Starship Krupa

Of course there's more to the UI overhaul than that. The new vector-based technology is supposed to be able to handle display scaling better. We already have the resizable Console strip modules, which is great. The new Track Manager is a big improvement over the old one. Theoretically, the vector-based UI should allow for greater customization. If not for the end user, at least for the developers. I hope we see more of that. I'm here to advocate for it. I like the overall look of the new UI. Most of my CbB themes are as flat as I could make them, especially the dark ones. Flat is the current look for computer programs. Computers have been around long enough that programs don't have to look like physical objects. The last big revamp of the SONAR/CbB UI was in the oughts, right? I know that new isn't necessarily better, but It was looking dated to me. I don't like having to switch back to CbB for certain tasks.

"Blame" is a strong word. I like to stay away from figuring out what the devs' priorities are. I want to be able to use NuSonar, and they probably want it to be usable. I'll put it like this: Sonar has multiple areas where legibility and accessibility has been reduced in comparison to its immediate predecessor. I'd like to see this reversed/remedied, especially if/as CbB gets phased out in favor of the free tier of Sonar. Others have concurred, and of course there must be many other users who never post on this forum. NuSonar has been released for some time, and from the start, people have given feedback regarding how the legibility of Sonar is reduced from CbB's and how important it is to restore the features that have been removed from Color Preferences. Some users have stated that if these issues aren't addressed, they'll stick with CbB for as long as they can and then maybe go in search of yet another DAW. So far, things have stayed the same except for some tweaks to the contrast of grid lines in Track View/Clips Pane. While the UI looks slicker overall, there are no areas where legibility has been improved. In most locations, text font size has decreased. Less so button image size, but there are some locations where that's gotten smaller too, such as the note length buttons in Piano Roll view. The underlying UI elements are the same size as they were in CbB, so making the graphics and text labels smaller isn't due to lack of real estate. The text sizes really look like I went down a line on an eye chart. CbB was the last line I could read, and then NuSonar is the next line down where I start to miss letters. In the places where text contrast against its background has changed, it's been reduced, not increased. A relatively small increase to text contrast against the backgrounds would help, though. There are some operations, like comping, where I switch back to CbB even though I otherwise much prefer the look of the NuSonar interface. Comping, clip editing, any work that requires me to use the grid to line things up is much easier and faster in CbB because I can make the lines out better. When I switch back to CbB, my eyes relax, I can read labels again, and I don't have to rely as much on memory and guessing. It's easier and more comfortable to regress to a program whose UI I like less than it is to have to squint and press my face up to the monitor. I'm about to connect with someone on Craig's List who's selling a 4K monitor, which I'm only interested in because it might help me see Sonar better. The HD monitors I already have are perfectly fine for everything else I do with my system. I recently had a comping project with 4 linked drum clips. I started out in NuSonar, to give it a chance, but eventually had to choose between forcing myself and getting the job done. It's still mostly fine for MIDI editing, but I can't make out the note value buttons in PRV any more. I don't mean this to slam the developers, they're good lads who work hard and do good work. The UI revamp is a herculean task and they've actually pulled it off. But if the reason for the reduced legibility is that Sonar is still relatively new, then what better time to provide feedback, before things are set in stone? There's still time to restore the text to its previous sizes. For now, even a couple of color schemes with higher text contrast would help. "High Contrast Light" and "High Contrast Dark?"

They are completely compatible. There's nothing to do except copy them and start using them. I you change your Sonar file location preferences so that Sonar uses the same folder as the CbB templates, you don't even have to copy them.

Clarification: only one app can be assigned to open files with a given extension when the filename or icon is double-clicked in Explorer. NuSonar and CbB can both open .CWP files once you start the program and open projects via the Start Screen or File/Open.

Hmm, so with each big move in the UI, Color Preferences has become less capable of allowing the user to set colors? Disturbing.🤔 Between Theme Editor and Color Preferences, I was able to get CbB to mostly bend to my will, color wise. There were some elements that were impervious to color customization, notably the Browser background. With NuSonar, the Browser background color can now be changed, you just have to be a developer to change it.😆

That's what I thought, that it was a relatively recent feature. Theme Editor was fun while it lasted, but as far as making the DAW sufficient to my needs, not necessary. I don't have to have REAPER or CbB-level control over the program's look to be happy. I need to be able to make out my measure and beat lines, and their colors weren't determined by Theme Editor. It was Color Preferences. Although the interface to the feature is still there, it no longer has any effect on parts of the UI that I want/need to modify in order to make them legible. I can't figure out what elements it even CAN control any more. I have a feeling that Color Preferences dates back a good many Cakewalk/SONAR/Sonar revisions. I'll take a guess and say at least as early as the first X, probably earlier. The dialog has that "party like it's 1999" look about it. One thing that gives me some hope is that among the current fixed color schemes we can get an idea of what screen elements can have different colors. If we're allowed to once again choose our own custom colors, the elements that I'm most interested in tweaking should be tweakable. The aforementioned clip backgrounds and lines, text color in the Browser, various buttons, various backgrounds. As soon as they let us at it I'll be working on my own custom color schemes/themes. I hope that it's just a matter of the devs wanting to rework the Color Preferences dialog panel to match the new Sonar look before we get it back. I didn't realize until I used CbB how much more inspiring a program is when I can set the colors myself.

Indeed. Restoring the text and button image sizes to at least what they were in CbB would be at the top of my list of pressing concerns. Returning a small bit of functionality to the color chooser would be second. Specifically being allowed to adjust the color of my Track View/Clip Pane beat and measure grid lines would help so much. Despite the fun I had with Theme Editor, I could live without one if I were allowed to choose a few important colors. I like the new look overall, but once CbB finally validates no more, my screens are going to start getting nose prints from my comping sessions!😆

Here's another act I would DEFINITELY go see, Trevor Horn touring as The Buggles at age 75 and just bringing it. How can he still be hitting those high notes? Oh right, never had a touring career as a singer except for that one stint with Yes. This is a great performance of one of the best songs on The Age of Plastic. He's a ferocious bass player, while doing lead vocals no less. He's so awesome he gets a pass on the 5-string.

Found my earlier notes/cheat sheet on Workspaces. Here it is with some editing:

Jonesy beat me to it. The D key is all you need. Console or Piano Roll in the multidock and flip back and forth as needed. I use Sonar on a laptop with a 15.6" screen, which is tiny compared to the humongous (3 of them) set of monitors I use on my main workstation. For extra fun, try Shift+D. Workspaces and Screensets are powerful, but they're advanced and require first understanding them and then configuring them. Somewhere on this forum I wrote a guide to understanding Workspaces, I'll see if I can find it....

The most lamented feature that was left out of Sonar is the ability for the user to set custom colors for such things as beat and measure grid lines. The next most is the full Theme Editor, but I understand why they deprecated that. The underpinnings of new Sonar's UI are just so different.

I don't see a topic from you there. Are you sure you posted it in the Feedback forum? I'll look in the Sonar forum....

Sonar Premium is the full-featured version of Cakewalk's flagship DAW. SONAR Platinum was a product whose life ended in late 2017 when Gibson, Cakewalk's parent company, dissolved Cakewalk, Inc. SONAR Platinum came with a great deal of bundled plug-ins. They later sold the Cakewalk intellectual property (not the company, just the intellectual property) to BandLab. BandLab reissued what had been SONAR as "Cakewalk By BandLab." The core program was the same as SONAR Platinum, but did not include most of the bundled software. The DAW got a major UI update and changed its name to Sonar (mixed case). Up until now, Sonar has only been available as part of a paid BandLab membership. This version is now "Sonar Premium" and is still only available as part of the BandLab membership. Sonar Free Tier is Sonar minus a few features (plug-in upsampling, multiple arranger tracks, free sound library). It also has a splash screen on start up that encourages the user to upgrade to the premium version. For most people's uses, it will function as well as Sonar Premium, and better than Cakewalk By BandLab. There are so many free plug-ins around now that bundled software is not as important as it was when SONAR Platinum was still around. I hope this clears things up. I know it's hard to follow.

I ran into the "email with no code" problem when I first tried, but they corrected this. Maybe it's broken again. Have patience, keep trying. So far I haven't been knocked out by it, but I've only run through the presets. A deeper dive is in order. Can't have too many glitch effects in the toolbox, says I.

I rarely see live music these days, which is kinda silly because when I do, I really do enjoy it. My next live music adventure will be seeing Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass' second to last show (likely ever). By the time I found out that Herb had put together a new TJB and was touring, most of the shows had sold out, including the one nearest me in Los Angeles (I live in the San Francisco Bay Area). He kept the ticket prices down and wanted to play smaller venues, and that led to some scarcity. At one point I tried to get a ticket for the Indianapolis show, but....sold out. Crossed my fingers that they would add a second LA show, and lo and behold they did. I got in early and scored a great seat at the Dolby Theater for $75. Of course they went and added shows in Santa Rosa and Sacramento, which I could have driven to and from without an overnight stay.🙄 However, once I had booked my LA ticket, I poked around a bit and found out that the weekend following the LA show is when this year's Disneyland Dapper Day(s) will take place. This is an event that I first encountered 10 years ago and have wanted to go back and attend actually dressed up. So it worked out pretty well. 2 days at Disneyland in my sharp green shiny suit. What I do with veteran acts is check YouTube for videos of the shows to see whether they still "have it." Herb most definitely does. "This Guy's In Love With You" is always a singalong, but how could it not be? I'd also go see Tears For Fears, they seem to be bringing it in their recent shows.

I agree that entertainment industry awards seem to be silly opportunities for self-promotion and phony virtue signaling. The Motion Picture Academy lost me the year that Kramer vs. Kramer won over Apocalypse Now and All That Jazz. 1980 I believe. 1980 did a pretty good job of warning me what the next decade was going to be like. The Grammys have always seemed hopelessly out of touch to me. 1966: The New Vaudeville Band, a studio-only project, won Best Contemporary (R&R) Recording for the novelty song "Winchester Cathedral," which was a pastiche of English Music Hall music. Maybe there were some rock 'n' roll singles that came out in 1966 that would have been better choices. Have they ever lived down handing the Best Metal Album award to Jethro Tull? I've never paid much attention to them anyway. The artists I really like tend not to be Grammy material, and even if they were, who cares about the tastes of a bunch of record industry people? The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame seems to be below even those standards. The main criterion for inclusion is probably "who will make the greatest number of people likely to visit (and deflect accusations of racism and sexism)?"

Yes. I'll reiterate: there is no way to create a custom theme for the new Sonar. You can't even change any of the meaningful colors. All you can do is choose from half a dozen color themes that the devs have come up with. If you'd like this to be another way, please post in the Feedback forum.

I'm 64 and my vision isn't getting any better. While I like the look of NuSonar, I agree that there are visibility issues. Unfortunately, there is no theming available to end users. We can't even choose any meaningful colors. All we can do is go to the color settings and choose one of the factory color schemes, all of which use varying shades of grey for everything but buttons and some text. They seem to be designed more for overall appearance than visibility. The only cause I can think of is that Ben must have the contrast on his monitors cranked way up. That's not an option for me, I also use my workstation for photo and video editing, and if I set my monitors so that NuSonar has better visibility, the colors in photos and videos is messed up. The most recent release has improved on the contrast in grid lines, but it's still nowhere as good as when I could choose actual colors rather than varying shades of grey. In CbB I used red for the measure lines and green or blue for the beat lines, depending on which of my themes I was using. It looked great and really helped with visibility. As someone who spent weeks on each of my half a dozen custom CbB themes, I'm very disappointed in the lack of customizable options in NuSonar's UI. If you don't like this situation, please post in the Feedback forum. I've been lobbying for at least allowing users to change the colors of the grid lines. I'd also like to be able to set text colors in various locations. The only color theme that currently uses anything but white on black is Mercury Classic.

I don't think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is much of anything more than a tourist attraction. Still, I don't quite understand her stance here. It seems like with her induction, their board or whatever is now finally recognizing the unsung session players. So why would she not show up for the ceremony? Seems like it would be an opportunity for her to say something at the podium like "it's great to see the Hall acknowledging the contributions of the many great session players. I hope that they continue to honor the many other deserving musicians." Words to that effect. I'd think it would be more constructive than a no-show protest.

You're using Yellow Submarine? Cool! I haven't gotten much feedback on my themes except from fellow themesters. But since they appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into extensive theme creation more than actually using them (not surprising, they have their own ultra-tweaked themes), it's different from hearing from someone who actually uses it. Especially one of the ones that was based on an animated movie (I did another one based on Neon Genesis: Evangelion). How did the 70's happen? Same reason Yellow Submarine did. The Beatles took LSD, and they were so influential that whatever they came up with afterward was going to wind up being the world's "theme." And since they broke up at the beginning of the 70's, we were stuck with what they were up to at the height of psychedelic garishness. The designers of furniture and fashion had to extrapolate from there. I'm being silly here, but not entirely. My Yellow Submarine theme is based on animated movie about The Beatles that came out in 1969, but you read it as a "70's" theme. The Beatles were the "theme creators" of the time when they existed. We were stuck with modifying the last themes they did for about 10 years. I remember Isaac Asimov writing in the 70's "I have long hair today because 10 years ago, 4 kids from Liverpool felt that going to the barber was a drag." As for who took responsibility, nobody. "Responsibility" was not a popular concept in the "Me" decade.😆

I didn't take it as an insult at all. I really do want to know what you think may be about to happen. Multiple of your hunches about how things would play out have turned out to be prescient. More so than some of my own that I was pretty sure about. Notably the absence of The Licensing Model That Must Not Be Named. I'm glad that one of my hunches, that BandLab would not hang people out to dry in regard to a free licensed Cakewalk/Sonar, turned out to be accurate. I really didn't want to have to answer to the people I've hooked up with CbB over the years.

All hail the mighty T-RackS 670! Getting a freebie for that one was a watershed point in my development. It's the one that helped me finally "get" the awesomeness of M/S processing.

Care to elaborate? I'm glad my life doesn't depend on figuring out what BandLab have "planned" at any given point. They seem to be full of surprises. BTW, I tried an experiment where I logged Sonar out of BandLab and then logged back in using an account that doesn't have access to the premium tier, and the old style Track Manager is present in Free Tier Sonar. Which actually makes its UI more similar to CbB's than Premium Tier Sonar's is.

I've been using Sonar since it came out, and switching back and forth between it and CbB requires no adjustment that I can perceive except that some of the text and icons in important areas have shrunk and contrast also suffers in comparison to what you can do in CbB with themes and custom color sets.. Cakewalk have been pretty good about that kind of thing in recent years. It isn't some huge change like the SONAR X, it's not much different from using a custom CbB theme. I've noticed over the past 7 years with Cakewalk that new features that they have added don't usually replace something else, they augment what's already there and are easily hidden. The lone exception I can think of is the recent replacement of Track Manager with the one that docks in the Browser. This new Track Manager replaces the old one, and I guess Free Tier Sonar has neither of them. As far as reduced functionality between Free Tier Sonar and CbB, they've explicitly listed what the differences are. I went over them in my post. They seem trivial to me. I suspect that the CbB validation server will be shut down in the near future, then installations of CbB will switch to permanent demo mode after the last validation times out. Sad to see that, because I have half a dozen themes that I put a lot of work into that are tailored to easy visibility, and as I said, Sonar is less friendly to people with impaired eyesight. Its failure to allow the user to even set grid line colors causes problems for me. I don't understand at all why users can't be allowed to make our own color choices. This feature was in CbB, it's in most other DAW's and it's easy to revert if a user messes up their colors.

As was Cakewalk by BandLab. When I wrote the Wikipedia entry about Cakewalk by BandLab years ago, I put in a descrption of the licensing and said that it was a "free subscription." Since it's in Wikipedia, it's the Official Truth of the Internetz.🙄 I agree that if it needs to phone home to a server every 6 months or every month or whatever interval to keep functioning, that's a subscription. In the case of free tier Sonar, the "cost" of the subscription is embedded advertisements for the BandLab membership. Fair play, CbB was always an advertisement for the BandLab brand. Subscriptions require the user to trust the software manufacturer not to change the rules, go out of business, whatever. Fortunately, BandLab have so far continued to provide a free way for Cakewalk/Sonar users to access our projects. This has never been interrupted in the 7 years of BandLab's ownership of the Cakewalk/Sonar brand, although there was the scare of the announcement of payware Sonar replacing CbB. The differences between Free Tier and Premium seem trivial to me. If your plug-ins have a case of the grainies, get new plug-ins or render at 88.2K or 96K. I did some subjective tests using a virtual synth that benefited audibly from plug-in upsampling, and rendering at the double rate had the same effect as 2X upsampling. As far as which dithering or stretching algorithm I use, should I care enough to do a shootout? Multiple Arranger tracks is nice, but I've never used more than one per project.