Sonar "Track Layers" VS Cakewalk "Take Lanes" in multitrack, multi-takes editing and other downgrades comparing with older Sonar editions

[Davor Tomic]

 HI!

 I started using Cakewalk by BandLab couple of months ago and I see that it is a brilliant successor DAW to Sonar DAW, with so many improvements and great features, but I am an active Sonar user since 2004 and, as I worked on many versions of Sonar through the years, I witnessed that every new version had some seriously great upgrades and developed some very intelligent and user friendly solutions for dealing with various features, operating and handling the whole process of recording and music production and most of all editing recorded clips, better than in any other DAW I tried (protools, cubase, cool edit, logic, reaper), especially editing multiple takes recorded on multiple tracks  (like, for example, recording drums with 14 mics or more, and then editing that 14 tracks, multi-take recording, which is my usual day to day job).

 That being said, I and my associates and colleagues also witnessed some of those brilliant features going the opposite direction from improvement within the newer versions of DAW, and that started after Sonar 8.5, in Sonar X1, though it is stil great, user friendly, fast and intuitive!!! Well, for me and that brilliantly fast and easy editing, everything went south with Sonar X2 (stuff also featured in all it's successor DAWs) when "Take Lanes" were introduced instead of "Track Layers", which is why I am still working in latest edition of Sonar X1.

 What the hell was supposed to get better or easier or whatever with that annoying feature that was not been able to be done in sonar 8.5 or X1, or even some of the older ones???!!!

There's no "Rebuilt layers" command, which was a very useful command dealing with layers, sorry - lanes! To me and my colleagues these "Take Lanes" were visually confusing since day one. The old style was so "common sense" and intuitive visually-wise, and work-wise.

I went through HELP files to figure out how to deal with these "take lanes", but there's not much help with it, is it,hm?

Some other downgrades (in my opinion) comparing with older Sonar DAW versions:

- When I mute the clip, it used to have a little "red crossed circle" icon in the upper left corner so it was crystal clear the Clip is MUTED.

- In Sonar, in track view (also in the bus view), going up and down through the tracks in a project by scrolling the mouse-wheel used to toggle track by track (or you could say bus track by bus track), no matter the current heights of the particular tracks, so you would always see the whole track channel on top of the screen. Now in Cakewalk it seems to toggle some fixed value, so by scrolling it's clumsy to toggle to a desired track, and it's often to see just a small part of the track, so you get lost easily - the user is forced for more usage of the side bar to scroll precisely to a preferred view/location... ANNOYING!

 

Does anybody feels the same as I do regarding this stuff?

In hope of improving these features back to when it was done right, all the best and keep on the GREAT WORK!!!!

Davor Tomic Pinky

Edited November 27, 2020 by Davor Tomic

[Davor Tomic]

anybody?

 

[David Baay]

All of this - especially lanes vs. layers - was discussed ad nauseum on the old forum as the changes were introduced. Editing a lot of audio takes is not part of my workflow so I can't say definitively that layers weren't better in some respects, but as with so many software evolutions it's likely you just need to embrace the new ways of doing things and ask specific questions about how best to accomplish tasks that seem to have gotten more difficult/awkward.

[David Baay]

I was searching for one of the longer threads about continuous track scrolling and found this post that actually complained about track-by-track scrolling before continuous (a.k.a. fractional) scrolling was introduced in X3b... to each his own. 

http://forum.cakewalk.com/Smooth-Scrolling-of-Tracks-m1615686.aspx

And here's the big one complaining about it. Post #13 by Seth Kellogg explains why it was implemented:

http://forum.cakewalk.com/Im-Disapointed-in-X3-m2918795.aspx#291886

This may not be the definitive thread, but here's one discussion about the loss of 'rebuild layers'. More than one poster pointed out that the result of rebuild layers was a little unpredictable and the last post points out the the Re-use Existing Lanes recording option largely made rebuilding unnecessary. I prefer to have control over what ends up where, and generally have it set to Create New Lane.

http://forum.cakewalk.com/X2-Take-lanes-rebuild-layers-m2686731.aspx

 

Edited April 6, 2022 by David Baay

[David Baay]

So I guess it's going to be another 16 months before the OP comes back to check for responses...?  Not surprising, I suppose, given the features he's complaining about were implemented 10 years ago!

[Byron Dickens]

That's why I don't bother with these people.

[Starship Krupa]

On 4/6/2022 at 1:32 PM, Davor Tomic said:

anybody?

I guess not. I suppose people have accepted it as it is.

I never used SONAR in the "Track Layers" era, so I can't speak for how awesome (or not) it was. You're not the first person I've seen who preferred them to Take Lanes.

I can say as someone who used a few other DAW's before Cakewalk by BandLab, lanes systems seem to be the industry standard paradigm for managing multiple takes and comping/editing. Sure, some people liked it the way it was, but having an "idiosyncratic" workflow makes it harder for people to a. use skills they got from using another DAW and b. use their Cakewalk skills elsewhere.

As they've evolved, DAW's have become standardized to a degree. Piano roll for MIDI. Lanes for multiple takes. Trying to buck these results in a product being a "niche" tool. Look at Waveform for example. I've tried it a few times over the years and just can't get started. It's just too different from the workflow I'm used to. On the other hand, I just got a license for Studio One Artist with my new audio interface, and thanks to it following DAW conventions I'm used to, I was able to jump right in.

I also suspect that the initial negative reaction to Cakewalk's Take Lanes was partly due to the way they were implemented. They introduced some advanced features like Speed Comping that were confusing to new users.

The point I agree with you on is the one about muted clips. No matter how I change my clip colors, even with deep diving into Theme Editor, I still have some trouble with figuring out which clips are muted vs. other states. A little red icon in the clip header would be sweet.

[John Vere]

I'm not a fan of using Lanes when comping a guitar track. I have my reasons. I find for me I still like the way I did it 15 years ago. Insert 3 identical audio tracks and go at it. I use the first track as the target and simply cut and drag "better" parts from the other 2 tracks. It's simple, fast and it never goes weird on me like take lanes always seems to do. 

[Starship Krupa]

1 hour ago, John Vere said:

Insert 3 identical audio tracks and go at it. I use the first track as the target and simply cut and drag "better" parts from the other 2 tracks. It's simple, fast and it never goes weird on me like take lanes always seems to do.

Since the DAW I learned on, Mixcraft, uses lanes, I was already familiar with the paradigm. Theirs are similar to Cakewalk's, but more rudimentary. Unlike Cakewalk, you can't hide your lanes, so screen real estate can get pretty scarce. You also can't group clips or tracks, so any edits have to be done on one track or clip at a time.

I've poked around at Studio One and their take handling is called Layers. It looked to me like there was no way to make all the layers visible like I can by opening Take Lanes. I may be wrong, but if that were the case, I'd find that difficult to deal with.

I don't have too many complaints with Cakewalk, but one that I do regarding the comping workflow is that the more advanced features seem to get in the way of when I want to do something simple. The business of their being half a dozen different hotspots on every clip is hard to deal with at first. It took me a while, plus the advent of the configurable Smart Tool and the Shift key modifier, to get a handle (huh huh) on it.

When I started out, I'd find things happening like I'd split a clip and then want to slip edit one of the resulting clips, something that one does all the time when comping. You have a bad rim hit or finger squeak or breath intake that needs to go, what do you do? Split it right there and just drag the clip edge over until it ain't there no more.

But Cakewalk would inevitably allow me to only drag the split point back and forth, with both clips remaining intact. Which is an operation that I want to do with a frequency of only slightly greater than never. If it's a matter of hotspots, I never figured out where the hotspot was. I just hold Shift.

Or, for instance, do 5 takes of whatever, in Comp/loop record mode, then pick my favorite take and trim a little pre-roll off. Drag the edge of the clip to the right, and....the leading edge of the clips in the other lanes come with it. Also an operation that I have never done intentionally.

The comping workflow in Cakewalk has the feel of something where a bunch of people designed it, and while they were doing so, somebody or other would bring up "wouldn't it be great if it could also XX," and then instead of making the fancy XX an option or modifier, they made it the default behavior. So I have to sort of keep brushing Cakewalk away when it wants to do more than I want it to. Speed comping: great feature, once I woodshedded with it, it can really help eliminate a whole bunch of steps, but, since it's the default mode, when I was newer it became an efficient way for me to mess up my tracks.

Speed comping is great for a scenario where you've played multiple takes of something and played some bum notes here or there and sort of know the sections you have trouble with and where the good takes are. Wham, bam, make your selections here here and here, it mutes and fades everything automatically, done.

What it's not so great for is when things are more complicated. It doesn't scale well for me when I have (as the OP mentioned) a multi-mic'd drum performance and I need to nudge a kick drum hit a little, take a bit of this take over here and that take over there....to do that I have to either modify or drop the Smart Tool and switch to the Edit tool for most of my moves.

With one way, I have a strategy, and want to execute it in the fewest number of steps. With the other way, I'm going along one edit at a time. Both are valid ways to work, I tend to stay closer the one edit at a time. Laser focus on that one change, get it, listen to it, go on to the next one.

[John Vere]

Sometimes I think the "new" features are heading towards "non musician" skill sets. They are focused on making it easy to create "music??" without any clue of what it really involves.  So I still use the software the way I used an 8 track recorder 30 years ago,,, . And I still sort of like to be competent enough to do that in 2 or 3 takes,,,, not 40 that I keep!  But that's just me and I've come to believe I am now truly a dinosaur.