COLOR ME ...totally excited and totally ready to buy the upgrade.
...need more be said?

Over the years ...Cakewalk (et al) has been a solid, reliable partner in helping me generate income...
I work with some of the biggest names around ...albeit very quietly ... after a huge loss in late 2007 and a horrid setback in 2008 thanks to "the economy" ...I struggled to regain some foothold on sanity and life itself...

During this period I lived on the computer ... creating every kind of sound I could imagine...Cakewalk was my constant production companion
 
I encountered a dandy of a software issue with Cakewalk 8.x each forum post yielded nothing but "you must be crazy" responses... I called technical support... I believe it was Willy (almost sure) who doggedly pursued my crash reports and actually did see "something" that just didn't look right...

... he pursued this issue until finally, another office in Germany encountered the very same problem... 
Upon discovering this ...Willy notified me Cakewalk was building a beta version to address this remote problem...

Turns out ... the obscure issue was at the bottom of many related problem reports... 

SO he carefully guided me through the beta testing ...often by phone ... we tested, worked on many revisions ...until finally the problem was resolved.... that outcome had positive effect on many users...

*** That sort of dedication to clients indicates the quality of the individual and more ...the dedication Cakewalk has to providing users with a product that performs as advertised.

I will be a Cakewalk customer for as long as I am able to work in this business... and beyond if they'll put my face on a product after I am gone...(chuckle)

...and with Craig Anderton on board ... it's a done deal for good.

Where do I pay? (The top o' the line version, please) I want all them bells and whistles.

Best of All Worlds to All Y'all 
Roy

This looks and sounds great to me!  Already put in my pre-order!   149 upgrade!   Same as before and get features sooner.   I guess Cakewalk is taking the more modern "Agile" development approach to software which will get us changes faster and more often and is way more efficient for their development team!  Thanks!!

Anderton

Beepster

djjhart@aol.com
As I under stand you get more for being a monthly subscriber.

Nope. If you pay in advance you get all the same stuff you would on a month to month basis (as far as I understand it).

Correct, and you pay a little less if you pay upfront.

So if your monthly subscriber after 12 months of paying your done?
Or do you keep paying and On the 12 th month you will get X5 and 12 months thereafter of paying you will get fixes upgrades and goodies . (Something like that)
But as a one time payment this year I will get x4 and all its bells and whistles as soon as there ready too? And then a year later I have to buy x5 .

So basically it's a 12 month ez payment plan ..

ampfixer
THe only thing I can tell for sure is that it will cost me more to own Sonar than in the past, and that there will be no more free bug fixes or enhancements.

 
Realistically speaking, you ALWAYS paid for bug fixes and enhancements. When you spent $149 for an upgrade, that was factored into the cost. A company knows there will always be problems that surface after a piece of software is released, so you build in the cost of making those fixes.
 
New users get a year of free bug fixes, enhancements, and content. By the end of that year, the assumption - as it is currently - is that show-stopper bugs will have been fixed. Most users realize that software will never be bug-free and that X3 is substantially more stable than previous versions. By continuing to tweak that core, I would expect it will continue to become more stable in the future. 
 
The way things work now, if there are remaining bugs, they may or may not be fixed in the next update. The way things will work in the future, if there are remaining bugs, they may or may not be fixed in the next update. However, the big difference is that QAing will be easier, and the modular installer makes it easier to do what used to be called "quick fixes."
 

It's costing me more and you have a cop out option for buggy updates. You will get the $149 from me so that I can experience the new format for a year and then I'll evaluate the experience. It doesn't feel good, but you're the dog and I'm the tail.

But again...that's no different from now. Suppose you had X2. You paid $149 to update to X3, even though maybe you were nervous about new ownership and thought the future might be uncertain...but you took a leap of faith. Then you received five updates over the course of six months, enjoyed more stability, found out all the cool things you could do with X3, and then you were in a position to decide whether you thought the $149 was well-spent or not, and whether you'd update to X4 when it appeared. That's what's happening, EXCEPT you're getting what would have been X4, while assembling "X5" a block at a time over the next year and using "X5" features as soon as they're ready.
 
Personally speaking, I think the improvements in "X4" are well worth $150. Mix Recall is huge, so is VocalSync and the MIDI enhancements. The Control Bar is now fabulous...and of course, the new amp sims  That's not all but for the way I work, those would justify $150.
 
It has always been your option to say "Nope, not gonna upgrade this time around" and if you didn't, then you weren't going to get bug fixes for the version that was no longer being sold. I really can't think of any major music software companies that continue to offer new features and bug fixes for versions that are no longer being sold, although there probably are.

 I found the answer....

Just to put in my 2 cents worth:
I upgraded to Adobe Cloud because it was a no-brainer. They offered an introductory price of 19.99/month for existing owners of CS6 versions that did not include Premiere, After Effects and a few others.
The 19.99 got you pretty much EVERYTHING they sell, with upgrades, plus some content etc. I had been wanting After Effects for a long time, and now *BAM* for 19.99/month??? I'm IN! Have never regretted it. It's going up to 49.99/month and still worth it.
 
My thought is that Cakewalk does not come close to the arsenal of products under the Adobe moniker. For new customers to sign up for Platinum at 50/month, is a bit of a stretch, IMHO. I hope they've done their research (Gibson, the new owners) because I use Sonar Producer about every day for business and I'd hate to have to learn something else if they went out of business/lost market share.
I will upgrade, however. Get the discount.
 
Best of luck Cakewalk!
Wally
 
P.S. Make sure the code you buy is not protected under some international "wood" treaty. If so, don't let the FBI in without a warrant. DOH! (Just kidding.)

 

drewfx1
 
I'm still not quite clear on what happens a year from now though (assuming I did the yearly upgrade now). What would I be paying for at that point?

 

Andrew Rossa [Cakewalk]
You'd be paying for more features, updates, contents for the next year. You will have a year to decide if that is of value to you.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but what I'm seeing here a year from now is a substantial price hike over the existing upgrade cost  (which was already substantially increased last year) for an upgrade that you can't possibly know if you think is good value ot not or not because you won't know what it is gonna be and if after a year you don't think it was worth it  - tough luck 'cos you've already paid for it ?
 
You might well produce upgrades that you (CW) see as being good value for this fee, but to give one example from the current upgrade package all the AD2 stuff is totally useless to me as it can't be installed on an offline pc, so to me has no value at all. Problem is that in future I will have already paid for it.
 
 
 
 

Leonard
This new model gets folks like me who skip releases into your annual revenue stream. I really like Sonar. Count me in.

Questions.

My daw will now need to phone home to run Sonar Platinum? My Sonar X3 Pro rig is an offline machine. Do I now need antivirus software if it must be plugged into the web exclusively for this purpose? Which AV program do you recommend? A trip to windows 7 update is now necessary to plug up security holes.

and everything was working so well.

 
I use Windows Defender in Windows 8. (Microsoft Internet Security in Windows 7 I believe).
Work perfectly and it have very low impact on CPU. Can of course turn it of if you want to. Its also free which is good:)

Anyone complaining about spending $149 for this version is just plain stupid.
 
That you can opt to pay monthly is an amazing offer.
 
$149 does not reflect inflation for the past 10 years. Neither did $179, and $189, and $199.
 
Sonar has been underpriced almost from the git.
 
If this software was being imported my China it would qualify as "Dumping." And sanctions and tariffs would be applied.
 
A Hundred and fifty bucs for a year of goodness and you guys are publically spewing dumbness before you use your frontal lobes for a minute of thought?
 
I say, "Go buy a different product and complain in the appropriate forums."

TabSel
...as they are legally obliged to for free, and held responsible for.

I suggest you read the terms and conditions you agreed to when installing the software. Cheers..

No warranty either expressed or implied.  Side effects include but not limited to...

dwardzala
Anything that is released at the end of the year would not be patched, but I think the intent is to release stuff throughout the year and patch it as soon as possible, meaning most of the stuff will probably get at least one patch.

Up till now we had a release followed by a flurry of user beta testing and patches to fix the bugs uncovered.  This happened once per release, so every year and a half or whatever.  Say six months of turmoil followed by a year of peace.
 
Now it will possibly be turmoil all year long, year after year.
 

paulo
Maybe I'm missing something here, but what I'm seeing here a year from now is a substantial price hike over the existing upgrade cost  (which was already substantially increased last year) for an upgrade that you can't possibly know if you think is good value ot not or not because you won't know what it is gonna be and if after a year you don't think it was worth it  - tough luck 'cos you've already paid for it ?

 
As I've said before, Cakewalk can be more forthcoming with what to expect because the whole process has a quicker timeline so there's not as much concern about competitors getting a heads-up to try and counter something new. The company has already announced some upcoming features, and the program isn't even for sale yet. There will be more. So not only will you be able to look back on a year of updates to decide if what you get is worth the cost, but you will have some idea of what to expect in the future.
 

You might well produce upgrades that you (CW) see as being good value for this fee, but to give one example from the current upgrade package all the AD2 stuff is totally useless to me as it can't be installed on an offline pc, so to me has no value at all. Problem is that in future I will have already paid for it.

 
The reason why upgrades include so many features is because there are bound to be some duplications. For example I'm sure quite a few people owned Melodyne before X3 came out. And probably quite a few people owned AD. But I'd bet there were more people who didn't own them than did. As you can see from the bullet points above, it's $10 per major feature...so even if you only use half of them, that's $20 per feature. And if you use VocalSync, you come out $140 ahead even if you use nothing else.
 
Updates are intended to provide the greatest amount of utility for the largest number of people at the lowest cost. 
 

Paul P

dwardzala
Anything that is released at the end of the year would not be patched, but I think the intent is to release stuff throughout the year and patch it as soon as possible, meaning most of the stuff will probably get at least one patch.

Up till now we had a release followed by a flurry of user beta testing and patches to fix the bugs uncovered.  This happened once per release, so every year and a half or whatever.  Say six months of turmoil followed by a year of peace.
 
Now it will possibly be turmoil all year long, year after year.

I apologize in advance to all those of you who have already seen me say this many times over, but the developers are in favor of this model because QA is simpler and faster with smaller individual updates instead of trying to QA the permutations and combinations involved in throwing a whole bunch of new things in at once. There is also a new modular installer than makes the process of doing smaller updates easier, and also can make them available sooner.