Hello everyone!
This is an interesting thread with some interesting views, so thought I'd throw mine into the pot too.
My work means I am in Apple world using Logic and Ableton Live, but for years I have chosen to use Cakewalk for my client and personal projects. As a multiple DAW user for 20+ years, the clunkiness of Cakewalk to me means:
Too many menus/options dotted all over the place.
Too much screen real-estate wasted under the Skylight paradigm, leading to project navigation/management annoyances, endless resizing of views and tracks in large projects etc. I already use two large monitors.
UI feels sluggish as the years go by, outdated from top to bottom inside and out (hate those system menus & fonts).
It is not possible to scroll using the mouse wheel in some menus, e.g. ProChannel module list. I have all of the ProChannel modules so this has been annoying me for years.
Managing AUX tracks and PatchPoints is an absolute chore (please can we have a decent manager for this).
MIDI routing, or lack of.
I personally feel that with an updated UI and a streamlining of menus, most issues regarding clunkiness would be resolved. Other functions in need of updating or implementing would appear more obvious once the UI looks slicker, feels snappier, is more unified throughout.
Can you tell that I’m looking forward to a future Cakewalk Sonar with an updated UI? 😆
When upgrading to Win10 it often resets some system settings that negatively impact on audio playback performance. An example of this is the Indexing option being re-enabled on some HDDs. Check that Indexing is turned off on your Audio drive (assuming you use a separate drive for audio, which you should).