^^^Yep, just like my rotary dial phone is still a fine phone.

It doesn't have caller ID, text messaging, 3 way calling, voice mail, and I need to run a really long cord whenever I try to use it in my car, but I find the user interface is much simpler and the larger speakers have better sound quality and it still makes phone calls just fine. When the developer of my rotary phone starts making new ones in more modern stylish colors and shapes, I'll be just as happy to buy a new one, since this flat black color is starting to show it's age.

This whole iPhone thing is just a fad anyways. Internet on a phone? Compressed audio format storage and playback? Touch screen user interfaces? GPS? Who the heck will ever want to buy anything like that when they can get a more robust rotary style phone? That whole iPhone thing will never sell. We all know rotary phones is where it's at. I'm willing to bet that 99% of the people buying iPhones don't use 90% of the features on it anyways. So when that 1% notices one of those features doesn't work properly, then what is the real hurry to fix it anyways?

"how many of the other NLEs mentioned have Scripting, or Takes, or uninterrupted loop playback whilst settings or FX are changed, or many other features or functionality that Vegas has - that's not playing catch up."

Man, I have to say I am so on the same page as you. This is exactly why I decided to stick with my rotary land line phone. My rotary phone has never dropped a call. How many of these cellular phones do you know of that can say that? Also, when I receive an incoming call, I DON'T get charged like these cellular phones. I also don't get charged for any local phone calls either or use up a certain number of allocated minutes when making local calls. I don't have to wait for nights and weekends either to get free minutes. How many of these cellular phones can say that? So in certain aspects my rotary phone is way ahead of these cellular phones.

One day everyone is going to get fed up with being charged for incoming calls, calls being dropped. Their iPhone internet connection dropping right when they're in the middle of sending an email, that took them 30 minutes to type up on that tiny touch screen. Then the phone dies and they lose their entire music collection. Just watch...people are going to get fed up with that sh*t and when they do they'll come running back to rotary style phones and Sony will have the best looking and most featured rotary style phone out there and Sony has people like SonyPCH working hard to ensure they'll be on top when that happens.

>>...Sony has people like SonyPCH working hard to ensure they'll be on top when that happens.

Damn straight! I will be here.

Peter

I don't think it's productive or fair to lay the blame at SonyPCH's feet. Even if he agreed 100% what could he say here and what can he do about it?

As he said he's only here on his own time to help and for that much he deserves appreciation not attack. It's unfortunate though that he seems to be the lone voice of SCS here, there's certainly a paucity of SCS people elsewhere listening to the users and giving feedback. I guess it's understandable that he's the lighting rod and it'd sure be nice if some of the frustration many of us are feeling didn't all land on one person's shoulders, more so when he's more than likely not in any position to respond, much less act.

What I still find troubling is the "majority of users" comment here and the "we found it confused a lot of people" comment in the Sound Forge forum about broken functionality that long term users had taken for granted. It sounds to me like the results of some randomly selected focus groups input rather than the usual Sony approach of talking to the frontline users. I'm not a frontline user but I speak with enough of them to know that what I've found lacking is what they're feeling pain over as well.

Bob.

Yes, very funny BradlyMusic, but again not an accurate analogy.

Vegas is not an outmoded machine - hell, it can input, edit and master back to XDCam - hardly a rotary phone. Alright, that's video and this is an audio forum - well, again you could never adapt a rotary phone to have those missing features you described, but Vegas CAN be improved to have those audio features you consider it's missing, and who knows, maybe it will ....

Bob...I'm not placing blame on SonyPCH if you were referring to me. I'm sure SonyPCH knows better than anyone in Sony of what audio users want to see.

SonyPCH probably gets to work on what he's assigned to work on, just like the rest of us. That's what my message was about and not a jab at SonyPCH. I'm sure this Vegas rotary phone would at least have a touch tone dialing keypad and call forwarding by now if it was up to SonyPCH to take it upon himself to do so, but obviously someone has not assigned his resources to do so. The best thing SonyPCH could do for us would be to get off that Sony ship and jump into one of the life rafts and start rebuilding that raft into a new ship with all the audio/midi necessities, along with a full service wet bar so we can celebrate afterwards.

"and who knows, maybe it will ...."

And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt before then.

drew said:
"I'd have asked for sends from busses and a return to the old bus/pan paradigm instead of spending time duplicating the horizontal faders vertically, but then I would just be repeating old feature requests which I know people reading this have made.. and anyway.. you may get those in Vegas Pro 9."

well, those two features you mention ARE in Vegas 8.

Yes, which is great news Charles. At last! But they are, pretty much, the only two significant new audio features in Vegas 8. Would have been nice if Sony has really taken this new mixer concept to heart and rolled with it - also adding things like folder tracks and fader groups, etc. I mean if we accept for a second that MIDI is never going to happen, because seemingly it's not, then surely the goal on the audio side should be to make Vegas the best editor (which it is) and mixer (which it isn't yet) out there? In which case, Vegas has still got some way to go with its mixing tools, but I'm glad to see at least that Sony's finally making some progress on this front.

Really I'm not going to gripe too much - as a Vegas release goes (ie don't expect too much. Or anything at all, er, really) this is pretty good for us audio guys :) Look forward to checking out 8.

Ben

>>Would have been nice if Sony has really taken this new mixer concept to heart and rolled with it - also adding things like folder tracks and fader groups, etc.<<

In what ways should we have "rolled with it"?

What do folder tracks have to do with a traditional mixer view?

How can you evaluate something that you have not used yet?

>>In which case, Vegas has still got some way to go with its mixing tools, ...<<

In what ways?

What can't you do that you can do with other tools you have and use?

Be specific.

Peter

CMD said: "well, those two features you mention ARE in Vegas 8."

That's really good - I hadn't seen any public mention of that at the time of writing and am genuinely impressed that this has (finally) happened.

Great news for Ben and others who stuck with it - I still have my old faithful copy of Vegas 6 for legacy reasons, but moved elsewhere a while ago since these things just didn't seem to be a priority.

Meanwhile after over a decade using SF, nobody from Sony could tell me how I could trial 9.0b having installed the first release and found some aspects to be so different as to be unusable - now they've made options to revert some behavior, but I can't even test that and now it would cost double the launch upgrade price.

How things how changed. A few years back I'd never have imagined I'd be so surprised that Vegas had added important audio functionality to a new release! Nor that I'd be begging for Sound Forge to feel like Sound Forge when editing and then begging for a chance to try it!

I upgraded to Vegas 7 only because 5.1 was included in the good upgrade price but I've never even used it. Installed and opened it to see how it worked but I too have finally moved on from Vegas. I guess I follow the forum mostly out of morbid cursiosity to see just how the audio only folks are being treated. I'm still using SF, CDA and Acid, but I'm transitioning from Acid to another app as well.

Well, I transistioned from Vegas 3 to Sonar awhile back. I was happy to see Acid 6 reluctantly make it's way into being a DAW. I always liked the Vegas workflow over Sonar, and I was happy to see Sony finally take an interest in making a DAW that was on par with other competitive software when they released Acid 6. After buying Acid 6 and finding all it's short comings compared to Vegas, I was highly disappointed. Vegas is actually more of a DAW than Acid, and Vegas is mainly a video app now. I guess Sony doesn't want to make a competative DAW be it named Acid, Vegas or anything else. I have decided coming back to Sony was the wrong decision. I should have learned from my 1st experience when I left Vegas the 1st time around. I too am looking at another app that works more like Vegas than Acid does, with the features many have been asking for in Vegas.

Have fun Sony bumpling your way thru developing a DAW. Maybe one day you'll come up with something that doesn't seem so half assed developed.

Ben -
I couldn't agree with you more. Vegas is the best editor out there but as a mixing tool, it lacks A LOT. The console is a huge step in the right direction, but it still could use many enhancements in the future. Not sure what I can talk about just yet... Folder tracks? Not sure if I want that. I want to be able to hide tracks and lock tracks and create mixing groups and saveable mixing layouts.

But the new bus sends help a lot and the console in general is more that just a vertical mixing tool. It allows a lot of things to been seen at once, which is immensely helpful.