Doktor Avalanche
Here's another idea. If these companies don't want to spend money on drivers, for supporting an OS they never agree to support in the first place, they should do a kickstarter to see if people would pay $20 or something for them... And make some money. Lack of forward vision IMHO.

Even THAT process is costly to coordinate.  The best solution would be to kick it to the Open Source community.  I'm sure proprietary concerns prevent that from happening though ...
 
Just like the Delta drivers.  Throw the source out there and let somebody run with it I say.
 

Doktor Avalanche

BobF

Doktor Avalanche
Here's another idea. If these companies don't want to spend money on drivers, for supporting an OS they never agree to support in the first place, they should do a kickstarter to see if people would pay $20 or something for them... And make some money. Lack of forward vision IMHO.

Even THAT process is costly to coordinate.  The best solution would be to kick it to the Open Source community.  I'm sure proprietary concerns prevent that from happening though ...
 
Just like the Delta drivers.  Throw the source out there and let somebody run with it I say.
 

Open source (what I said earlier) ...

Isn't it awesome to be agreed with?  

I've got the A500PRO working pretty well under Win 10 and I'm happy for that. Everyone seems to focused on making the hardware OS compatible, but I was thinking a bit deeper. My controller has control maps optimised for different DAW's, as I'm sure most controllers do. What I was thinking about was having Cakewalk revise and refine those controller mappings so that one day there could be a page dedicated to the Pro Channel and Quad Curve.
 
The software goes through continuous improvement but the controllers seem to be a snap shot in time. ie., the VS-700 was made for 8.5.3, not optimised for Sonar 2015. One day controllers will be touch screen overlays and we will be able keep them current. Can you imagine a keyboard controller that looks like a glass slab until it's turned on?

ampfixerCan you imagine a keyboard controller that looks like a glass slab until it's turned on?

Yes. I doubt the action would be very good though. Or the velocity sensitivity. Or aftertouch. Touchscreen keyboards already exist and they're a poor compromise at best compared to a real keyboard.

Control surfaces, on the other hand, are a different matter. Touch-screen control surfaces already exist. With a touchscreen monitor Sonar already has that capability. And there are quite a number of control surface applications for tablets, some of which work very well. None are dedicated to Sonar in the way Apple's Logic remote app is built for Logic Pro though.

FWIW...
 
I agree with Ampfixer about "disposable" gear. I have guitars that are 50 years old and not only do they work fine, you can still buy replacement strings for them. I also have digital keyboards from the 80s that work, but once some critical component fails and is no longer available, then that instrument becomes useless.
 
The V-Studio controller is Mackie-compatible and I use it with other programs, like Reason and Vegas. It also still works fine with SONAR. But again, it's likely that at some point a proprietary component will fail and that will be the end of it. I believe there are also some quirks with the Mackie Control implementation with SONAR because I tested it with the SSL Nucleus. Great controller, and worked fine for the basics...but as soon as you tried to control buses, you couldn't get back to any other mode of operation.
 
The issue of support for companies is tricky. Most companies do not make their own components and rely on third-party supply chains. Due to the size of our industry, these are often single-sourced. So let's suppose your V-Studio controller goes south. Roland may not be able to fix it because the company they used to make certain components is either out of business or moved on and no longer makes that part. Most companies will keep spare parts on hand to handle future service needs, but eventually those will run out. Of course drivers can be re-written, but as has been pointed out here, to be fair to Roland the economics of doing so don't make sense.
 
Finally, there's the desire of companies to sell you new stuff, whether you need it or not. I had a Matrox graphics card which was supposedly not compatible with 64-bit Windows 7. I contacted the company about a driver and they said no way, didn't exist, had to buy a new card. But then I found an installation package for servers that included a 64-bit Windows 7 compatible driver for the card. It worked perfectly, and was even identified as being for 64-bit Windows 7.
 
Or the Epson scanner that supposedly had no driver that would work with 64-bit systems. Yet I found a driver on the web someone had hacked (illegally, of course...you're not supposed to reverse engineer or modify a manufacturer's code) and it worked fine. Apparently all it required was removing or adding a line of code, it was a very simple change.
 
Or take my Apple quad core Xeon, which was manufactured two weeks before the cutoff date for being able to run full 64-bit operating systems. That cutoff date had nothing to do with technology; it's possible to modify the computer to work as a full 64-bit machine and run operating systems past Lion. But Apple would much rather that I buy a new computer.
 
It's a helluva stupid world we're leaving for our kids.

My question in all of this is why is updating the operating system so important? In most cases Operating systems are the least needed updates when in comes to users immediately updating, but so many people flock to the updating of the systems.  Then when they do everyone is screaming for updates.  If the programs you use operates under the old OS system, and there is no reason to update such as lower system load or better Asio driver implementation, or whatever the users particular situation may be, your better off forgetting whatever bells and whistles that are calling you.  OS's are flashy, but in the background, allot of times there is little to no changes to throughput on OS updates or new releases.  Mostly its the front end and new apps that are added that become the main stay for the new OS.  They usually take up more memory than the last, leave less to the secondary manufacturer's applications(especially where windows is concerned), and over all they tend to be buggy the first 6 months to a year after implementation.  So anyone going to 10, check and make sure there are drivers for your system. (Audio, Video, Midi, interfaces)  Because if not rollbacks can be quite painful, and sometimes completely impossible.

John T
Well, hang on there. In the case of the v series drivers, us plebs at the forums have them working, off the back of a bit of getting together in our spare time. Roland could get a moderately capable junior to sort this out in an afternoon. That's not an economic barrier, that's cynically exercised fake obsolescence. 

I hope this eventually bites them. We're now in a world where audio hardware needs to be computer compatible. I hope that the companies - of which there are presently few, it has to be said - who work to maintain compatibility, will earn their customers' loyalty. And that the companies who presently don't, find it necessary to rethink that position.

Roland have been financially struggling for quite a while, it's no secret. And while I wish no ill on their workforce in general, at a corporate level, well, they should stop conducting their business so poorly.

THERE, I'VE SAID IT.

Let's just say that's true. They will still have to test it, considerably. A complicated interface requires more complicated testing. The combinations can be huge.
 
The other alternative is not to test it extensivel, and risk releasing a dodgy driver. If the driver is dodgy they may also have to spend a considerable period of time and money fixing it....
 
With simple interfaces it's not too hard to test.
 
Alternatively stop support, don't spend any money. Life is less complicated for them Hopefully people will buy a new product from them... and if they don't there are always new customers....
 
And if something is branded as Cakewalk, well somebody else is at least (perceptually) going to shoulder the blame (many customers won't know or care about cakewalks ex relationship with Roland).

I had a Roland V-studio 20 which I had to part with when I was 'forced' down the Win 10 route. I truth I was gutted as it was for me the perfect partner for guitarist and DAW control. 
Though the driver workaround got the thing working, it was never fully functional and prone to failure. 


Even more galling is the fact that Win 10 caused me so much pain I sold out and went back to 8.1.
If only I had kept the V-studio.....

I must say, I am pleased with the fact I went with Roland interfaces.
My UA-25EX and UA-101 both have Win10 drivers ready to download.
See www.rolandus.com. The UA-25EX is Cakewalk branded.

Ha! That's a very, very sore point.
 
I had the older UA-25, then I got the UA-25EX as a backup (UA-25 was off the market by then).
 
Turns out you cannot have both the UA-25 and the UA-25EX drivers installed at the same time.
Whenever you install the one, it detects the other and insists on uninstalling it before continuing to  install itself.
 
And the drivers for the UA-25EX are not backward compatible with the older UA-25!
 
I had to sell my older UA-25 and got a second Cakewalk-branded UA-25EX.
 
My even older UA-101 driver co-exists with both, no problem.