What makes Sonar Platinum a good choice for Cakewalk users?

[orcmid]

3 hours ago, bitman said:

... And new Sonars and Next are for the next gen (or else) . So I started up SPLAT and saw that it had the one feature I must have was there and that is the tempo extraction. ... I think I go SPLAT. 

 

It took me a moment to recognize SPLAT as SONAR Platinum :).  I'm guessing that Cakewalk.next is not part of the family, according to the announcement.  The same announcement suggests that Cfb, SPLAT, and the BandLab Sonar.next will co-exist, which means the common assets will continue to co-exist.  I already noticed that for the first two.

PS: And BandLab preserving the legacy internet materials and the authorization system strikes me as good news.  If it was up to me, that would remain the case until at least beyond where BandLab's Sonar.next achieves parity with CfB and SPLAT.

Edited December 23, 2023 by orcmid
Add PS

[Bapu]

7 minutes ago, orcmid said:

When you open the latest CCC your user ID should show up in the top bar, on the left of the settings gear.  I don't recall if I had to authenticate with the installer or not when I upgraded to the Bandlab version of CCC.  

I do know when I click on my name it will link to (https://legacy.cakewalk.com/My-Account) .   If you have held onto your Cakewalk user and password information, you can log in there and that might also do the job.  Also,   If you are able to login there, you will see a button for downloading the now-supported CCC.
 

This is paulo, btw

[Sheens]

And his morning stretch (in slow motion)

 

Edited December 23, 2023 by Sheens

[Starship Krupa]

On 12/22/2023 at 7:20 AM, Sistine said:

I am not that much convinced that it has less bugs then Sonar Platinum

I never had SONAR Platinum as such, but I grabbed CbB within a week of the announcement of its release. You can believe that all those bugs they say they fixed and optimizations they say they made were fake if you want, but on my system(s) if I had paid money for that first release of CbB I would have been dissatisfied enough to return it.

A behavior I remember too well is how the audio engine would stop if I moved the playback loop markers more than twice. The status of the audio engine in general was pretty iffy, it reminded me of a balky lawnmower where I'd have to jump off and pull the starter cord every so often. Now I can't remember the last time I got a prompt informing me that the audio engine has stopped.

It also did this amusing thing where if I dragged the window to another location on the desktop while it was playing back, the main window would move, but the playhead and vertical indicator line would stay behind, happily cruising along as if the window hadn't been moved out from underneath it. There was this other thing where if I recorded with take lanes closed it would scramble up the resulting clip boundaries. It just felt fragile in general, like I shouldn't click and drag on things too quickly or it would trip over itself, that I had to baby it.

It would crash or start playing back weird if I left the program running for too long. I remember months into the improvement process when I was psyched that I had accidentally left the program running overnight and when I got back to my computer the next day, it was still running fine.

This was a computer that had already been running a number of other DAW's just fine. I was coming from Mixcraft, which was solid as a rock.

The very next release got it working better, then the one after that, and 3 months in, it was clear that the new management had shown up with their a55-kicking boots on.

I don't recall any bugs having to do with Tempo or Arranger Track that affected anything other than display of the Tempo or Arranger Track. But this is all my own memory of events, and memory can be funny. Not saying anyone else remembers it better or worse, just saying this is how I remember it.

Here are some features that would now drive me nuts not to have in CbB: Ripple Edit Indicator, display of selected note value in the PRV header, display of note names in the PRV, ability to turn off the numeric readout on the Aim Assist Line, Replace FX menu item, open synth UI on replacement, right click menu item to rename clip, fit project to window horizontally (without altering it vertically), configurable Smart Tool, persistent instrument names list in the PRV....

[paulo]

23 hours ago, Bapu said:

This is paulo, btw

I remember when that pic was taken.

I was watching the lesser known 4th film in the "Look Who's Talking" series...

 

[CSistine]

1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said:

I never had SONAR Platinum as such, but I grabbed CbB within a week of the announcement of its release. You can believe that all those bugs they say they fixed and optimizations they say they made were fake if you want, but on my system(s) if I had paid money for that first release of CbB I would have been dissatisfied enough to return it.

A behavior I remember too well is how the audio engine would stop if I moved the playback loop markers more than twice. The status of the audio engine in general was pretty iffy, it reminded me of a balky lawnmower where I'd have to jump off and pull the starter cord every so often. Now I can't remember the last time I got a prompt informing me that the audio engine has stopped.

It also did this amusing thing where if I dragged the window to another location on the desktop while it was playing back, the main window would move, but the playhead and vertical indicator line would stay behind, happily cruising along as if the window hadn't been moved out from underneath it. There was this other thing where if I recorded with take lanes closed it would scramble up the resulting clip boundaries. It just felt fragile in general, like I shouldn't click and drag on things too quickly or it would trip over itself, that I had to baby it.

It would crash or start playing back weird if I left the program running for too long. I remember months into the improvement process when I was psyched that I had accidentally left the program running overnight and when I got back to my computer the next day, it was still running fine.

This was a computer that had already been running a number of other DAW's just fine. I was coming from Mixcraft, which was solid as a rock.

The very next release got it working better, then the one after that, and 3 months in, it was clear that the new management had shown up with their a55-kicking boots on.

I don't recall any bugs having to do with Tempo or Arranger Track that affected anything other than display of the Tempo or Arranger Track. But this is all my own memory of events, and memory can be funny. Not saying anyone else remembers it better or worse, just saying this is how I remember it.

Here are some features that would now drive me nuts not to have in CbB: Ripple Edit Indicator, display of selected note value in the PRV header, display of note names in the PRV, ability to turn off the numeric readout on the Aim Assist Line, Replace FX menu item, open synth UI on replacement, right click menu item to rename clip, fit project to window horizontally (without altering it vertically), configurable Smart Tool, persistent instrument names list in the PRV....

Nice that your bugs have been fixed! 👍

It surely depends how you use the program! I  mentioned the bug above in the OP that is new to CbB and was never in Splat. There are some other "new" bugs where the selection of things doesn't work as it should. Though I agree with you that Splat has a lot of bugs, especially with take lanes. But most of them (take lanes) are still there in CbB. There are also plugins (VST3) that crash CbB, but not Splat. And so on.

New features bring always a lot of new bugs in the first place. You can see this if you look at the changelog of all CbB releases (e.g. after the introduction of the arranger).

But overall if I use Splat it is not much different to me than using CbB. There are too many bugs especially when I am editing audio clips. So far I know how to work around most of them, but it is painful and elaborate sometimes.

But YMMV as always, happy Xmas!

 

[CSistine]

@Starship Krupa: You caught me! I wanted to avoid arguments like this! 😄 But actually it is my own fault!

Edited December 25, 2023 by Sistine

[Starship Krupa]

3 hours ago, Sistine said:

@Starship Krupa: You catched me! I wanted to avoid arguments like this! 😄 But actually it is my own fault!

Well, I don't care for arguments as such, either. Your experience and preferences are as valid as mine. And we all want the same thing: software that does what we want without having to keep our fingers crossed that it will work, and without having to develop workarounds for features that are broken.

I think that as people continue to use a beloved piece of software, we learn to tiptoe around the things that make it fall down and go boom. And everyone has different paths through complex software.

I'm that way with Vegas Pro, I know that it's crash-y and fragile, but it's what I'm used to and I've learned how to tinker with its zillions of options to make it way more stable. And I'm probably the opposite of a power user with it. It has gotten better, but not to the extent that I've seen with CbB. I'm not equipped with the skills needed to report bugs in a video editor.

I picked up that recent Humble Bundle with Corel Painter. Never used software like that before, but I found a nice Wacom tablet at Salvation Army a few months back and wanted to try it out for its intended use. I fired it up and started testing brushes and stuff, was having a great time, even came up with an abstract thing that I thought was a keeper. But since I was having so much fun, and started out just fiddling, I neglected to save it along the way, and sure enough, it poofed (crash to desktop with no warning). Can't blame it on plug-ins because I have no 3rd-party ones.

My system is based on components that were top of the line for workstation builds half a dozen years ago. I can do video editing, DAW work, game all day long (which I sometimes do, unfortunately). Painter is MATURE software. I remember it being around 25 years ago. WTF Corel? Fortunately PaintShop Pro by itself made the bundle worth the price of admission.

Something that I suspect happened along the way was that under previous management, feature addition took precedence over bug fixing, to the point where veteran users lost hope that long-known defects would ever be cured. I've run into resistance among veteran users to report issues to the current team and they'll say that they reported it 8 years ago and gave up. Of course, 8 years ago, it was a different company. Noel B. was obviously given a lot more leeway, hence the focus on bug-smashing.

Also, regular users sometimes aren't able to sit with something long enough to crank out a step-by-step so that the devs can reproduce it, and a bug that they can't see is one they can't fix. They're kinda more interested in spending their time making music than beating up on the program. However, I am a geek, and actually enjoy that sort of thing. Making music is a hobby. I love CbB and I hate to see anyone not enjoying the program as much as I do.

I used to earn my living as a pro software QA engineer, these phenomena are more common than they should be in the consumer software market. I like to contribute, so I've written up many CbB bugs and frustrations and turned them in. It ain't perfect software by a long shot, but the devs do listen. Some of my feature requests have even been implemented (fit horizontal, toggle numbers from Aim Assist, Replace FX are some of them). My current beg is to be able to delete markers from the right click dialog.

Feed me some bugs, in PM if you don't want the chorus of "it works for me, it must be your system or the plug-in's fault." I'll hammer them and if I can repro them, I'll turn them in. You never know....if the wheel don't squeak, it ain't gonna get the grease.