Loyalty to Cakewalk

GTex62
Just wondered how long people have been using Cakewalk?
 
I started with Cakewalk v1.0 on a 5.25" floppy disk in 1987; although the company was called Twelve Tone Systems.  
 
DOS, IBM XT with dual 5.25" floppy drives.  All song names had to be 8 characters or less.  At least the filename of the song.  MT-32, Roland D-50, and record out to a cassette deck.  Magic!
 

pagec
A' Cakewalk' slot machine on Canvey Island (UK) caravan park amusements hall in 1964. Beat that.....still analogue !!!!

Danny Danzi

spacey
Now I'm hoping X3c and my computer will last long enough before everything
changes again to let me record a few tunes...that will pobably suck.
Well...at least my computer skills are getting better. Maybe I should be like FBB and
record that. ;)

A bit off topic here, but since you mentioned this, I just had to chime in here. My apologies ahead of time for the topic drift.
 
Just do what I do Spacey....put a good version of Sonar on your machine, and if you decide you want the newer stuff, put it on a little pc that doesn't matter too much.
 
I have this little get together with all the engineers in my area once per month at a bar for drinks and food. It's really cool as we get to share secrets, bond, bust on each other, and of course, talk shop in ways we can't talk to anyone else. I opened up the floor with "do you all think we are losers for buying into hype and being current?"
 
This opened up one of the best discussions we ever had in all the years we've been doing this. Everyone at this table (there were 10 of us this night) agreed that we're losers and deter our own progress just because we have this passion and excitement to buy the latest and greatest stuff all the time. Here are the things that were said:
 
It's like our options have options that have options that have options. By the time you get all that stuff organized and working for YOU in YOUR work-flow, the tables turn....you're searching for drivers, your go to plugs no longer work right, you're experiencing crashes, you can't load old projects in this new software, the software has abandoned things that worked for 15 years, the program is over-kill, you're forced to re-learn an entire DAW....wow, what a time waster "just to be current". Are we fricken' nuts?
 
This isn't just in regards to Sonar. We got the latest MAC users with PT and Logic crying, Cubase dudes, Presonus...the list goes on and on. So at the end of the conversation, we were all in agreement. None of us will purchase anything more unless it sincerely blows our doors off. We will not purchase new DAW software and put it on our real recording machines. If we do, it goes on a box we don't care about. This way we can learn about the new system if we choose to....and we can experience the new stuff in a stress free environment. If we find issues that annoy us...you lose on that release unless you feel like trying to resolve them or wait for patches.
 
If you don't find issues, you decide whether or not to install on your good machine. Me personally? I have 8.5 and X1 on my good boxes with X2 and X3 on my secondary recording boxes. I've never really been an X2 fan, but seem to like most of X3. It seems to be working really well on my secondary recording box at the moment and may graduate to the good box this weekend. The whole plugin debacle scares me with X3, but it seems to have been taken care of (at least for me) with the C patch. A and b caused a few issues there for me...but I expected this due to VST3 and the other growing pains we may have experienced.
 
But if I can be honest....from a business owner standpoint, it really hasn't paid for me to be current in anything other than upgrading to Windows 7 which is of course old and dated already. Though I had no problems with XP, 7 obliterates it. With computer audio, when you get something working right, I really and sincerely feel it's best to leave a well-oiled machine alone. For those that like to tweak and work on this stuff spending countless hours troubleshooting, may God bless you. For those of us who have to make a living from this, it can become one of the worst time consuming and frustrating endeavors known to man....all because we get so excited, we gotta buy. It's almost better to not have the money to buy this stuff in certain situations. I got a client that has so many plugins, his uterus fell out. LOL! He uses just about none of them....talk about a spending fetish. Get a good pc...put on a good version of a DAW you know works, add your plugs, make music. Current in my opinion, is way over-rated.
 
-Danny