Anderton

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I fairness and I should say I am one of the most critical of Cakewalk and companies in general but Support across the board are almost non-existent for most companies and forums have taken over.

You have to live with it. 

 
You are correct this isn't just about Cakewalk. In general, people want to pay the lowest price possible. They don't always consider the practical implications of paying lower prices. For example I avoid the self-checkout machines in grocery stores because I would prefer to see humans employed. But it's a losing battle. Stores that used to have a dozen lanes with checkout people and baggers still have the dozen lanes...handled by maybe one person, or two people when it's really busy. It's probably small comfort to the unemployed checkout people that they're paying a dollar less for groceries.
 
I think the future is no support from manufacturers, but instead, for-profit companies dedicated solely to support. Another possibility is companies turning support into a profit center, and charging for support past the first 90 days. This is becoming more and more common. It discourages frivolous complaints, and pays for additional staffing. 
 
Then again, banks want you to do everything online or at ATMs so they can get rid of tellers. Now pay attention because our menus have changed recently. If you disagree with me, press 1. If you agree, press 2. Para espanol, oprima 3. To access the forum directory, press 4. To speak to a customer representative, press 5. Your estimated wait time is 1 hour, 46 minutes. Have a nice day!
 

Anderton
I really think paid support beyond 90 days is the answer.
 

• It would discourage people from adding to support's workload for questions they could get answered in seconds by searching the documentation of visiting the forum.
• It wouldn't add to the price of the program. This matters because people who don't need support wouldn't have to subsidize those who do (or think they do).
• Not having free support is no longer considered out of the ordinary.
• The money paid for support could finance a) adding more support people, and b) solving issues that cause support problems. 

ampfixer
 
I don't know how many there are because there's no accurate tracking and reporting system for customers.
 

ampfixer

The long term stuff that people complain about, the issues that have been around for years, seem to never go away.  
 

rjeynes
It's surely no coincidence that the deterioration in Cakewalk support has coincided with the introduction of rolling monthly updates, which introduce new features (and new bugs) nearly every month. Isn't reducing the frequency of new feature updates a place to start to try and reduce the volume of error reports? This might also allow some movement of resources from development to support to try and get on top of the backlog. (I know the developers won't like this idea!)

Starise
I think the title of this post is enough to incite a bad response from most. Many have had a positive experience, several have had less than stellar experiences.
 
We know that support still exists. Alex has said they are looking into this problem which btw probably isn't expedited by a nasty post. 
 
I have been on both sides of service. Sometimes being a tech and listening to a customer is similar to being asked to poop gold bricks. Rather WE DEMAND you poop gold bricks. We might say, we are doing this and that. We are doing our very best and it isn't good enough. There is a disagreement on what is considered to be reasonable. 
 
Who is the best person to deal with issues? If Cake hires from the outside, they need to train people unfamiliar with the issues. Wouldn't you rather have someone who has used Sonar for the last 15 years on a daily basis dealing with your problem? How about a bunch of people like this? Enter the forum. Don't discount good advice.
 
 What would it cost to man Cake with 20 full time Sonar "experts" to listen to any whim of the customer? Some say the software is already too expensive. Imagine adding that into the cost.
 
Since I'm a tech I tend to side with the techs because I see some of the things demanding customers don't see.
 
When you buy any product you enter into a kind of relationship with it. You use it a lot and expect certain things from it. Yet we still need to be reasonable. Expectations are way too high in many cases. Compare Sonar to any other and you will see nothing different. Cubase has plenty of bugs. Avid has problems. What are they doing? 
 
One thing I would like to see is a very good troubleshooting section. We have all seen those that ask if we plugged it in. I mean something deep. This would weed out the customer complaints for the smaller stuff. Something like a buzz noise in the electronics can be a myriad of potential issues. The customer really does need to own some of this. Making it work well depends of good connections and setup. In many cases Cake is blamed and it isn't Cake at all. Just sayin' 

kicksville
 
 I can give you two: gain and polarity settings are not recalled with track templates

kicksville
 
 and copy/paste or split-to-clips operations with multiple sets of grouped clips result in all new clips placed into a single group
 

• Split Tool didn't always split grouped clips in take lanes
• Split Tool didn't create desired selection groups