John T

45 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

Though my main personal nitpick with the change to the vector UI is the 15% size increase. How is it not possible to maintain the exact same interface size from before when you have freely scalable graphics.

I'm not seeing that. I've done a comparison with both apps running, and everything is almost exactly the same size.

1 hour ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

From reading through all the posts the people with 4k monitors seem happier than those without.

I don't have 4k, but I think the new look at 100% scaling is generally sharp and readable for me. I've not done any precise comparisons, but subjectively, I find it mostly clearer to look at than CbB.

Seems like there are a range of user experiences going on. So I'm guessing some of this is just gremlins to work out with the new tech.

Yeah, that's my gut feeling.

I think that makes more sense for Next, which doesn't have an existing user base, and seems more suited to integration with the overall Bandlab thing. But for Sonar, I think it would certainly ruffle some feathers. I suppose we'll see.

Obviously, at this point in time, we can only speculate. But it seems a reasonable assumption to me that Bandlab's core business is in driving membership signups. And therefore they're going to want Next and Sonar to contribute to that.

There is of course a bit of a tension between that and the value to customers who want to use Sonar, but have no use for any of the Bandlab features. That certainly describes me; I'm not involved, and not planning to be involved in the distribution of any of the stuff I work on. And I'm not in the market for the kind of collaboration tools Bandlab provides.

So the question is two-fold, I think. Firstly, is Sonar going to be available outside of Bandlab membership? And secondly, does that matter to you or not?

I'd say for myself, I don't really care either way, as long as the cost is reasonable for what I use. Which the current membership is to my mind. ~$15 a month is fine by me.

My current guess is that they're going to launch as membership-only and see what happens. But of course, that's only a guess.

1 hour ago, David Baay said:

In this particular case, I think all the FX going gray in the bin kind of gives it away.

I disagree a bit. When I say "at a glance" I'm not talking about being "able to tell what's on and what's off", I'm talking about it being glaringly and immediately obvious what's on and what's off. I'm on about something that's basically impossible to over-do.

If I have one general objection to the new look, it's that things like that button should be more obviously "lit" or "not lit". I don't think the at-a-glance readability is as good as could be.

Regarding blurry text oddities, most everything looks great for me. But I'm getting weird squishy fonts in the title sections in Preferences:

 

I think overall it's very impressive how nothing has really gone away or been broken, or not that I've found so far. For such a complete overhaul of the UI, I imagine that took some meticulous work.

I'm pretty sure that positivity and optimism are against the TOS. Moderator!

4 hours ago, lychee said:

I also hope for the disappearance of the Vista Smartglass type frame when you reduce the working window to display several projects at the same time.

Ha, yeah, that always jangles my brain slightly.

I'm personally not interested in a full-blown theme editor. But I think it would be nice to see more colour tweaks available in preferences.

I also think there's a gap in the current set of themes, and there should be at least one that's a bit more high contrast.

Thank god for that. The last thing we want is any girls in our treehouse.

Got a nit pick here:


 

Something that looks like an X in the top right corner of an object has a long-standing meaning in Windows. But this is in fact the control to vertically expand or contract the module. I guarantee that'll be confusing to new users.

Yeah, I'd like to see more things available in the UI colour preferences; it's very limited right now, but I think it's been mentioned that that will change.

None of the existing themes are quite as contrasting as I'd like. I think the at-a-glance readability of things could be improved massively with some pretty small adjustments.

For example, I'd like things like the power buttons in the UI to be much brighter for on and much darker for off. Stuff like that.

The shock of the new is always a hump to get over. But nearly everything I thought looked weird in the new version yesterday looks fine to me today.

45 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Technically they are external to the application since they are plugins. We may get around to refreshing their UI at some point.

Yeah, I thought as much. It's not that big a deal. It's just that, because I have those a lot in existing projects, my first impression of the UI was that it was a bit unfinished, as all my existing projects pop up with a lot of this stuff. 

But that's a subjective thing. Overall, I really like the new look and am optimistic about how things are progressing.

49 minutes ago, Heath Row said:

Surely there must be other themes that don't look anything like this,

Of what's presently included, they're all variants of these two, more or less.

Yeah, that's a substantial improvement.

It's a minor point, but I was a bit surprised to see that the Console Emulator and Concrete Limiter ProChannel modules don't have the new UI style.

3 hours ago, GreenLight said:

Wow! First impression: I really like it. Cakewalk/Sonar goes modern!

Here's an example in dark mode. You know, the mode for tough men who carry a dagger between their teeth while they produce music.

 

52 minutes ago, Mr No Name said:

That daw looks likes it's been aimed at women and children.

And pushing a mouse around used to be such a robustly masculine pursuit. We live in a benighted age.

5 hours ago, norfolkmastering said:

On my monitor it is clearly sharper on CbB compared to Sonar.  Overall I am finding the text on the Sonar displays more fuzzy.  I am running two BenQ GL2450H  24" monitors with a resolution of 1920 x 1080.

That's interesting. My overall impression is that the new version is the sharper one. I'm on dual monitors, both HP, both 1920x1200, which is native resolution. Windows display scaling is 100%.

1 hour ago, Hillmy said:

I use the Tungsten theme in Cakewalk and I like it. But the one in Sonar is bad. Lots of missing details and colors making it look like a mod of Ableton interface instead of the award winning Cakewalk skylight interface.

I think the two existing attempts to replicate Tungsten and Mercury are a bit... unfinished, perhaps is the generous description. I think the default "dark" is actually a better take on Tungsten, if you give it a chance. Takes a bit of time to adjust of course.

It's definitely odd, and a negative, that lots of text fields have smaller fonts and yet don't fit as much text in. Right now, that's the big obvious clanger for me. I assume that's some kind of font spacing rule that's not too hard for the developers to iterate on.

Tell you something I really like, that I don't think anyone's mentioned:

Quote

Create sends by dragging effects to channel strips (audio track, instrument track, aux track, or bus)

This is great. You just drag an effect from the browser into the sends area of a track, and it creates a bus with that effect in and a send routed to it. Such a small thing that removes a ton of clicks. Really nicely implemented.