Jim McDougall

I can assure you I am an OI (Organic Intelligence). So, if my statements are wrong, please explain how I can configure a Roli Block Looper to start recording a clip from a button and stop from a button and play from a button as I am playing or how to configure Sonar to work with a MidiPlus SmartPad. Fewer and fewer control surfaces are supporting Mackie because of its limited functionality. Reality is, that most new controllers are in fact, designed to work with Ableton Live. Whether you are playing "Live" or not, the reality is that most new control surfaces are now designed to the Ableton standard, just like in the old days most controllers were designed to support the Mackie standard. Sonar does not necessarily have to be a 'Live' environment, but it does need to support modern controller functionality.

I am a longtime Cakewalk/Sonar user(decades). I have the new Sonar installed and trying to connect various of my control surfaces and there is little to support modern control surfaces. I have a Roli blocks setup that is almost useless with Sonar. In the ACT definitions, there is nothing that allows me to take midi events and map them to Sonar functions like start recording a clip, stop recording a clip, play a clip and so on. Although Sonar can record MPE, there is no indicator I can set to identify the track as an MPE track. I have the capability to build expansive Midi controllers via OpenDeck but the Control Surface capabilities of Sonar aren 't any better now than they were more than a decade ago. I have sat down and mapped all the midi generated commands from the MidiPlus SmartPad and it is extremely capable although you cannot edit it. It appears to be a complete emulation of the Novation-S. The ACT controller needs to be upgraded to both allow any midi event to be mapped to a Sonar function and as a follow through clips should be able to be easily defined as loops. ACt should also provide two communications so that it can provide feedback to the controller for LEDs. Currently Mackie control is the only two control surface supported and that is also ancient. While I understand that many here produce in a very linear fashion, and that will continue to hold true for film and stage, modern music is branching from this linear recording paradigm - parts will remain linear but as everyone is seeing, there is now another large branch based around clips and loops being combined with linearity. While I understand the effort to migrate Sonar to Bandlab Calkwalk Sonar from a development and coding perspective, at some point we need to feel that what has been an ignored part of core Sonar functionality and is in dire need of modernization is going to be addressed. I see all this effort going into plugins and VST handling and while that is good, it doesn't help if the only way I can control that is via a mouse.