Mark Morgon-Shaw

1 minute ago, rfssongs said:

I keep em all, I've a box of them.

Me too

Then I still can't find the one I want and have to buy a new one 

13 hours ago, Misha said:

Here is a vid of a guy making  a backing track to practice to: BIAB is amazing for making these type of practice tracks &  fast sketches. 

You could get a much better result from Ezdrummer, EzKeys & EzBass

23 hours ago, Jonathan Sasor said:

Discord is more of a chat than a forum. It kind of splits the difference between a forum and an app like Slack

Is there a Discord for New Sonar yet ?

On 9/26/2023 at 7:59 PM, Misha said:

 BIAB is a very special software that has many purposes, besides playing demos

I agree it's certainly special ? 

You either need a better string library with more articulations or need to fake it somehow . There are some libraries that have fast attack patches which might help but a lot of folks fake the accented feel by doubling the start of the note with a pizzi articulation and mixing it in such a way that it sounds like one bowing action.

Also boucing the track to audio might make it easier to control the note envelope using automation   

48 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

seems like something that might be more popular for the use case I suggested: track/edit/compose in one program, then export it to another, for use in one's own studio.

That methodology has always struck me as a bit of a strange way of going about  things. Surely more efficient to learn onw DAW really well and just roll with it ?   

Gave Next a try ( I have Discord here on my studio PC btw for a few years as we use it to talk about collabs and hadn't noticed any issues ) 

Next seems very slick and polished, it's too simplistic for me to use in any real way but I am guessing I am not arget audience and I can see the appeal to those stepping up from something like the Bandlab App or creators seeking a first DAW.

I like the visual style, and the one thing it has that I wish CbB or Sonar had is the Xsampler - I like the way if you just drag a loop into the track pane it offers to make it into a sampler instrument. I hope they carry this over to the new Sonar. 

14 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

So you do your tracking and comping in your favorite tracking and comping DAW and then export it for mixing in your favorite mixing DAW. People do this today by bouncing to individual audio files in the first DAW, then importing them into the second one. "Imagine" doing that for 50 tracks, at the end of which every effect you used, every edit (no matter how imperfect) and every MIDI track, is baked-in and can't be unbaked without going back to the first DAW.

I have to collaborate with mutlple musicians for some of my production music tracks and everyone I know in the industry just sends each other Wav files as it's so much simpler. One guy I work with regularly has CbB and honestly I don't even want his project files because how he works and lays everything out is very diffrent to how I work. His projects look like a unicorn vomited on the screen whereas mine are very simple and grey. I use folders, he does not. I use multiple busses - he does not. Even the way people name their tracks differs.

So it's not really an issue to bounce a bunch of  track-outs and everyone who does it regular enough knows the drill. Print any FX that are an integral part of the sound and leave the rest to the person doing the final mix/master. Most of us use Dropbox to send wav files to each other.

I think that's as univeral as it gets. 

4 hours ago, Misha said:

Mark,

back 13 years ago Band In A Box was a mainly  smart MIDI sequencer.  Since then, they adopted Real Tracks, performed by real studio musicians from all over the world on real instruments of all kind of genres from Rock to Bossa Nova. Not loopy loops, but entire performances. They recorded thousands of hours of these Real Tracks and Real Drums.  Perhaps, you should re-discover BIAB

I first tried it in the late 90s when as you say it was purely midi , wasn't impressed then ( I ended up buying a Yamaha TG300 and programming my own tracks instead ) nor in 2000's when I demo'd it again nor more recently after they introduced RealTracks and there was quite an in depth review in SOS magazine. I think if you're into a certain chintzy kinda trad style or just want a tool that will let you easily demo a song to be replaced with better parts then it has a role to play but some of the more modern styles are laughable once it goes outside it's lane.

4 hours ago, Misha said:

Pre-baked arranger...  In my opinion modern styles  are very usable. They are as good as they were programmed or recorded.   I have heard amazing stuff done on Tyros / Genos. Obviously they were modified for particular tune. 

  Just had a watch on Youtube, the actual instrument sounds on these things have not improved that much in the last 15-20 years, they're not as good as what you can do in a decent plugin which may even be free. Again the style are kinda chintzy throwback trad stuff which is fine - I didn't spot anything vaguely contemporary but I suspect given the sounds are not that brilliant it would be another cheese-fest. Something like VPS Avenger will sound way better, 

4 hours ago, Misha said:

Again, the core of my request is a Chord Track that would be linked to current arranger track , where you can drag in MIDI phrases (loops) or short MIDI performances and automatically re-harmonize them based on the chords typed in that Chord Track.   

A real world scenario is this: you assemble your midi phrases on a regular Sonar MIDI track(s), check tick "follow chord track" on individual MIDI track.

 Cool but that's not what you originally said.  As an extension of a Chord Track feature it should automtically reharmonize the underlying midi ( and audio) to follow anyway. That's how it works in StudioOne for example. But it's nothing like a QY100 etc.

5 hours ago, azslow3 said:

2) (the consequence of (1)) they kind of enforcing Komplete Kontrol and limiting DAW integrations

The new one doesn't force KK for using the Kontakt instruments, it's directly integrated with K7

Personally I don't care for pads, or faders much which are absent on the new model. I have them on my M-Audio controller and never use them. What I do use a lot in Kontakt , pretty much every track I make has a handful of Kontakt Instruments or more. So having direct control from the keyboard itself is a big attraction to me. 

8 hours ago, Misha said:

I don't follow your "something from a 90s home keyboard" comment.  Midi segments are Midi segments. If they were played / programmed well, they will sound good 100 years from now.   They are just instructions,  just as with gazillion EZ keys MIDI "packs", that people can't stop buying, which are  essentially melodic (or rhythmic) MIDI snips.   

Because generally they're not that well programmed esepecially when it comes to anything vaguely contempory. Dial up a Pop preset on any pre-baked arranger and it sounds nothing like what we would call Pop now for example.

Yes if they're really well done the Trad Styles in the likes of EZkeys can probably stand the test of time much better but if you're trying to make music for today's market they're probably not a great idea. 

8 hours ago, Misha said:

I don't know what you "heard" and "where" you heard it, but I respectfully disagree.

Back in 2010 I joined the Taxi forums ( self proclaimed World's Leading A&R Company ) so I've heard a lot of it used there from various people trying to get into the industry. 

20 minutes ago, azslow3 said:

From the amount of feedback I have got about my integration for M/A controllers (probably somehow works with S MK2, but I don't know if someone has ever tried), special integration with CbB/Sonar probably is not worse the resourced required to develop it ?

I think if it's to be once again taken seriously then it's these types of things that can be deciding factors for busy media composers 

On 9/23/2023 at 9:09 PM, Teegarden said:

If this will happen, why would it not be compatible with CbB? Sonar is just a name change and another update of a DAW that has many years of backward compatibility...

Because it sounds like it would require some new code and no new code is going into CbB from this point forward. 

Everything I've ever heard made with Bland In A Box sounds cheesy and terrible. Maybe it's the user's fault and it can actually be made to sound really good instead of canned, or maybe it's just really meant to be a placeholder for something better like a live musician.  But it's often easy to spot when someone has used it.  

I've been asking for a chord track for several years ( and have received hints that it's coming ) but I think going further and providing some sort of full on auto-accompianment falls outside the remit of a DAW and gets into 3rd party plugin territory .  There's already a ton of good quality virtual backing band type plugins available for example :-

Toontrack have EZkeys, EzBass & Ezdrummer

Sonscore's 'The Orchestra' is great for Orchestral parts as is the Orchestrator which is part of EastWest's Opus Orchestra

Ujam have a bunch of stuff  like virtual drummers, a virtual bass player and several virtual guitarists

Then there's loads of Kontakt instruments like NI Session Guitarist series, Session Strings and Session Horns with their animator presets

Also if you're down with the kids  there's stuff like LoopCloud which has 4 million samples and can repitch / tempo match to your project and can be a useful source of inspiration 

I'm sure there's plenty more options I've not come across and doubtless once Ai plugins start coming to market we'll have tools that we can tell to just play a guitar or violin solo and it will spit out something pretty good.  But anything that whiffs of something from a 90s home keyboard isn't really writing music in my book and also tends to sound generic and of low quality. 

I use Kontakt a lot and the the new S series Mk 3 keyboards look very interesting but I just watched a review which says for it to function properly the DAW needs to be made compatible.

I don't know what this entails and as CbB is now sunsetted that's obviously never going to happen, but as all the other major DAWs look to be compatible or adding compatibility is this something we can hope for in the new Sonar ?  

On 9/13/2023 at 12:14 PM, msmcleod said:

But to answer the original question of the post... "How many users does CbB have?"... go here:
https://bandlabtechnologies.com/brands/cakewalk/

Wow . That is a lot 

Out of interest do you get useage data , are you able to see how many CbB were logged over a given time period ?

3 hours ago, msmcleod said:

You can save/load presets either within preferences, or alternatively specify a config preset as a command line option (so you can have different shortcuts on your desktop that launch Sonar with different configs).

Will the preset persist if I save it in a Project Template ?

2 hours ago, msmcleod said:

The new Sonar will have configuration presets, which will make this far easier.

Great. Does this mean my preferred choice of Sound On Sound editing can be part of the preset so I don't have to go back in to preferences and select  it each time I start a new project ? 

Channel Tools is very underrated plugin

14 hours ago, Craig Anderton said:

Tesla owners, for starters.

At least if CbB crashes nobody gets hurt. I wouldn't want to be a Beta Tester for self driving cars which is basically what Tesla Autopilot Customers are. 

"The Washington Post analyzed data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and found that Tesla's Autopilot has led to 736 crashes and 17 deaths in the U.S. since 2019.12 "

9 minutes ago, Jonathan Sasor said:

The apps have a shared intermediary format. It can't do everything as there isn't 1:1 feature parity between Sonar and Next, but it does handle quite a few things, much more than uploading to bandlab.

I've not heard about my Beta Application - So were is Next positioned in the ecosystem  - is  it somewhere between the Bandlab App and CbB / Sonar ?

1 hour ago, Byron Dickens said:

I hope it does list at $499.

Honestly I wouldn't mind , I've earned far more than that from it even just in the last few months - If it came with a monthly call with Noel to go though my ideas on improving the UX then I'd sign up today.

7 hours ago, JohnnyV said:

I Someone straitened me out when I said we had been using a $500  DAW but  they were correct and it has actually been Sonar Professional because of the missing add-ons. So CbB is only a $200 DAW. 

 

Yeah it's the old marketing tactic of having a really expsensive top tier that you sell realtively few of so the $200 option looks like a bargain in comparison and was likely the most popular. 

I think the CbB team have been absoloutely brilliant over the past 5yrs.

How anyone can begrudge them transitioning to a paid model after giving us half a decade of pro level software and support FOR FREE goodness only knows.  

I see the Platinum Lifetime crowd still complaining over on Facebook, as if Bandlab who owe them nothing either legally or morally haven't already done enough already for the user base. Maybe Bandlab can give them a token concession against new Sonar to finally put the matter to rest. 

I've checked my spreadsheet and since April 2018 I've written and produced over 450 tracks with CbB many of which have aired in various TV shows around the world and continue to do so. That wouldn't be possible if CbB wasn't a high quality stable DAW with professional level features and it's testament to the Dev Team that a slew of fantastically useful features have been added during that 5yrs that are in daily use.  Off the top of my head...

Arranger Tracks ( This has gotten me out of trouble more times than I care to mention ) 

Articulation Maps 

New Export Module ( This has been a game changer for creating deliverables ) 

Track Folders 

Ripple Editing

ARA 2

That's without accounting for all the bug fixes and small enhancements along the way.

So thanks to the CbB team for the last 5yrs, I will be first in line to purchase the new Sonar. I think the last one I bought was Sonar8.5 as an amateur producer before finally calling time on that version and transitioning to CbB as I was starting to get my tracks used professionally. 

I sincerely hope most will follow and the new products are a great success, I would dearly like  my DAW to once again grace the pages of Sound on Sound and be talked about by hardware manufacturers as a popular DAW their products need to be tested with and made compatible.