Magic Russ

Just turn on the news.

Sorry, just had to ask because there wasn't one with P5.

Since you are describing Next as a creation environment and Sonar as a production environment, it seems that you might have a number of users who decide to do creation work in Next and move production work to another environment, such as Sonar. Can we expect that Next will include appropriate export options?

They actually had both back in the day.

CA-2 is still pretty good, as were the Linear Phase plugins and Adaptive Limiter. The original Z3TA+ was pretty groundbreaking. Triangle II has an ob9 patch that I prefer to a number of current Oberheim emulations. I'd love to see them make a few tweaks to Pentagon to make it a little more stable and take standard wav files. Rapture is still a fairly powerful synth, and while Dimension doesn't have the power of Kontakt, it has a pretty solid library. While I will be the first to say they made some really dumb missteps with Rapture Pro (especially releasing a 32 bit version when a not insignificant portion of the content would not load in memory), if you take it as a version of Sound Center instead of the next iteration of Rapture, it actually is a mostly worthwhile product. And obviously nobody has asked for Guitar Rig LE because the version of TH3 is much better. I have fond memories of these because I had a tighter budget when starting and plugins were much more expensive in the early days. If I had to spend a month with only plugins included with versions of Cakewalk I purchased I could do alright.

I think at this point any reasonable person has discerned that outside of an official announcement, anything more said on pricing and licensing will be nothing more than FUD, venting, ranting, or possibly virtue signalling. With that out of the way, let's talk about the direction these products are going in. "Less work, more flow" is an awesome slogan, but what's in the pipeline to actually achieve that? What is Next? Is it just a port of BandLab software or something more? Is it going to be competing with FL, Ableton, and Bitwig? What else is in store for Sonar? The change to vector graphics might not be enough to open everyone's wallet. What about the instruments? What gets included, outdated, updated?

I don't think it's fair to blame Cakewalk's demise on the update plan. I recall having read that they were losing money as early as the Roland days. Besides, if it's such a terrible idea, why did Bitwig take it up and why are they having success with it?

I think you may be giving many of the people who misunderstood the message a bit too much credit.

Like I said in the upstairs thread, I don't think anyone in the DAW world can get away with that. Those who have tried have been shown the errors of their ways. I would be shocked to see that happen.

Thank you for reminding me why I don't spend time on Nextdoor.

Come on, you know the pricing model is going to be an issue for someone, even if it is free.

The entry for Sonar on the KVR site is $99-499 for Sonar X3, not the resurrected version.

I used to use vi back in the days of doing Pro*C on UNIX. I had half a dozen perl scripts that would automate a lot of the drudgier stuff like doing the cursor and statement creation for embedded Oracle.

That may be one of the more interesting things I have heard today. I see that Next offers tagged browsing of plugins. Is this something coming to Sonar as well? Will Sonar import files from Next?

I get the impression that where they are going is similar to how things worked at the tail end of Cakewalk where you choose from a) Buy the software plus 12 months of updates (which Bitwig does now) and you keep software at last updated version covered under the plan. b) A rent-to-own plan. It seems to me the DAW market is competitive enough that nobody can get away with a pay-or-quit subscription model anyway.

It would have been cool if Next was a revival of Project 5....

That will probably be me as well.

Thanks for clarifying that. I remember some time back someone telling me that you could shift-drag to do this, but that wasn't working. I didn't realize you had to click shift after you started dragging.

I wonder if this means their next library is a Celtic entry into their Spotlight Series.

Thanks for that but for me what is as important is the ability to drag them without the container.

How does that new Kareem Riggins compare?

When I drag a track template from the browser, the only place it will let me drag it is to the bottom of the track list. It would be nice if the drag and drop functionality would function so that it shows a red line where it is going to drop, or highlighting a track if it is going to replace it (and giving a dialog to confirm replacement of the track template. Of course, that means the replace functionality has to work, but that's another topic).

Over the course of time, I have made a few track templates containing a simple instrument track. If I add an instrument track into a project, and then decide to right click on the track and select "Replace From Track Template" and select one of my single-instrument track templates, I always get an error similar to the following Track template 'R6 Monark Lead' is incompatible with this track type. Why might I be getting this error? I might understand if it got confused by sends or routing but this is a situation where you have an instrument track going straight to master.

"My Account" shows a $69 upgrade from FX Collection 3. It seems the team that sets up the promotions got ahead of the team that puts content on their website.

In order to do things in a plugin like search for a preset or save or rename a preset, you have to be able to type that in. Unfortunately Cakewalk seems to impose an extra step on the user, that you need to first click on the keyboard icon in the plugin window to send keystrokes to the plugin. Wouldn't it make sense to have Cakewalk assume that if you have just clicked your cursor in a text box, that you want your text going to the plugin?