Maestro

Studio One 5 Professional has an integrated Score Editor based on Notion technology in it now. It's actually one of the better in-DAW score editors on the market, now. It still round trips with Notion 6 over ReWire or PreSonus' proprietary protocol, and the integrated score editor supports a lot of the Symbols/Score Markings from Notion.

That is not what I experienced. Entire clip was sent to the RX Audio Editor. In that case, a 1 hour podcast recording, instead of just the 2 second clip that I had split out of it (splitting around the area that I needed to work on).

As a preface, I don't think Cakewalk has a chance in the education market for a couple of reasons: It's Windows-only. This is a self-limiting situation for the DAW. The industry standards are pretty solid in the Composition and Scoring space: Cubase Pro (and Nuendo, naturally), Logic Pro X, and Digital Performer. There is no reason to forego them. Cakewalk by BandLab is tied to a Social Network. Schools would view it like requiring Facebook to use a DAW. It would be a non-starter for many, if not the majority. ----- The mediocre Staff View would be less of an issue if Cakewalk had a full ReWire implementation, but it doesn't. By that, I mean Cakewalk doesn't support ReWire MIDI Input (it can only Output). If it did, then you wouldn't need a better Staff View ASAP. You'd only need a cheap Notation Program that was significantly better than Staff View. For example: PreSonus Notion 6 on sale for < $70. So, you'd route your staves in Notion to ReWire MIDI Channels and then set the MIDI Input on your Tracks in Cakewalk to the applicable ReWire MIDI Channels coming from Notion; and the outputs to the applicable virtual instrument. You can compose in Notion, etc., and when you're done, you just record the MIDI to those tracks; at which point, any further tweaking/editing can be done in Cakewalk by BandLab on the Piano Roll. MusicXML Import would also be nice to have.

1. The handoff is for the entire file. If you only use 5 seconds out of a 50 second audio file, Cakewalk will hand over the entire file to i.e. Sound Forge or RX when you use the Tools menu. I ran into this issue when I wanted to remove an artifact while editing a Podcast for someone in Cakewalk. I had to switch to Samplitude and do the work there, because Cakewalk was handing over the entire 1 hour Audio File to iZotope RX. It was incredibly impractical. 2. They need to build the configuration for External Editors into the UI. 3. Using Audacity as an Audio Editor from Cakewalk is like using Cakewalk as an Audio Editor from Samplitude. It's designed to be used primarily as a non-destructive multi-track recording/editing solution, like Adobe Audition's Multi-Track workspace. It's a DAW, not an Audio Editor (or Destructive Wave Editor, to be more precise). If Cakewalk didn't support Virtual Instruments (like Audition), it would be directly comparable to Audacity. The issue with this is that when you go to save the file, Audacity defaults to wanting to save a project/session file, so it becomes a bit fugly to use because of all of the extra clicks and directory browsing to get it to overwrite the correct file before going back to Cakewalk. With Destructive Audio Editors, you press <Ctrl-S> + <Alt-F4> and off you go. The workflow is considerably smoother, and there is less button mashing/mouse clicking involved.