Can I vent for one second?  I am frustrated with X3 colors as well.  But I'm even more frustrated when I come to this forum and ask a question and instead of getting an answer I get a bunch of "why would you want to do that??"  Or, even worse, "what does it matter just write music."  It happens virtually every time.  Of course there are a lot of helpful people and answers here and 80% of the time I get my problem solved so I will just shut up now.

Like this you mean :)

http://forum.cakewalk.com...aspx?m=2777272&p=1

BTW I did appreciate peoples responses on that thread, it's their time they gave to me.

cowboydan
 
 



Hey Paulo
Its nice to know that you dont like my opinion.
What I am saying is that if Sonar would take Panu as a sidechain to Sonar (a paid separate site) as maybe Sonar Plus, Panu could work on the GUI which would not interfere with Sonar but would satisfy a lot of users as far as their wishes in what they want to see.
I, myself believe that Sonar is on the right track in making a DAW that can stand up to any other daw without all the GUI (face) changes and giving themselves a broad base to work without the GUI tweeks.
Everyone has their own wishes when it comes to daws and that is probably the main reason that there are so many of them out there now.

 
 I agree that it is probably not possible or practical to accomodate everyone's personal preferences and I don't particularly advocate having third parties involved, I just think that choosing black in the current selection configuration should result in ...well, black, not a very slightly darker grey. If I choose blue I get blue, yellow I get yellow, green I get green, black..... err sorry, how about this slightly darker version of what you're trying to get rid of instead ?  Why offer it as a choice and then not do it when that choice is selected ? This is basic stuff.
 
There should really be no need to hire a third party to make text legible - it used to be fine, so it baffles me how people just accept it now that it isn't because ....hey, this is the new cutting edge version - you should get with the times man ! I'm not just here to bash. Like most users I just want Sonar to be the best it can possibly be - needing to stop and translate the names of your tracks before you know if you're moving the correct fader isn't progress in my opinion.

@Paulo All good and fairly specific points, I would submit a feature request to Cakewalk.

CakeAlexS

Paulo


With respect to your opinion, which of course you are entitled to express ( why do I always sound so condescending when I try to be polite? Not intended ;) ) I think that all those who are unhappy with it just want the facilities that they already once had, which doesn't really seem so much to ask.

What worked in the past may not work in the present. Sonar now has colour customisation whether you like it or not. Right now allowing third party developers to hook into the UI would probably require various hook in points exposed. Cake would need to document and maintain them, plus cake would have to go in and put in code to disable their existing colour optimisation when third party code requests it. Also if third party code broke for whatever reason cake would get its butt kicked.

Something like that would take a lot of support and development time, plus Cake would thus be moving towards more of an open source mentality. Time then would probably be best spent improving their existing UI themselves or just go completely open source with everything and try and get everybody else to improve the product (from experience I can tell you it doesn't quite work that way in the end). In the case of the latter that would requite publishing source code and updating it on a regular basis (ain't gonna happen).

Do any paid for DAW's allow this to happen?

You are right if everything has to be built up again, but Panu has already done the small tweaks that some users want and also some of the big projects in Sonar Duckbar. This would seem to be a viable solution for those who cannot get enough legibility with their pots, names, etc. Nothing big would change. Panu does excellent work on this subject and could help a lot of people and give Cakewalk some well deserved rest. And maybe get a donation or two.

 

You are right if everything has to be built up again, but Panu has already done the small tweaks that some users want and also some of the big projects in Sonar Duckbar. This would seem to be a viable solution for those who cannot get enough legibility with their pots, names, etc. Nothing big would change. Panu does excellent work on this subject and could help a lot of people and give Cakewalk some well deserved rest. And maybe get a donation or two.


+1

Unfortunately with source code, whilst something may not look that big a job visibily, it can quite a massive undertaking to expose and support points that plug into a UI (I sort of covered that in the last post).. Take VSTs for example, there isn't a week that goes by where there isn't some issue going on. Supporting VSTs I suspect is extremely time consuming, esp when a lot of the time you are helping third party developers fix their issues who don't even pay you for it in return.

From what I see (correct me if I'm wrong) Panu needs Cake to undertake significant work in order for this.... Kickstarter (if you like) to happen. And then they would be expected to support it. If you think this is quick and easy to do think again. I don't see where the revenue comes in for Cake here, and I see it as too much trouble for Cake.

I prefer Paulo's last point as it is realistic as Sonar is not going open source any time soon (except with mackie controllers which (like vst's) can be plugged in).

Anyway I do understand what some people would like to happen, I just don't see it as realistic, even with donations which I suspect would be trivial in comparison to the work. Improving their own UI would be far cheaper and easier.

The one aspect where I agree 100% with Paulo is about making black tracks black.  I would have to think there's some technical reason for this since it seems every other color works.  Even if it was available I'm not sure I'd use it all the time, but it would be a nice option and potentially good for contrast.
 

CakeAlexS
Unfortunately with source code, whilst something may not look that big a job visibily, it can quite a massive undertaking to expose and support points that plug into a UI (I sort of covered that in the last post).. Take VSTs for example, there isn't a week that goes by where there isn't some issue going on. Supporting VSTs I suspect is extremely time consuming, esp when a lot of the time you are helping third party developers fix their issues who don't even pay you for it in return.

From what I see (correct me if I'm wrong) Panu needs Cake to undertake significant work in order for this.... Kickstarter (if you like) to happen. And then they would be expected to support it. If you think this is quick and easy to do think again. I don't see where the revenue comes in for Cake here, and I see it as too much trouble for Cake.

I prefer Paulo's last point as it is realistic as Sonar is not going open source any time soon (except with mackie controllers which (like vst's) can be plugged in).

Anyway I do understand what some people would like to happen, I just don't see it as realistic, even with donations which I suspect would be trivial in comparison to the work. Improving their own UI would be far cheaper and easier.

I see that we will just have to agree to disagree.
Panu has been doing this since the pre-X time and has had a lot of fun with it. 
Not in your time I guess.

Sonar Xn does seem to have been inspired by the book 100 Things You Can Do With the Color Gray.  The improvements in X3 were great, but I would still like to be able to color the whole Sonar framework to my own liking.  I use a genealogy program that allows custom color schemes for every aspect - backgrounds, controls, frames, text.. everything.  It can't be that hard to achieve.
 
We spend hours staring at X3.  It would be nice to have the visual experience as nice as the musical one.
 
-John