mettelusField failures are the #1 way for a company to give itself a black eye and create negative marketing that can never be "bought" back, specifically word-of-mouth advertising.
I agree
completely. I've been bitten more than once, like not being able to locate a CD-ROM that needed to be inserted periodically…very bad if you’re in the middle of giving a workshop. Thankfully copy protection is becoming less intrusive but as long as people steal software, companies will try to figure out ways to prevent that. It’s sobering to see the sales figures for interfaces compared to the software people run on them. If people aren’t stealing software, then I guess there are just a lot of folks who like to collect hardware interfaces.
True story: Steinberg once had a copy protection system that involved random, periodic insertion of your distribution CD. At one Frankfurt show I was told by a Steinberg representative they were so afraid of needing to authorize the program during demos they all used Cubase cracks.
During the early days of iLok, where it could wipe out your C: drive if you tried to install a new program while having out of date drivers (it happened to me), one computer builder would replace your legit Waves plug-ins with cracks if you provided proof you had purchased them.
Do I hate having a program go dead during a workshop? Of course. However copy protection uses code and code can have bugs. I
do think that if companies are going to make
any aspect of a program bullet-proof, it should be ensuring that any protection scheme doesn’t inconvenience legitimate users.
From a SONAR perspective, tempo maps could have been introduced in X3, and been extended to "map track to master" similar to AS - syncing audio to MIDI is a thorn everyone deals with at some point, and the "innovation" has been there.
Are you sure about that? I think there had to be changes in ARA to make it possible, and both Cakewalk and PreSonus have worked closely with Celemony to extend ARA. I’m actually rather surprised they remain the only two companies to really jump on ARA.
Listening to the users.
I can assure you Cakewalk listens, but that doesn’t mean they have the ability, time, or resources to implement what people want. Many of the requests in this forum are things Cakewalk itself wants to implement but can’t at the present time for one reason or another.
There isn't anyone who offers feedback here in hopes to see Cakewalk fail!!! Yet the ones driving this train in that direction continue to attack these people who are investing their time in "hope" of being not only heard, but listened to. Once that resource goes "offline," surveys aren't going to cut it one iota.
I think the impatience comes with threads whose premise is “I’m not going to renew/I’m going to switch because SONAR doesn’t do something I want it to do.” There are plenty of DAWs out there. If you want a MIDI implementation with VST Expression, there’s Cubase. If you want an audio engine that won’t stop unless you drop your laptop on a concrete floor, there’s Ableton Live. If you want to be able to tell clients you use Pro Tools…there’s Pro Tools.
But all DAW forums are filled with feature requests that will never be implemented. Unfortunately, you can't have it all, so you have to decide what comes closest to meeting your needs.
It’s a competitive market. Cakewalk does what it can to compete with the resources it has, and they're working hard at reversing the downward spiral that existed for years before the company was purchased.
However take the case of VCAs, since it was mentioned as something sufficiently important that it might cause someone to switch. I genuinely didn’t understand what VCAs did that was so important, but I wanted to know. After listening to what people said n this thread, it sure
seemed to me it wasn’t that huge a deal, so it sure wouldn’t cause
me to switch…but if someone
absolutely needs VCA-style grouping, well, there are programs that do that. Or take the thread about “jumping ship” because SONAR lacked a particular integration that Studio One supposedly had. But dig deeper, and you’ll find that the touted integration
doesn’t yet exist. By the time it becomes available to the public in SOP, I’d bet SONAR will have it too.
So yes—listening is crucial, but when there are thousands of people talking at once, it’s also important to differentiate between the signal and the noise. A legitimate user having SONAR go into demo mode is not just signal, but a loud and serious one. On the other hand I think for a lot of people, talking about switching to another DAW because it offers VCA grouping is noise. But that’s just my opinion…and it may be noise. Or it may be signal.