
If I could zoom a Lane/Lanes as I can a track.
If there was some more convenient button location to toggle Lanes
If muted clips were displayed BENEATH an overlapping active clip when Lanes are not enabled

...and of course, the Rebuild command and it's family...

I could be in wonderful harmony with most else....

Oh, and while they're at that.... Making the unselected envelopes colors more obvious so that I don't have to press anything to identify which is which! <sigh>....

Keni

Bring back Layers.
Lanes are one step forward, two steps back.