John T

I didn't say it couldn't be a horrifying trauma.

Sure, but you can't die in a DAW crash. It's not an especially meaningful comparison.

Hmm. Sonar Platinum came out in 2015. Ripple editing was added in 2017. I dunno, the thing gets updates all the time, and has done for years. This is some alternate reality nonsense we're diving into here.

No, it installs to its own folder. I've got both installed side by side without issues.

That 20 years claim is so silly, I can only assume the poster doesn't even want to be taken seriously.

No worries! I think it'll be interesting if more of us have a mess around with it and report our thoughts. I get the feeling quite a lot of posts are coming from people who've just seen screen shots. And that's valid, of course. But I've found that using it has changed my mind about a lot of my initial screen shot impressions.

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Yes, that's what I've done. Saving and exporting are disabled, but otherwise, it's fully functional. Scroll to the very bottom of the page on this link and click "download" for Sonar. https://www.cakewalk.com/sonar

I'm not seeing that. I've done a comparison with both apps running, and everything is almost exactly the same size.

I don't have 4k, but I think the new look at 100% scaling is generally sharp and readable for me. I've not done any precise comparisons, but subjectively, I find it mostly clearer to look at than CbB. Seems like there are a range of user experiences going on. So I'm guessing some of this is just gremlins to work out with the new tech.

Yeah, that's my gut feeling. I think that makes more sense for Next, which doesn't have an existing user base, and seems more suited to integration with the overall Bandlab thing. But for Sonar, I think it would certainly ruffle some feathers. I suppose we'll see.

Obviously, at this point in time, we can only speculate. But it seems a reasonable assumption to me that Bandlab's core business is in driving membership signups. And therefore they're going to want Next and Sonar to contribute to that. There is of course a bit of a tension between that and the value to customers who want to use Sonar, but have no use for any of the Bandlab features. That certainly describes me; I'm not involved, and not planning to be involved in the distribution of any of the stuff I work on. And I'm not in the market for the kind of collaboration tools Bandlab provides. So the question is two-fold, I think. Firstly, is Sonar going to be available outside of Bandlab membership? And secondly, does that matter to you or not? I'd say for myself, I don't really care either way, as long as the cost is reasonable for what I use. Which the current membership is to my mind. ~$15 a month is fine by me. My current guess is that they're going to launch as membership-only and see what happens. But of course, that's only a guess.

I disagree a bit. When I say "at a glance" I'm not talking about being "able to tell what's on and what's off", I'm talking about it being glaringly and immediately obvious what's on and what's off. I'm on about something that's basically impossible to over-do.

If I have one general objection to the new look, it's that things like that button should be more obviously "lit" or "not lit". I don't think the at-a-glance readability is as good as could be.

Regarding blurry text oddities, most everything looks great for me. But I'm getting weird squishy fonts in the title sections in Preferences:

I think overall it's very impressive how nothing has really gone away or been broken, or not that I've found so far. For such a complete overhaul of the UI, I imagine that took some meticulous work.

I'm pretty sure that positivity and optimism are against the TOS. Moderator!

Ha, yeah, that always jangles my brain slightly.

I'm personally not interested in a full-blown theme editor. But I think it would be nice to see more colour tweaks available in preferences. I also think there's a gap in the current set of themes, and there should be at least one that's a bit more high contrast.

Thank god for that. The last thing we want is any girls in our treehouse.

Got a nit pick here: Something that looks like an X in the top right corner of an object has a long-standing meaning in Windows. But this is in fact the control to vertically expand or contract the module. I guarantee that'll be confusing to new users.

Yeah, I'd like to see more things available in the UI colour preferences; it's very limited right now, but I think it's been mentioned that that will change. None of the existing themes are quite as contrasting as I'd like. I think the at-a-glance readability of things could be improved massively with some pretty small adjustments. For example, I'd like things like the power buttons in the UI to be much brighter for on and much darker for off. Stuff like that.

The shock of the new is always a hump to get over. But nearly everything I thought looked weird in the new version yesterday looks fine to me today.

Yeah, I thought as much. It's not that big a deal. It's just that, because I have those a lot in existing projects, my first impression of the UI was that it was a bit unfinished, as all my existing projects pop up with a lot of this stuff. But that's a subjective thing. Overall, I really like the new look and am optimistic about how things are progressing.

Of what's presently included, they're all variants of these two, more or less.