Mark Morgon-Shaw

You can already do that but the tabs are always locked into the same order

Sadly not

Suno can generate great souding singers, A friend of mine is using it to sing all his never released songs. There is a "cover" feature so you can upload a song you made and have it do a cover version in any style you want. I gotta say in many respects it sounds really good and was a big step up from his oringal demos but with the same chords, melody and lyrics that he wrote many years before Generative AI existed. I can agree with the first two but I wouldn't say it's depressing , he's hugely enjoyed hearing his old songs sounding slick and professional, on the flip side nobody in my industry would touch them with a 10ft pole and I know they have AI detection software at the production music libraries I write for. I don't agree with prompting songs though , that's super low effort slop.

Still no Cakewalk Sonar in the DAW section

I have both ( because I really wanted Bohemian Violin & Cello which are fantastic and only on Falcon ) but I must say , writing around 100 tracks a year that Omnisphere ends up on my tracks a lot more often than Falcon although they both have their uses. I think it's mainly the inbuilt library which is so deep there's always something I can use, sometimes I've been searching Falcon because I think I should use it more and come away empty handed. I also have a lot of Kontakt Libraries too which I probably use more than either.

I think of it more like a tool kit. I can pay smaller amounts and buy these Or I can pay a lot more and get this....the above is fine if your pottering around at home. Once you get into being paid to provide a service you're gonna want the best toolkit you can afford so you're not stuck without the right tool for a certain job.

I’ve not used Halion but I've got Falcon 3 and it’s great. Super deep, and it’s the only platform for a few libraries I use regularly like Bohemian Violin and Cello. But honestly, it’s not a patch (pun intended) on Omnisphere as an all around tool for a working composer. Falcon ships with around 1,600 factory presets, whereas Omnisphere 3 comes with over 41,000 patches now apprarently (including 26k+ new ones). That’s an enormous, curated library ready to drop straight into cues but still with a ton of tweakability. Falcon’s more of a modular sound design environment and brilliant if you want to build but a lot of us don't have time for that. Omnisphere’s designed to deliver - and when you’re working to deadlines, that scale and immediacy make a massive difference. You talk about cost but I look at value.

Most controllers have a DAW mode and an instrument mode so you can use it for bot - the transport controls normally still work even if controlling a VSTi ( at least with the last couple of controllers I've owned ) Guess YMMV depending on your DAW , VSTi's and Hardware controller

Just having my midi controller integrated is reason enough for me, I have Analog Lab which works natively with my Arturia Keylab and it just makes life way easier.

I get why the price raises eyebrows, but Omnisphere really isn’t aimed at casual users. There are plenty of free or budget synths out there that are great for general sound design- but for working composers, this thing is a bit of a godsend. The sheer breadth of the sound library, the reliability, and how quickly you can get a cue up and running make it invaluable. It’s a proper workhorse. Virtually everyone I know writing for TV uses it in some capacity, and personally, I’ve made the cost back from a single placement. It’s one of those tools that quietly earns its keep over and over again.

It's the least worst to my eyes.

I also have one, no issue here in either DAW

I despise the flatness but if they were gonna do it they should at least have implemented some colour pop. I just tried Bitwig and it's vector GUI is so much clearer than CW-Sonar . Hate it as a DAW though ! I think if Sonar dissappeared tomorrow I'd be a Cubase user.

It's also very genre dependant. In a modern pop song going in word by word or even sometimes down to a syllable can hep keep the vocal front and centre but you wouldn't really need to do the same in a folk song where you can often just work phrase by phrase. Vocal automation is also a good chance to unearth emotion in a performance and bring it to the fore. Little breaths, sighs , fading up the ends or longer words where you can sometimes get little vocal cracks. These are gold in certain genres when it's more about emotion than technical prowess.

Nice use of it in the song Parasite Eve by Bring Me The Horizon