I have had Cakewalk licenses since PA6. I migrated to Samplitude for a decade, came back for X3, and now am using CbB, and I am faced with the same issue I always have with SONAR. I am 95% an audio user and haven't done any heavy midi with Sonar, just used it for audio editing, time/pitch stretching, melodyne.
This is probably an education issue, but I suspect new users to Cakewalk coming from other platforms will find this as janky as I do. And this is probably the reason I will yet again drop SONAR and move to Cubase or Studio One.
Handling and assignment of VSTis!!!
I just want to:
A) Create a midi track (easy)
B) Assign a VSTi to that midi track (unintuitive)
C) Launch the VSTi view by clicking somewhere on the track (wtf?)
This should be as easy as 1) New midi track 2) Click on the midi out or FX rack to insert a VSTi and 3) Click on the text for the VSTi to open its interface.
In sonar it seems there are two common sense options to accomplish this, (the way you would do it in every other daw) but neither of them work properly in SONAR.
1) If you create an instrument track by either clicking the VSTi in the right pane and selecting "create simple instrument track" or DnD the instrument into the track pane, it will create an instrument track that is routed to the VSTi.. BUT, there is no way to launch the VSTi interface by clicking anywhere on the track. Neither does there appear to be a way to launch the interface by clicking on the right pane VST rack (maybe its hidden in there??)
2) If you create a midi track and assign its output to the VSTi, you can launch the VSTi interface by clicking on the text for the output. Great. But the problem now is that the midi routing does not work, there is no sound out of the VSTi. Meaning probably have to look somewhere in the routing/console to figure this out, but it should be dead simple and operate the way every other DAW does.
Maybe this is obfuscated behind some "clever" way to achieve what I want, but it is so fundamentally different from every other DAW that I consider it a design error/bug. Certainly long term users have been conditioned to take the right steps, but fumbling with this for the past 20 minutes, it still doesnt do what I want, and the documentation is spotty and not provided the answers.
While this may seem like a crybaby rant, its a plea to fix this, and is probably the #1 reason people are turned off from using the software. Sometimes people who have been working with something so long get disconnected from what the primary convention for doing work is in the rest of DAWs and don't see the issue. Meaning, if everyone else in the industry does it a certain way, and you do it differently, it will trip up every new user to the platform.
Good luck.