This explains a lot about Cakewalk/Sonar

[Orbit-50]

Maybe they should just ban the complainers outright

I was thinking that there could be some kind of auto ban for this but I wouldn't go that far right now. We first have to gather intelligence on them, then make our decision based on that.

[lingyai]

There may indeed be such people, that don't really care about improving their workflow, and maybe don't even make any music, and rather are just born to gripe.

But that all seems rather like a strawman in this discussion. Because those people are a breed apart from the type I normally see -- people like me who encounter specific, real-world problems to seek specific debugging / workaround advice (sometimes learning there is none). That's why they go on the forum most of the time. (Tech support is not your fastest and best remedy in Cakewalk's case, trust me). These people want something to work as advertised, since they bought it and all. Wild idea, I know, but some people....

And again, bear in mind that this particular CW thread, in which the CTO posted, has embedded in the title the question, what do you think of the new model? In that discussion, the new features vs bug-fixes question is central. So that thread was certainly the place to discuss it. To do so hardly makes one a whiner.

[trimph1]

I remember that even the crash reporter crashed

[lingyai]

I remember that even the crash reporter crashed

Still does. Or only shows up after certain types of crashes.

[vintagevibe]

Hey lingyai, thanks. I did read the entire thread that the guy linked to get the context.

I've seen you post in various forums and I've never seen you "obsess" over anything, on the contrary, you seem polite and reasonable to me. I doubt if he was even talking about people like you, or you.

You can hear some frustration in that comment of his. He vented a little. It happens.

Happens a lot more from the FLStudio devs.

But yeah, that (what he said) is what might be called a brain fart. We already surely know lots of developers may sometimes feel that way, they just never say it in public, for obvious reasons. If we could be flies on the wall we'd probably hear a lot worse than that.

I agree that the devs comments shouldn't be take so seriously. He's obviously frustrated. And I hope this thread isn't seen as anti-Cakewalk. There are long time customers with legitimate gripes and the CW forum is a common one. I see do see from release notes that quite a lot of bugs have been fixed so maybe they are doing better.

[trimph1]

I certainly hope that CW continue their bug fixes. I hope I didn't come off as a basher.

I like the features. I just want to be able to use it as well.

[incubus]

I don't think dudes attitude is too far off of the software/music biz in general. If you have a group of alphas that fanboi then even if it's 1% of people having a working product, that is the attitude of the company. Kinda like ESPN shows. Nobody watches that shit. They shill each other like mad, make sure the advertising bucks are there and ride off into the smoky-strain.

Oh yeah, and the "people that complain don't make music" argument is a fantastic cop-out

[Hank the Knife]

I have no dog in this fight. I don't own or use Sonar and never have. However, it's very clear to me, reading that comment, that some people have real issues understanding plain English and will take offense at almost anything.

That quote is quite literally true, for almost if not all daw products. That "some" (look that word up in Webster's) people who go on these crusades about things (bugs, features) aren't making music, or much. In fact, "some" of them actually quite literally don't and have never even legally owned some of the products they crusade against.

Just because that's quite literally true for "some" doesn't mean he meant "everybody making bug reports", or eveyone complaining about a bug.

He's right. Of the people complaining most on any daw forum, some of them are complaining just to complain and aren't doing anything of consequence musically if at all while shouting how critical everything is.

The real problem is that it's often enough hard to know which ones those actually are. But yeah, still not good PR to say thise things out loud.

Cool story bro. Some do some don't... but what exactly is your point? For instance: Bitwig Studio DOESN'T have this problem. Trust me
PS BWS is quirky as no other but I still work it, because I know it takes some years to make a current DAW fully functional. And it's IMPROVING. There we have UPDATES for.

[vintagevibe]

I certainly hope that CW continue their bug fixes. I hope I didn't come off as a basher.

I like the features. I just want to be able to use it as well.

I don't think most of us are bashing. The problem is the hostility we're met with when voicing these opinions on the Sonar forum.

[excessional]

All of which still makes this thread seem like a lot of whining about minor issues that don't affect 99% of the user base in any material way.

Is Sonar Platinum stable? Good value for money? Decent workflow?
Hell yes - it's the best value 'studio in a box' for PCs there is.
I've spent £120 on it in total.
For that I get a very decent modern DAW, Melodyne Essential, AD 2 with 3 Addpaks, stuff like Quadcurve EQ with real time spectrum analysis, comping, timeshifting, drum replacer and vocal aligner,a whole suite of decent FX, a bunch or more or less usable instrument VSTs.

Melodyne (for pitch correction), AD2 with 3 addpaks (for decent drums) and Quadcurve EQ (for quick and accurate real-time mixing) alone are 3 essential items that would cost more than £120 to start with, so you can basically view the DAW and the rest of the stuff as thrown in for free.

Is is perfect? No - of course not. Can the official support be overly 'officious'? Yes by the sound of it. But is is there or thereabouts as one of the best value/most usable DAWs on the market - surely...

[Jace-BeOS]

All of which still makes this thread seem like a lot of whining about minor issues that don't affect 99% of the user base in any material way.

That sounds similar to the Cakewalk CEO's excusing of bugs, with his comment about the complainers not being music-makers. I mean, it's only a "minor issue" to you if it doesn't break your workflow or discourage you actually doing work. How many of those "minor issues" does it take to be the death of a thousand paper cuts?

Also: It's a risky track to go down because that thinking could cut both ways (to sloppily mix metaphors):

I'd be concerned that the "99% of the user base" is who Cakewalk are most proud to promote as being their part of the market. The term "prosumer" has become very popular. IMO, that's because the term pleases users that aren't professionals but have a passion and seriousness about the hobby... AND it lets software makers excuse unprofessional quality control! It seems "prosumer" has become a favorite apologist term for Cakewalk. I know it has for Apple.

What if that majority of happy users are actually the fawning fanboys... and what if they're happy because they don't actually trip over the flaws... and what if that's because they're not "really making music" (because they're just "havin' fun makin' beats" or remixing other people's work, or some such thing)?

I'm not saying that's a fact, just proposing a possibility that's as possible as the rude one offered by the Cakewalk CEO.

From what I'm reading here, there's some similarity between the Reason forum and the Cakewalk forum. I see both as having a minority of the music industry's working musicians using their software, and a very vocal amateur group (nothing wrong with being an amateur; that group includes me). The amateur group is actually a majority of people in total because these tools make music creation way more accessible than it used to be. You no longer have to work yourself to death to attain the tools and share your music. But the majority of us aren't making money doing it, so we cannot call ourselves professionals (because really, aside from all the idealism that goes into that word, the only measurable and CONSISTENT definition of "professional" is "one who does [x] as a profession", and therefore "earns money at [activity]").

So if most of the users aren't pros... Does that justify a non-professional developer behavior? They ARE making money by providing a tool. Should that tool be excused from expectation of reliability because it's aimed at non-professionals? Is there a term yet for developers that make products "only for hobbyists"?

"Real professional software development is HARD! We're just prosumer developers. You can't expect us to debug our work. It's just a hobby we get paid for."

Cakewalk's product has always been accessible to people without great financial means. That's why their products got me started on the "pro-sumer" end of music creation and out of the most primitive part of the hobbyist end. The tools were capable enough for me and my abilities... at the time. Eventually, that balance of productivity vs cost fell on the side of wasted time and money. For me, it's because I was actively trying to USE all those features they promoted at me on every upgrade up sell (for example, I'm one of the users who found the VariPhrase plugin to be uselessly buggy and a major crash-causer, so I gave up trying to use it... but maybe I was "doing it wrong" because I wasn't trying to use it on vocals... ).

I wonder... Are all of the users who actively tried to utilize all of the product features gone from the community (due to leaving it over broken functionality)? I've read the running commentary as suggesting the user base has changed. I saw few other users complaining about the features I had issues with and part of that was because most people seemingly didn't use them (it wasn't just the case of people finding them perfectly functional, though that happened too). There are some diehards left and I almost became one. I wonder how much of Cakewalk's user base makes use of the entire product and how much of the user base just uses the most basic functionality (which gets the most testing).

Maybe it's people like the Cakewalk CEO that aren't "really using" the product...

[flugel45]

(The usual paragraphs of Jace-centric ranting).....
Maybe it's people like the Cakewalk CEO that aren't "really using" the product...

Jace, remind us again.... Exactly what version of Sonar was it where you felt you got screwed over, and how many versions/new owners of CW later will it take before you get this particular chip off your shoulder?

[AKJ]

All of which still makes this thread seem like a lot of whining about minor issues that don't affect 99% of the user base in any material way.

Is Sonar Platinum stable? Good value for money? Decent workflow?
Hell yes - it's the best value 'studio in a box' for PCs there is.
I've spent £120 on it in total.
For that I get a very decent modern DAW, Melodyne Essential, AD 2 with 3 Addpaks, stuff like Quadcurve EQ with real time spectrum analysis, comping, timeshifting, drum replacer and vocal aligner,a whole suite of decent FX, a bunch or more or less usable instrument VSTs.

Melodyne (for pitch correction), AD2 with 3 addpaks (for decent drums) and Quadcurve EQ (for quick and accurate real-time mixing) alone are 3 essential items that would cost more than £120 to start with, so you can basically view the DAW and the rest of the stuff as thrown in for free.

Is is perfect? No - of course not. Can the official support be overly 'officious'? Yes by the sound of it. But is is there or thereabouts as one of the best value/most usable DAWs on the market - surely...

if Sonar is stable for your workflow, that's fine. For me it is now mostly working but, ironically, the Steinberg soundcard which I am using atm is the first one that gives the expected performance (worse experiences with the NI and Alesis hardware I used before on the same machine). Many versions of Sonar/Cakewalk Pro Audio in many hardware combos gave a very mixed image throughout the years - although the same hardware always worked well with other hosts. In the cakewalk forum sometimes one could get useful advice but many times it was just: "something must be wrong with you setup" (official support, when contacted, could barely help). Btw, I am a very early Cakewalk customer (at that time, they were still called Twelve Tone Systems - which I, actually, much prefer as a name ). Cakewalk was the name of the host - a MIDI only host that came 5,25″ floppy disks.Since then, the company got quiet a bit of my money.
Of course, if you buy for the first time (and at today's low rates) and are interested mainly in the add-ons, it's all fine. But my interest is the host, not what comes as add-ons, since I am really more than set with plugins and content. I can work with Sonar. Nothing is a real show stopper. But I really dislike the shown attitude of the Cakewalk staff. It distroys any trust that they will ever learn the lession: eliminate bugs and develop features to the end. Sonar really could be the best host on the planet if they would do that. One example: The matrix view (incorporated from Project5) would really be a cool feature, but they do not support hardware controllers (at least not the way Live does). So it is actually almost useless. Same thing with notation. It was good in comparison when they started, but since then it never got a real update so it is now lightyears behind. I could go on. So for me Sonar is a love/hate thing. But the last years I more and more feel: it's time for a change ...

[Jace-BeOS]

(The usual paragraphs of Jace-centric ranting).....
Maybe it's people like the Cakewalk CEO that aren't "really using" the product...

Jace, remind us again.... Exactly what version of Sonar was it where you felt you got screwed over, and how many versions/new owners of CW later will it take before you get this particular chip off your shoulder?

If you're so tired of my "self-centric" postings, you must be able to answer that first question yourself. As to the second: Is it therefore your opinion that I'm not allowed to participate in this thread because it's all just supposed to be in the past for me? That's not your call to make.



Maybe when Cakewalk's behavior turns completely around I will feel no need to be defensive about the group of people I feel I'm still a part of. I read the Cakewalk threads here because they're meaningful to me: I want to see if Cakewalk is improving. So far, it seems they're not. i have opinions beyond the expiration date you want them to have. Tough. For each person that jumps in here to be dismissive of the thousand bugs they feel are immaterial, without having a history of personally experiencing frustrations with the product, I have an opposite opinion to share with them. That's how human beings and social forums work.

I'm not out here crusading to destroy Cakewalk or make you feel responsible for my happiness. Though it would be less irritating if people would curb their "self-centric" commentary for why ALL users should be acting like everything is fine because "I don't have that problem".

If people stopped with that crap, you wouldn't see my crap in response to it.

In that, there's an added complication: I'll speak up in all cases of this kind of dismissive crap in the computing world, whether I'm a customer of the product or not. These excuses and rationalizations are entirely unacceptable in most other industries (though they happen, such as when car flaws kill people, and we see how people react to that). The industry flourishes by enjoying its exception to consumer protection laws (like warranty) and any basic intuitive sensibility (such as "they said it does x so obviously it must, or they wouldn't be allowed to sell it", which those of us experienced in this industry know is not the truth at all). Sensibility has been perverted into a holy crusade of apologetics such as "no software can ever be bug free" and so on.

It's like fighting any other destructive social phenomenon: until people stop promoting an unacceptable policy as being "not an issue", I'll keep arguing against it. You can mute me. I'd be surprised if I'm not on a lot of mute lists already.

[trimph1]

If it works for you fine.

You don't need to be so defensive about the product.