Too much going on in the ruler in Cakewalk Sonar...

[RexRed]

Too much going on in the ruler in Cakewalk Sonar...

 

I click in the ruler to choose my song position I would like it to play from; it zooms the song in or out.

I click again and it selects the song. A tiny sliver or some arbitrary amount.

I have to "ctrl shift A" to unselect and I do this hundreds of time during the process of making a song.

Like every 10 minutes...

When I want to click on a marker it fights me. Almost every time.

I spend hours fighting with the ruler, each time I need to click there it is an act of luck if I will actually be able to position the now bar there or not.

I try to click towards the top of it but even that only works about 1/4 of the time. Usually, something else unintended happens.

It is a constant break in my train of work. 

I would like to be able to disable all of that other stuff.

If I am not working with markers I do not need them clickable. I would reenable marker edit if needed.

If I am not trying to select a portion of the song I do not need select active in the ruler. If I am not trying to zoom in or out I do not need zoom active.

90% of the time I just want it faithfully go to the song position where I click it to go and where I click it. 

It is hard enough when the timeline is a moving target to click it anyway than to also have an obstacle course thrown into the mix.

Please give us the options to turn all of the other ruler behavior temporarily on or off singly at will so we can have the ruler behave with a narrow or custom array of actions.

I can't get work done with the ruler constantly doing everything else but what I need it to do.

The ruler is narrow as it is and to have all of that other stuff in the mix makes it impossible to use it for simply moving to a song position while the song is playing.

There are only a few times in the course of making a song where I select an area to loop.

I never use the ruler to zoom I always use the plus and minus signs in the bottom left.

I really need a way to shut off all of this other stuff. Or, give us a second ruler above it that is only for time location.

But, I would prefer shutting all the other stuff off when I am not using it. I use markers in every song and I do loop my songs with selections to record,

but this is only a very minute amount of time I need those abilities actually active.

Right click on the ruler, check boxes drop down select the behaviors you want active.

Zoom

Select

Markers

Now Time

 

Thank you. 🙂 

Edited August 28 by RexRed

[Starship Krupa]

4 hours ago, RexRed said:

I spend hours fighting with the ruler, each time I need to click there it is an act of luck if I will actually be able to position the now bar there or not.

Yes, Sonar is so particular about where it expects you to click for a given action. It's taken me years to get used to all of the different hotspots on the different types of clips in the Track View and I still do it wrong often enough.

While you are waiting for your wishes to be fulfilled, here is the safest spot to click when all you want to do is just (for God's sake) position the Now Time:

Anywhere inside the vertical space inside the ellipse. That is, between the top of the numbers on the reticle and the top of the Arranger Track. It's actually a decent-sized piece of real estate once you know where it is.

If you click between the top of the numbers and the top of the ruler, you get the magnifying glass that I, too never use (I use combinations of mousewheel and modifier keys to zoom in and out). Click too low and you'll get nothing, unless the Arranger Track is open, in which case the Now Time will reposition where you click. If you really need a humongous target, you could even add an empty Arranger Track and just click in that when you want to move your Now Time.

Hope this helps.

My suggestion (as a gamer) is to spend a few minutes with an empty project and practice clicking along the ruler in that space in order to put it into your muscle memory.

[RexRed]

1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said:

Yes, Sonar is so particular about where it expects you to click for a given action. It's taken me years to get used to all of the different hotspots on the different types of clips in the Track View and I still do it wrong often enough.

While you are waiting for your wishes to be fulfilled, here is the safest spot to click when all you want to do is just (for God's sake) position the Now Time:

Anywhere inside the vertical space inside the ellipse. That is, between the top of the numbers on the reticle and the top of the Arranger Track. It's actually a decent-sized piece of real estate once you know where it is.

If you click between the top of the numbers and the top of the ruler, you get the magnifying glass that I, too never use (I use combinations of mousewheel and modifier keys to zoom in and out). Click too low and you'll get nothing, unless the Arranger Track is open, in which case the Now Time will reposition where you click. If you really need a humongous target, you could even add an empty Arranger Track and just click in that when you want to move your Now Time.

Hope this helps.

My suggestion (as a gamer) is to spend a few minutes with an empty project and practice clicking along the ruler in that space in order to put it into your muscle memory.

Your advice is very helpful, If I aim for that particular location that you have outlined it is more responsive.

It would still be nice to be able to defeat other behavior there when not in use. 🙂

[Starship Krupa]

1 minute ago, RexRed said:

Your advice is very helpful, If I aim for that particular location that you have outlined it is more responsive.

I'm glad it works for you, Rex. Actually, investigating it on your behalf helped me to "fix" the exact location for my own use.

I've generally found that Sonar's picky behavior about clicking isn't due to sloppiness, it's more in the other direction. It demands more precision than I want to give it.😄 Of course, until I take some time to figure out why I keep getting different results when I perform what seems to me to be identical operations, it feels clumsy and weird.

Check this out from the Reference Guide, a diagram used for explaining what will happen when clicking on a clip in one of seven different places:

Further down the page, it lists them and all possible combinations of modifier keys, so there ends up being about 15 different things that will happen depending on where you click (and drag) on a clip and what key you were holding when you clicked. Of course, once you learn this, you can go like a bat out of hell because everything's right there rather than buried in menus, but until you do, it's frustrating, because similar clicking and dragging actions have such different effects.

It was months before I realized that this was the case. When Cakewalk by BandLab was first release, the Reference Guide  hadn't been published, and the web-based documentation was....difficult to navigate.

[Amberwolf]

This isn't a solution to the problem, but a "hack", if it is usable for you. (I use it sometimes because I have poor fine motor control and perception and sometimes can't reliably click on things in small spaces.)

Assuming the newer Sonar works like the ancient one I use, there is the option to set the Now time by left (or right, or both) clicking in a track, in the track view clips pane options, IIRC.  So you can create an empty track wherever is convenient for you to use as a now time setter, and just click in it when you want to set the now time there. 

It's a waste of screen space and whatnot, but it does work, and you can make the track minimized or as tall as you want, to make it convenient to click in.  You can also put the track in the middle of your workspace, at the top, the bottom, or anywhere between other tracks. 

 

(you can also just click within a track to do this, even on clips, but if you don't want to select or touch anything in a track that it less convenient). 

[David Baay]

I have some essential tremor in my hands and pretty significant macular degeneration in my right eye, but have no issues with clicking in the timeline to set the Now time even on my 15" laptop display with the scaling set to show the same real esate as on my 24" desktop monitor (also small by current standards). I wonder if you might just need a higher-quality mouse with the right mousepad, responsiveness settings, weight, friction and an ergonomic position that keeps your arm and hand relaxed and stable to achieve the necessary control to click precisely without dragging.

All that said, I can see some value in having more control over the multiple functions that the timeline supports and being able to disable some of them (I almost never use its zoom function, myself).

[Starship Krupa]

On 8/27/2024 at 7:30 PM, RexRed said:

I have to "ctrl shift A" to unselect and I do this hundreds of time during the process of making a song.

May be a few other tips I could share around this topic....

Cakewalk demands many Deselect All commands in order to allow us to create without negative consequences, so what I do on all of my DAW systems is bind "Select None" to the "~/`" key in the upper left corner of most Windows keyboards beneath the Esc key. It's great because it's one of the few single keys that's not bound by default.

On 8/27/2024 at 7:30 PM, RexRed said:

It is hard enough when the timeline is a moving target to click it anyway

Do you know about engaging Scroll Lock to stop automatic scrolling?