Just wanted to thank you all for raising this issue. For me the problem has existed in some form since Sonar 6 (5.2 was my true love ). Hopefully this can be addressed in an 8.52 patch. I use track layers extensively for R&B type background vocal stacks (which can get pretty crazy). Audiosnap, Vvocal and clip automation makes tightening things a dream but the bugging clips makes me want to look elsewhere at times. I would love to see Cakewalk chime in on this thread. 

Cool, glad I could help.

Lona69

This is not really a condemnation of Sonar the Program, it's a (I think) justified criticism of a company that can't see the forest for the trees. Sad

I disagree. Cakewalk's development priorities might not be to your liking, but it's not because they don't know what they're doing.   

Marah

rstollen

Lona69

This is not really a condemnation of Sonar the Program, it's a (I think) justified criticism of a company that can't see the forest for the trees. Sad

I disagree. Cakewalk's development priorities might not be to your liking, but it's not because they don't know what they're doing.

I'm of two minds about this. I believe that they DO know what they're doing. But I believe that what they're doing, or what they CAN do, has been narrowed by earlier decisions and miscalculations.

Thinking about Cakewalk, I feel like I'm looking at like a planet that has a weird orbit or irregularity and I can't figure out what's causing it or where on the current path it was thrown off... but if I could see it through the Hubble (or if they were a public company with public reporting), it would immediately become clear where and what the problem was. We're seeing the consequences of a "was" much more than an ongoing "is." (I have a theory or two about what it was/is, but this isn't the place.)

That seems reasonable to me. I'm a software developer and I have a product that was developed in 1995. It was great stuff at the time, but if I implement some features that the industry requires, I'll have to rewrite that product. It's a tough call. But I don't feel like I somehow screwed up almost 15 years ago. But I know that I will either have to rewrite or lose customers.

rstollen


BTW, my wild guess is that Cakewalk is going to rewrite, and they may lose some customers along the way. But that's the nature of the software development business.

I pretty much agree with you on this. The only logical reason for this "upgrade" is that they need more time to develop/debug/finalise the new product (hopefully from the ground up). I don't think they will lose customers though. If those customers are like me, I might just come running back to that environment that I am so famliar with if its REALLY stable and as "bugless" as one could hope for.

    Oh...One of my friends has just pointed out by not naming my new program I am inadvertantly endorsing Reaper. I didn't go to Reaper. I went to Record from Propellerheads. I'm a songwriter.

rstollen


BTW, my wild guess is that Cakewalk is going to rewrite, and they may lose some customers along the way. But that's the nature of the software development business.

Why would you throw away a million lines of code that works 95% correctly?
 
Cakewalk has been "rewriting" and rearchitecting SONAR since SONAR 3. Bussing, multicore, native VST, MIDI overhaul, 64-bit OS support, 64-bit audio pipeline, surround sound, GUI performance optimizations, and on and on.
 
Why do people think that you need to start "fresh" with a brand new main() in order for bugs to be fixed? The next overhaul/rearchitecture may very well be (perhaps should very well be) track layers/comping/envelopes, but that doesn't mean you have to necessarily throw out the baby with the bath water. It doesn't make sense.
 
I've worked with and on products that are certainly Legacy Stovepipes from Hell... functionality that deserves to not only be rearchitected and rewritten from the ground up, but first burned to durable storage and buried in a deep hole within the earth's crust never to see the light of day again.
 
However, with all of the attention given to major rearchitecture and rewriting of large chunks of SONAR functionality and core architecture over the past 6-7 years, I find it hard to believe that Cakewalk is in that position of last resort -- total rewrite. There may be areas of functionality that are prohibitively expensive to add or rewrite -- e.g., incorporating a band new, world-class notation subsystem -- but you can't use the same "old code" argument for, say, envelope bugs as you can for something as extensive and expensive as, say, notation.
 
Track layers and comping in SONAR has been around since what 2005? So exactly what "legacy" are we talking about here? 4 year old code? That's not legacy.
 
Oh, and don't let something like an "old fashioned looking" child window or popup menu fool you into thinking that the entirety of the SONAR architecture is "legacy". (not directed at you, rstollen, but in general I see this topic come up one in a while, and to me is a red herring argument)
 

Just another voice chiming in here. I've been a Cakewalk user since Pro Audio 5 circa 1994, and I've bought every upgrade between there and Sonar 6 (where I stay). The envelope bug and the envelope bug alone forced me to stop upgrading. All the new features may be nice, but when you get down to it ...even if you got cruise control, GPS and a Blaupunkt, if your car aint got wheels you aint goin nowhere.

And oh yes, 4 years old code has settled down with kids and a dog ;)

vocalid
Why you should do a total rewrite? Because patchwork quilts of code make for inefficiancy. With non realtime issues as in banking and such you can keep the code going for decades, but not for something as delicate as a DAW-software.

"Real engineers" can entirely rewrite a codebase from the inside out, not just the outside in. No need to start from scratch, unless absolutely necessary (e.g., you need to port to another platform). Besides, you're assuming SONAR is a patchwork quilt of code -- how would anyone but cakewalk engineering know that? If it were so bad, how could they possibly do the level of core optimization that they pulled off with v8? Those sorts of core changes are exactly what would prompt a full rewrite... if the code was that unmanageable.
 
And FWIW I've architected/rearchitected my share of realtime physics simulation and visualization systems, realtime audio, etc.... so I'm not just an IT dork writing dynamic website trinkets...
 

Who really cares if they have to do a complete rewrite or just tweak code that's there. The fact remains this is a mess that's been a mess for a long time and it's not getting fixed. Meanwhile, we get all this marketing hoopla about useless new features (at least useless to me) an these supposedly under-the-hood improvements (which personally have made 8.3.1 the most unstable version I've used since version 3). It's raising some fundamental issues that go beyond the bugs themselves. Like why doesn't this get fixed?

Regards,

DB

One of the big differences between Sonar and Reaper (for me) can be gotten to this way....
 
Reading Sonar's What's new is like reading a new features list in an add or on packaging. Reading Reaper's What's New is like reading the ingredients on a bottle of shampoo.
 
When CW announces or releases a new Sonar update or upgrade (and wouldn't it be nice to return to some kind of rough consensus on WTF those words mean) like they've recently done with 8.5, 8.3, and 8 (plus the little ones in between), they list the new features.
 
Each release is different. But when I go to look at a What's New in Sonar, I can read it through fairly quickly NOT because of the number of features (this is not about that) but because, generally, a fair number them can be described by a descriptive name (Session Drummer 3) and  a short sentence about what it is and what it does. So the list can be read slowly, once, and you can come away with a good initial sense of what's what. It takes, say, 2 or 3 minutes to get it in a first take (and you can always go back later.) 
 
When Cockos announces or releases a new upgrade or update, like they've recently done with 3.1 and (about 4 months ago) 3, they also list What's New. As with Sonar, each release is different. But unlike with Sonar, very few of the new items have full-fledged feature-type names. They're all description, but more difficult to describe because theyre more subtle in how they change the work environment.
 
The description needs to be read more slowly because the feature is not, say, a plugin that can be described and categorized (channel strip, step seq).
 
The items in Reaper's What's New list are more like, say, an improvement in how a dialog works, or new default options, or new commands and functions being exposed through its integrated macro and keybind system (which is very nice, if you're into that kind of thing.)
 
I think that's a fair compare. Neither approach will be better than the other everytime for every platform and every user base. The point is: They are very different. And they result in two very different beasts. Especially over time.
 
For me CW has steadily let lapse its upgrades and maintenances on existing features that are an important part of my flow. Most of these features are so basic you take them for granted. Or would like to be able to. Envelopes. Dialogs. Deleting across layers.
 
Sonar comes with nice goodies. I wouldn't mind having the full Dimension (like why not?), or some of the other plugins. The mix of new plugs might make it worth the price alone. And I really appreciate how Sonar's peak system works (and miss it desperately in Reaper which doesn't even give you vertical meters in its 'track view'. Can you believe it????)
 
But those things don't outweigh how in Sonar when you delete a clip in a layer, it will sometimes alter manual mute ranges of overlapping adjacent clips.
 
Or the need to switch tools way (way) more often than I like.
 
Or that clip envelopes sometimes go deaf dumb and blind and respond to nothing.
 
Or that I can't bind clip envelopes, perhaps the feature I use most after hitting the spacebar.
 
With Sonar, these things are just part of a list of long-standing issues.
 
With Reaper, they would be listed in the What's New of a run of the mill update with the words FIXED or ADDED next to them.
 
That's the difference between Sonar and Reaper.
 
 

 

And in the last version *upgrade* from v2.5x to v3.0, there was not one plugin with a catchy marketing department name touted as a feature. It's meat and potatoes functionality enhancements, with documented changelogs to boot.

 
Hehe, they must really be hard up for customers if they're still trying to get converts from the Sonar forum.
 
The last time people started advertising competitor products here the CEO of the company dropped by and shut it down. I guess you miss seeing Greg and just wanted a chance to say hello. LOL

Marah

And they know that those customers who feel the plugin offering is weak aren't their customers anyway. Because that's not the kind of end user Reaper's developers see when they try to figure out what we all look like. They have implicitly conceded that customer set as a main object of their development and marketing love.

In contrast, that appears to be a customer CW is most eager to court and keep. Seems like a valid approach. It's not like it hasn't been working for years. 

Edit: I'll suffice it to say without the link to the changelog (since Richard is trying to make it into something it isn't), that there is *FOCUS* on the core functionality of the DAW, and that's something that Cake used to have. Attention to detail and old world craftsmanship was something the early version of Sonar had, but it's become the norm each year to see more and more attention paid to plugins and addons than the core DAW.

 
So you're saying this isn't the same old effort to "Spread The Word!" as touted early on from the Cockos forum as if the Reaper users there are all members of some commune sent to prosthelytize among the various DAW forums? This is a new effort to do that?
 
The new effort is off to a dismal beginning, none of the fire and venom from the old! Now it seems like some cult that one would expect to at an airport rather than in a forum. This time there's even an omnipotent swami figure from the Reaper camp.

Richard Fey

Edit: I'll suffice it to say without the link to the changelog (since Richard is trying to make it into something it isn't), that there is *FOCUS* on the core functionality of the DAW, and that's something that Cake used to have. Attention to detail and old world craftsmanship was something the early version of Sonar had, but it's become the norm each year to see more and more attention paid to plugins and addons than the core DAW.

 
So you're saying this isn't the same old effort to "Spread The Word!" as touted early on from the Cockos forum as if the Reaper users there are all members of some commune sent to prosthelytize among the various DAW forums? This is a new effort to do that?
 
The new effort is off to a dismal beginning, none of the fire and venom from the old! Now it seems like some cult that one would expect to at an airport rather than in a forum. This time there's even an omnipotent swami figure from the Reaper camp.

There is no concerted effort here. You wonder why all these Sonar users who also use Reaper are suddenly here?  Maybe the fact that Cake's heavy handed marketing department, who learned the ropes selling "M3dZ from C@nada", have spammed us to the toon of several hundred emails to check out the new version.  You see, we were actually *invited* here.