Staff view - how many users seriously use it?

Could not care less.

The only time I could ever see me using that in anger would be where I played in a horn line or parts on a song, and later decided to get a real horn player/section to play them live. I might want to print out the score to give it to them to learn, but thats pretty much it.

I am not saying its not something a lot of people will use, but for me personally I would probably not notice its gone apart from the 3 times a year I acceidently click on it while i am looking for the synth rack or console buttons :)

G

Hi Uncle-

The question occurred to me re: what percentage of Sonar users seriously use the Staff View (I don't...) and therefore how much of a deficiency is it overall.

CW conducted a SV User survey a while back, but I can't remember now if they asked whether anyone was considering leaving SONAR because of its weaknesses. IIRC, it was more about what functionality & features people wanted to see added. Maybe they got a decent feel for the numbers you're looking for, but I don't know. Surveys can be funny things.

I don't use it as much as I did early on because a) I know its limitations better, and that I'll run up against them sooner rather than later; and b) I have Finale now. For me, the fact that I needed to purchase additional software to notate my music accurately (the triplet issue, for example, has been documented to death) means that SONAR is deficient in that area.

So to answer your question, I almost never use SONAR's Staff View now, but that doesn't mean notation isn't important to me -- just the opposite, in fact.

I think part of what bugs folks about the SV (esp. long-timers) is that it's been there pretty much since the beginning, so there was always the "implied promise" that it would be improved, but it hasn't happened. It might still, though, with some competing products stepping up their notation features a bit. All digits crossed!

-Susan

ORIGINAL: Noah330

Sonar is a DAW. It's nice that all the DAW companies give notation, but when I need to do notation I use Finale. I wouldn't expect Cakewalk to include anything more then a rough notation editor and I think that the percentage of people who use it is probably small so I would rather the R&D dollars go elsewhere in the product.

Amen! I believe in using the most appropriate tool for the task at hand. Therefore, if I need to work with music notation, I (too) will choose Finale over Sonar. OTOH, while Finale has the capabilities for creating audio files, when I need to create audio from MIDI, I pick Sonar.

I will sometimes use the Staff view in Sonar when I want to see the music notation of a MIDI file that someone else created. It IS useful, so I wouldn't want to lose it. But it's not a real biggie for me.

later,
randy

I edit in PRV but I do print out staves for people to learn their (real) parts.
Randy

[broken record]
You can't tie into, out of, or within a triplet.
Triplets can't include rests.
[/broken record]
Deal-breaker right there for me. I can't see what I want to see in SV.

I have no interest in nor use for the Loop Construction or Step Sequencer Views, for example, and I couldn't care less about Beatscape, but I know these are valuable for some. I certainly wouldn't ask that those be removed just because I don't use them.

I don't necessarily think this is where this conversation is headed, but just in case...!

-Susan

Agree staff view is deficient. If it worked better I would probably use it more, but I'm not going to stop using SONAR because of this shortcoming.

I use staff view quite a bit. When I'm traking a vocal or horn section I like to have the staff view up and follow along. When I compose a song I will enter lyrics and chords to create a lead sheet. If I am composing an Orchestral piece, staff view is almost a must, you can see and edit harmony in different instrument families. I use Sibelius as my notation software and considering how things use to be done, the 2 softwares are amazing, but I really think communication between DAW's and software programs could be improved. Preparing a midi file for Sibelius can be time consuming. Right there is a niche for someone to step in and make so money. Another issue is hidding Keyswitches in staff view.

Staff view in Sonar is on it's way to being archaic

I use notation all the time.

Cakewalk will seriously shoot themselves in the foot if they don't upgrade / improve the notation features. Just think of all the cash spent by schools on Sibeilus. These kids could be tomorrow's Sonar users ... if they haven't jumped to the other sequencers.

ORIGINAL: uncleswede
The question occurred to me re: what percentage of Sonar users seriously use the Staff View (I don't...) and therefore how much of a deficiency is it overall.

The question is inadequate. Of course only few use a feature that is so rudimentary. And surely quite many Sonar users don't care about it - if they would, they'd probably had picked another app from the start. For Cakewalk, therefore, a more important question is: how many potential new customers do they lose to the competitors because of this lack? It's impossible to say, but given that many other first-rate programs do most of what Sonar does and besides that offer a reasonably developed notation feature, in all likelyhood there must be quite a few of them.



Kind regards,
wb

Just looked up Sibelius 6... it now works via rewire - nice ...... I suppose I will have to wait for reiwire to get 64bit treatment now.....

I use the staff view!

Best, JH

Couldn't be said better vintagevibe!

I use it for what I believe it was intended for: editing MIDI tracks. I prefer real notation to the Piano Roll View. I don't use it for printing manuscript.

I haven't used Staff View to date in any DAW.
I "write" by playing into midi sequences and editing via various midi editors. My brain thinks that way now, after 14 years of doing it, so that's what I do.

However, I've recently been doing more stuff for some film guys/girls. They tend to want "scratch pad" tracks, in the hopes that eventually they'll get their video big enough to take to the next level.
In that world, I must admit I've been paying more attention to occasionally looking at the staff view, since there's a possibility that we might need to print and publish to some "real" players.

Would never EDIT in the staff view though. I mean, I can read music, but frankly I find the various midi editors more specific than staff music generally is.

- zevo

Count me among those who don't "seriously use" Staff View because I don't consider it seriously usable. And I wouldn't even be a heavy user. But every so often there's something I'd like to see in notation, like a part that I just jammed out and don't really know what I did, or to be able to see a vocal line or a counter line that goes against it.

I remember my disappointment the first time I opened SV in Sonar 2. It's like it was barely even there.

It's *too* faithful -- literal minded -- to performance subtleties and so gives you a clutter of note values that for staff purposes should be resolved to basic quarters and eighths and so on... it should have some kind of automatic "quantization" tolerance, or whatever. So I end up creating a special quantized clone just for staff view. But even then, even for just a single staff, the view is linear and doesn't wrap, so it's not terribly useful. I've occasionally used Prinit View, or actually printed it out, just to see what was going on.

I recently started using Finale Notepad 2008 when I really need notation. I export a .mid from Sonar (a function which is also not well implemented) and then drag it into Finale. It was a free LE version of the main Finale program (which I don't need.) They recently updated it to version 2009, and started charging $10 for a download version. Even for the most basic things, it's way beyond what the Sonar SV can do.

To be honest, Staff View looks like an early example of a feature that was added and more or less forgotten.

I do NOT think staff view, even as it is, should be removed. But realistically, I think the chances of its being improved in the current Sonar line/design are non-existent and that those waiting for a change in Sonar 9 are waiting for the same Godot they were waiting for in Sonar 8 and Sonar 7. If SV was important to Cakewalk's business, they'd have addressed it long ago.