Well...with Logic 8 and Sonar 7 now out and especially for me - Nuendo 4 about to be unleashed upon a very hungry audio crowd - not to mention the impending Cubase 4.1 update - I would say the "audio" attention is seriously focused elsewhere.

I was a serious fan of Vegas - but that was long ago. While I still like to keep up with what's new...Vegas simply doesn't have the depth of the above mentioned apps - especially Nuendo for the kind of work I do.

VP

Whilst I am slightly annoyed at the lack of audio improvements, I learnt long ago that chasing the newest 'big thing' is ultimately rather pointless. I still find Vegas the fastest DAW and that, for me, is far more important than some extra features that I'll never use. I like Vegas' simplicity and streamlined interface. Things like that mean a lot when you just want to get work done.

You mention the recent new releases... as a sound designer I look at Sonar 7's additions like this:

"A complete MIDI overhaul with Smart MIDI Tools and dozens of other new features" - I don't use midi much

"Introduction of the most powerful Step Sequencer found in any DAW" - again, a midi thing that I wouldn't find much use for

"True linear phase mastering plug-ins" - I'd rather use my own plug-ins, why DAWs makers are obsessed with bundling plug-ins i'll never understand, just give me better base features

"Internal sidechaining" - could be useful

"Delay compensation for external hardware" - don't use much hardware anymore

"Pitch to MIDI functionality with Roland V-Vocal 1.5" - again not a great deal of use to me right now

"Numerous workflow, mixing, and delivery enhancements throughout the application" - ....


So there's not a great deal for me to get excited about in that lot really... but that's just my take on things...

i am in same boat...i just do not need many of the bells and whistles...maybe if i was producing musicians but for just solid audio radio production vegas has always been fine and makes the most sense to me...i did upgrade to logic 8 because it was an inexpensive upgrade and logic finally cleaned up their interface but still have to go through so many steps in logic to achieve things that take many less steps in vegas...logic is still very very "busy" and has way more than i would ever need but hey if you need all that from logic or any of the other DAW's i understand if vegas does not fit your needs...but it does fine for me...

I usually don't need the extra audio power with the types of video editing I'm doing. I just bundled Sound Forge 9 with Vegas 8 and I'm looking forward to using those. If I need more than that, I can always send to my brother's studio using Nuendo and let him fix it and send it back to me!

I've had some training in Final Cut and find Vegas is very similar (as far as the video goes), so I'm staying with Vegas for a while.

Jeff

I use Vegas as an audio app on a daily basis, have been since 1999. I don't do music production, just soundtracks, radio and TV commercials so midi is not an issue.

I too love the simplicity of vegas - it's hardware and format agnosticism, the ease of workflow etc.

Especially love working to vision on such a flexible timeline - still have the FCP people marvelling at drag and drop on the timeline from DVD.

And even though I'm originally an audio guy, I can now perform quite a bit of video editing. So many more jobs!