Lord Tim

What's your exact routing you have going on? Sometimes you might need to work your way through the chain to make sure everything a tracks is feeding (or being fed by) is also receiving input, or echoing live input.

Just to throw my hat into the ring here, a few quick things that come to mind right away for me are: Consistency - some views work a certain way, others don't. I get the reasoning behind the *why* we might want to have a left-mouse lasso to grab things in the PRV as opposed to a right-mouse one in the Track View, or different double click options, etc. but for a new user, imagine getting used to the standard conventions of most operating systems and then finding "oh that works when I enter in MIDI notes, but how come I can't grab a bunch of clips using that method?" when you try it. Again, I understand exactly why we have it like this and it works really well once you get used to it, but I can see that as a clunk for someone who just dives in. FWIW, REAPER did this first and I remember hating it when I first tried it out. To me it feels more natural in CbB, but it's still a "well that's odd" thing if you're used to selecting things in Windows in general. Consistency (part 2: The Revenge): Some views have been switched over to the Tracks / Inspector paradigm (eg: Tempo Track, Arranger Track, Articulation, etc). Fully onboard with that - these are GREAT enhancements rather than fiddling around opening up different views to do things, thus removing clunk. What about Meter/Key? Markers? If this was expanded to offer stuff like DDP creation, would this stuff live in here? From what I've seen from Cubase, that's how they have the top of their main track view and it's very elegant. Additionally to that, this goes back to my "Shell Game" thing - unless you hit the hotkey to toggle Tempo View, where is it? You can actually drag down on the blank space above the track headers and it magically appears. Again, I get why this is, but why am I even guessing about it? There needs to be something obvious for new users especially. Additionally with Markers, why do we have to delete them by clicking on them with your left-mouse, and while holding it down, pressing the delete key, or changing into the Markers View? Nothing else does that, and it's a big hold over from the CWPA days. It's little things like that which confuse and frustrate people, despite not really being a slower workflow at all. It's just unnecessary stuff to remember. Shell Games: I saw it mentioned in a thread that adding new VSTs can be confusing. I'll admit, I've been burnt by this one. So you install a new Reverb plugin. CbB scans for it and says "hey there it is, great stuff" and then you look in your Plugins Browser and... where the hell is it? If it's a VST3, there's a good chance it's been added into the right category for manufacturer or effect type, but a lot of the time it gets dumped into Uncategorised. There should be a Newly Installed category and a chance to adjust where that new effects subsequently appears from there. No more guessing or hunting, much like I mentioned for hidden tracks like the Tempo track earlier. UI/UX: Workspaces are fantastic, and are a real timesaver once you learn them. Screensets too. But how many people here can really tell the difference between Workspaces and Screensets? Yes, *I* know, but there's been SO MANY questions about this stuff over the years. Workspaces can also really bite people badly when stuff isn't where they expect it to be. How many times have we seen "Cakewalk is crap, they took out X feature!!11!! SONAR used to have this, I'm moving to Bitwig!!!!" and then they're told to change to a different Workspace that reveals that item they were ranting was removed, but really wasn't. There's got to be a better way (besides the new installation onboarding dialog) that helps you choose and understand what Workspaces do, and then after you're already established, helps you understand why things are missing or different. I have no good suggestions here, honestly. But there's got to be some solution to make this better. Following that idea (and this was alluded to earlier in this thread) why can't we drag things around to the different docked areas, eg: like in Adobe products? In Audition, I can make any one of those areas show whatever I want, so for example, docking an ARA view on a side tab rather than the Multidock would be handy, or putting Big Time above the Synth Rack View, or Markers View in a side dock rather than down in the Multidock, or that kind of thing. Ideally for me (and I've mentioned this before), I'd like the "everything is a multidock" idea where rather than specific areas like Inspector/Browser/Multidock, we have "area 1" "area 2" "area 3" etc and in each area we can add whatever view we want to see. Then, to keep consistency with how CbB is now, have a "classic" Workspace that puts things like Media/Plugins/Notes in the area where the Browser is, Arranger/Tempo/Clip and Track Properties, etc. in the area where the Inspector is, and that kind of thing. And then allow us to split those views or add tabs as we see fit. Both of those things stop confusion and stops a bit of the Shell Game with where stuff is going to appear, if someone can set it up to suit their workflow better. Bonus UI thought: How many people here know we can rearrange the Track Header widgets (ie: the volume control, pan control, R/W/A/* buttons etc, by holding down ALT + dragging them around with the left-mouse button? Really powerful stuff for getting things how you like them (it'd be even better to be able to remove them entirely this way, or move them to the Track Inspector to show/clean up the Track Headers). Menu Diving: And this is slightly related to the previous point: How deep do you go with menus before it's too much? How much do you simplify them before power users get angry and go to REAPER to get their endless menus fix? (Sorry REAPER fans, but the default config of REAPER before you clean up anything is absolutely NUTS!) For people using interfaces with a lot of I/O, this is bad enough trying to add a track or assign inputs or outputs, etc. because the list is crazy long. Got a bunch of plugins that expose sidechain? Welcome to Menu Hell. There's got to be some kind of submenu thing going on there (although that takes us back to the menu diving problem again) or have common tasks at level 1 of the menu and then a submenu for other things. Eg: Level 1 could have a simple INPUT > entry and at the top of the list that pops out of there have SIDECHAIN >, but all of the regular interface I/O right underneath it. That way it's really only barely past 1 level of menu to get to the obvious stuff, but any more advanced things need to go down another level. Kind of related to that, and also calling back to consistency, has anyone here tried to add an Aux track? It's easy to do, just go to an existing track and then choose the output to go to New Aux Track or New Patch Point from a send or the Output. Great. Now try to add one without doing that, like you'd do for an Audio or MIDI track with the context menu. What's that? You can't? How about from the Tracks menu? Nope. OK fine, how about we create it using the way I mentioned before and then change all of the outputs of every other track to this new Aux track. Select them all and go to the Tracks menu and... where is my Aux? I only see busses and hardware outs. Huh??? So what I'd have to do is open up the other tracks, shift+select them all, find the Output of one of them, hold down CTRL and then change the output of that so the multiselect works on all of the other selected tracks. THIS is a great example of unnecessary clunk. It's all certainly possible but there's hoops you need to jump through to do it. I have a bunch more stuff I could probably mention but this is a good start. I will say too that I'm purposely avoiding talking about new features here, but like I mentioned earlier about Ripple Editing and the Arranger, sometimes a couple of new features can entirely remove some of these problem areas just simply by making them redundant. The switch to in-app updates rather than dealing with the weirdness of Bandlab Assistant for updates is another good example there. A new feature was added that entirely took the old problem out of the equation. I'm *very* familiar with CbB and work very fast in it, so a lot of these things don't affect me personally much on a day to day basis, but if I was looking at this with fresh eyes, or was new to the app, I could see how this would trip a lot of people up. But going back to my OP, in the day to day driving of CbB, I personally find it just as smooth or as few operations to complete a task as any other app I've used for the most part, and not finding it overly clunky myself, but there are most certainly areas that could do with some attention.

Have you engaged the input echo button on the track? https://legacy.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=SONAR+X3&language=3&help=Recording.22.html

There's certainly got to be some middle ground to cater enough to both parties. Fix the pinch points that are clearly making things annoying for people (new users especially) while retaining enough legacy functions/layouts to not lose long-time users. I mean, that really sounds like that was the point of Cakewalk Next: make a product that didn't have to worry about 30 years of legacy users to keep happy, do it the "right" way from the start (which is still obviously subjective, of course). It's going to be interesting to see what that's like. I think what I'd like to get out of this thread (aside from the great perspectives so far - cheers, everyone, these have all been excellent answers!) is, what areas are obviously not as good as they could be which we could pass onto the Bakers to refine, but without going so far as to change how the core layout and application works. Retaining as much as we can while taking out some barriers. Clearly some parts are going to need a huge overhaul (the drum maps thing was a great point) but some basic things should just do the job with no fuss. No menu diving, no extra dialog boxes, no need to hunt for things or play a Shell Game looking for something that apparently is changed but no real idea what... That kind of thing. That said too, some whole new features have really made a difference to day to day workflow too. Remember how painful cutting out sections of songs was before we got Ripple Editing? What about moving them around before we got the Arranger? We could do both things before but both things eliminated a bunch of Clunk and pinch points just by existing. I have a good list of stuff I'd like to see refined or added too, of course, but I'm also realising how much legacy muscle memory I have when I see threads like this too.

There's certainly a "rock and a hard place" factor to a lot of stuff, to be sure. Just taking the External Insert thing as an example, this is a known limitation that is apparently a real problem to untangle under the hood because of a decision wayyyy back in the day. The same for adding a more modern scripting language. The scalable UI is another thing, and as we can see how they're at least willing to take on the task rather than putting it into the Too Hard, It's Baked In basket. But there's also a narrow path to tread where a lot of this stuff is fixed/refined without angering their legacy users. Like I said with Skylight, a lot of people coming from older versions of Cakewalk/TTS products were NOT happy about the menus being moved around or the new keyboard shortcuts, etc. Imagine if those menus weren't just moved but the way someone found to be super fast to accomplish a task was taken out just to keep a new user from getting confused. Cue torches and pitchforks! Again, it's a double edged sword with people finding parts of the UI missing, but Workspaces could solve a lot of this "multiple ways and several places to do this task" problem to a point.

I think in the case of the insert operations, a lot of things were moved around once we got Skylight back in the day (much to the displeasure of a lot of old-timers) to have it make more sense - which it did for the most part. A lot of things were split up between track / project / global operations to have the context of those operations make more sense once you were comfortable with the paradigm, and it makes a lot of logical sense. But I do tend to agree that on first sniff, a new user would have a few "argh, but why?!"moments.

Ha! Yeah, from how I understand it, the new product line is written in mixed case: Cakewalk Sonar, Cakewalk Next. Whereas the old pre-Bandlab stuff was suggested to be written as all caps: SONAR Platinum (a product from the Cakewalk company.) I'm sure people will write it how they write it, but this is a good way to get a bit of distinction between each thing in threads like this at least.

Or... Buy this DAW outright for $200, free updates per version. 3 or 4 updates happen, and then a year later the next version of the DAW is released and - oh no - the one you bought is now "frozen in time with no updates." It's semantics at the end of the day. There's really not a lot of difference between paying up front for 12 months to receive a program that won't expire, that gets updates over that time, and a buy outright program that stops getting updates the moment the next version is dropped. In Cakewalk's case, if you elect to keep your subscription, you also continue to get updates past that as well, with no need to buy a whole new version and do the "3 or 4 updates then you're SOL" dance.

Could this just be an education issue for a lot of complaints then? Learning the DAW through decent tutorials and digging into the manual, etc.? One could argue that it should feel more intuitive without needing to do that- which is a fair comment - but this is a pretty deep product, so there's bound to be a learning curve to get the most out of it. And again, what may feel intuitive to one person could also feel like an impenetrable black box to someone else. This was me with Adobe After Effects the first few times attempting to use it - I'm pretty savvy with picking up most NLEs, design apps, audio apps, etc. but that damn thing entirely threw me! I eventually made the decision to dig in properly and now I'd call myself quite proficient in it, and how it's laid out makes perfect sense as to why the devs chose to make it how it is.

See, this is my reasoning for a lot of the complaints too. REAPER is a great example for me - it's a fantastic DAW but man, do I ever plod in it because it just doesn't agree with me at all as far as workflow goes. I do marginally better in Studio One, but I keep returning to Cakewalk because I'm super fast in it and nothing (for me at least) gets between my brain and recording the idea (questionable talent notwithstanding ?). There's definitely areas where CbB can be improved, of course, and I have a few thoughts about that also, but it really seemed like there was suddenly a bunch of people who have been biting their tongue about them because of the free thing, and now it's a problem. Are those things more than preferences? What am I missing? That's the question!

Actually I meant just the initial release back in... when was that? April 2018? But absolutely agree with the rest of your post

Mike is one, but there's been a couple of others. Just to be clear, I have nothing against Mike or his opinions in any way whatsoever - his videos are great and he seems like a genuine guy who knows what he's talking about. But rather than saying "better in other DAWs", explaining how and why. That was probably beyond the scope of his livestream, to be fair, but like I said it wasn't just Mike's one that I saw people mentioning it. That got me wondering what I'm actually missing, thus the question.

Hopefully this won't descend into a free-for-all mess like some threads do! Please try to keep on topic and post respectfully. So, we've all seen the announcement by now that going forward the new Cakewalk products are switching to a paid model. Whether you agree or disagree with that isn't really the point of this thread (by all means, continue to duke it out in the Announcement Thread). This thread is in relation to seeing the mention on several Cakewalk-centric YouTube channels, and a few posts around here and social media saying that now that Cakewalk is a paid product, it should be treated as such, and not get a free pass for its "clunky" areas. Now, I'm going to state up front that I 100% agree with the "it should not be given any free passes now that it's becoming a paid product" statement, but I'll go further to say that even as a free product, I don't think anyone should have been looking at it as such. This was the formerly full flagship commercial product during the pre-Bandlab days, with countless bug fixes and extra features. No matter what it cost, it should be judged on its own merits. Nothing should be different now. But one thing has stuck with me from these sentiments: "Clunky." The notion that other DAWs are doing something different/better than what CbB (and presumably Sonar going forward) is doing. Some base qualifications here: I'm not starting this thread to blindly defend CbB, this is a genuine attempt at getting other perspectives. It's also not the opposite, I'm not starting this to invite CbB bashing either. It's also not here to crap on any of the YouTube channels either - they're good people with their own valid opinions on things. I'm particularly talking about other traditional recording style DAWs, so things like Ableton Live and Tracktion Waveform, etc. that use an entirely different paradigm is beyond the scope of what I'm talking about here. There's a reason most of us are using CbB here, rather than any of those other ways to record, so my comparisons would be things like Cubase, Studio One, REAPER, ProTools, etc. that share a similar workflow. This is NOT a discussion about features or OS ports. So while saying "there's no Mac version" or "where is the Sampler" etc. are fair questions, they're better suited for the Feedback Loop forum. I'm definitely not talking about missing effects or anything like that. So with that all said, for those of you familiar (and especially very fluent) with other DAWs, what are they doing that's making CbB look clunky in comparison? Is it part of the UX (I don't mean the design, I mean how it works - the User Experience) that's easier to use on a competing product? Creating tracks? Editing? Multiple open project work? What stuff do you do in your other DAW that feels like it's not as intuitive or takes longer in CbB? Why am I asking? Am I a paid Bandlab shill? No (although if someone wants to give me money.... ?) I'm just a user like the rest of you guys, who has been around quite a long while and uses Cakewalk stuff professionally in my day to day job. I'm seeing these comments and... honestly, with all the playing around with other DAWs I've done over the years, I can't see where a lot of the criticism is coming from (some, yes, but the amount of "this is better in other DAWs" comments I've seen over the last few days with absolutely nobody expanding on exactly what, is making me go "am I missing something here, or is this all just a lot of subjective opinions triggered by the payment model announcement?") Again, please take this as a genuine question in good faith, I'm keen to know what everyone thinks! A final disclaimer: as I said, I'm just a user like everyone else, and nothing I'm saying here is in any way connected to Bandlab or any decision making they do, but I'd like to think they'll have a good look through the thread here and take on board any good suggestions or comparisons. So, people, what (if anything) specifically is making CbB seem clunky in comparison to the other similar commercial DAWs? Let's hear it

No, I've seen this too, but rarely. This is different to the Pause thing which updates the UI very slowly. This isn't anywhere near that slow. This happens on particularly heavy projects especially, I've found, so things scroll along a little more... low frame rate(?) as was said. Definitely less screen redraws, obviously favouring audio performance rather than screen repaints. But if you open a MFC menu, it'll start scrolling entirely smoothly.

I think it's good to remember that CbB was pretty much SPlat with a few months worth of fixes in the first release... look at it now. And actual meaningful additions too, not just another bundled synth or sample library to keep the upper management happy. (Not to say a great synth or library is a worthless addition, mind you, but having core improvements to the app will beat that out every time for me)

The thing I'm getting from this vector based UI is you're not locked to any resolution, either large or small. It's not a set "this is a 132px x 181px graphic" it's a "I want to draw this line from this point to that point, then fill it with this colour, do this dynamically" thing, which is entirely independent of any screen resolution. Someone mentioned fonts earlier in the thread and that's a great analogy. Sure, this will scale better on super large monitors, but there's also no reason to think that it couldn't be scaled the other way (to a reasonable degree anyway) to cater for smaller screens.

Just one more setting... just one more setting... It was a different time...!

I haven't seen anything to suggest they'll be taking any effects or instruments away at all.

Noel mentioned earlier in this thread that they had plans that if anything were to happen to the company and it wasn't going to get picked up, they would have made a perpetual activation for them. But as it happens, Bandlab came along and that wasn't necessary. Why not unlock them? Back in the day, the big difference between SPlat and CbB was the paid add-ons, really. Bandlab elected to give the core product away for free, but not the paid add-ons. All of that stuff still holds value to them, obviously. Now that they're monetizing their products, it makes sense to me that a lot of those paid add-ons would be offered for sale or included in bundles. If you give them away, you lose that value. But for those of us that did buy them back when they were available, we can use them now without getting locked out of an unsupported host.

Yeah, from everything I've been led to believe over the last 5 years, the deal was they bought the code, the graphics, the names, and basically that's it. All debts and liabilities died with the Cakewalk company, and then Bandlab hired the old dev team to bring it back to life, and offered to keep the old product servers running at no cost and give us the flagship product for free for years. Those old Gibson-era products still work though, so in effect anyone who bought the licenses back in the day still can use those products, and all of the paid add-ons work fine with CbB, so even taking into account the ill-fated lifetime deal near the end of the company, that price kind of got everyone 5 years of updates via CbB if you want to frame it that way. Totally get that people are going to see it as they're going to see it though, and moving to a paid model may make some people move on - I think that's fine and expected. Nobody really knows what deal it'll be going forward, what goodies we'll get, if anything will be free as an incentive... it's all basically speculation for now, so rather than worrying about if the sky is falling, I'd personally hold tight and wait to see what's going to happen and then make a decision. There's been a lot of goodwill over the years, so it'll be interesting to see how it all pans out. I'm optimistic. For me personally, it makes no sense to go elsewhere to another paid product that I have to learn as well as I do Cakewalk, no backwards compatibility with my old projects, etc. just because I have to pay for this one. If I'm going to pay for anything, I'd like to pay for something that's going to be the easiest transition for me so I can just get the hell on with getting my work done.

The old legacy e-mail reset was shut down 5 years ago. If you need to get any logins sorted out, shoot a message over to support@cakewalk.com and they'll sort you out. If you mean you can't login when you previously could do, it's possible this is because of the recent server changes, and a new Command Center has been posted up for people to get their stash: https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/topic/58373-cakewalk-command-center-version-118/

Nice one! Yeah, this is definitely a function of the forum software, so I guess the graphic is actually fine after all, but the way the forum displays it in different browsers is not great. Something for Invision to look at I'd say

This is the actual graphic: (Obviously parts will look transparent on a white background like this, open it in a new window to see it) As you can see, it's quite large, and bitmaps don't scale as well as vector graphics, which is the entire reason they're updating the UI on Sonar. Additionally, this forum software is made by https://invisioncommunity.com/ Every forum is different but every one I've used so for or have been admin on has recommended large graphic sizes so they can be resized down properly by the forum software. This is something that should be taken up with them, not Bandlab. Also, this is what I'm seeing on all of my machines: I dunno how it looks on your machines but this is scaling pretty well for me for a bitmap image, and much less pixelated than the one you posted. Perhaps your browser or display scaling is set incorrectly? At this point, I'm honestly unsure if you're trolling or not. I think Jesse spelled it all out pretty well earlier.

That is sensational! HAHA!

It was rubbish.