I just finished making a homemade greeting card in an older version of Coreldraw.
I have gotten used to do my creating and editing with plenty of ctrl S alone the way.
I feel the same way about Sonar. Love the program (want staff view/ notation fixes- yes my gripe after all these years of no love) but I agree Sonar is like my cats, finicky

The plus is there have been lots of fixes in Platinum according to the ezines (very enjoyable reading). So they are trying. The minus is it's as buggy as X3 ever was, or it could even be worse now.
 
I try to avoid upgrading on a monthly basis, but when I do it, I generally end up breaking X in order to to fix Y, and sadly I still end up with the same annoyances year after year after year that don't ever get looked at.

After a year I was hoping Cakewalks product would be in a much better place, please don't get me wrong I still like and use it, but I can't help thinking there are far more polished products I could be using. I am however far too fat and lazy to do the extra work researching this.

The point of my post is not that Sonar is not,or should be made more, stable or predictable. I assume those fixes will be difficult, time consuming and expensive. The point is that through the simple magic of changing a few paragraphs or screenshots in the help file, a bug can instantly be transformed into an absent feature. Hell, if you want the buying public to think the program is bug free, just delete all mention of the ability to do X using the well documented method that does not work as described. Providing relatively clear instructions that do not work for most users is much worse from a customer relations standpoint than just not saying you can do X at all. This is not a style issue. It is a usability issue at least as important to the frustrated user tearing his hair at midnight as the ability to make adjustments using a cartoon version of a mixer channel strip. It is a customer relations issue at least as important as offering telephone support for technical problems. Hire a technical writer who is familiar with the program or pay him to get familiar, and task him with editing the monthly updates of the help file to assure that following the directions does not lead to frustration. Instead the documentation continues to give incorrect instructions, that persist after they have been identified, and bug reports are apparently closely guarded secrets from the user base at large, and are only officially publicized when there is a fix in the next release. Sonar is not the buggiest program I have used, or the most frustrating, but only because I have used a lot of open source community product. From that community we have come to expect abysmal documentation and help limited to cryptic comments in the source code. 
 
The knowledge base issue is more difficult and expensive, but it could pay for itself in decreased use of telephone support. Microsoft reportedly developed its very useful knowledge base primarily to assist its support personnel, and now it serves as the primary source for most users who do not want to pay per incident for simple problems. In addition a hyperlink to the appropriate knowledge base article from within the help system could save the help system editor a lot of duplicate writing.

I doubt it would save much money as from my experience - customers do not want to read documentation, they want a "techie" to read it for them so they can have a good moan about it. From a customer perspective I could not care less what happens internally, I'm just looking at the product.

FanCake
I doubt it would save much money as from my experience - customers do not want to read documentation.

 
Whenever someone comes up to me and says "I read your manual on [product name]," I always reply "So you're the one!! I just knew someone out there reads manuals!" I used to think it was a joke but I'm not so sure.
 
One time I was consulting to a hardware company and said they really needed to write better manuals. They were puzzled. "Why? The customer has already bought the unit."
 
It would be interesting to have an alternate, crowd-sourced version of manuals online where people could make corrections and add tips, as long as any additions were hidden until someone from the company could verify they were correct. 
 
[Note to FanCake: I've tried to send you a PM saying you were right in the locked thread, but I guess you don't have enough posts to receive them yet. Anyway, just wanted you to know.]

Anderton
It would be interesting to have an alternate, crowd-sourced version of manuals online where people could make corrections and add tips, as long as any additions were hidden until someone from the company could verify they were correct. 

 
I've seen a few instances of crowd sourced manuals that work very well.  The online Wikipedia for Audacity is a good example. For Sonar though the issue is the released software changes every month.  Crowd sourced documentaion would work well and add value to a stable product with few updates such as Music Creator.

 

Anderton 
Whenever someone comes up to me and says "I read your manual on [product name]," I always reply "So you're the one!! I just knew someone out there reads manuals!" I used to think it was a joke but I'm not so sure.

I will never understand the logic behind not reading a manual.  The investment in reading time is returned many times over in productivity. 
 

Anderton 
One time I was consulting to a hardware company and said they really needed to write better manuals. They were puzzled. "Why? The customer has already bought the unit."

 
This attitude seems to be disturbingly common.  Many companies now don't even bother to write manuals. A close to home example is that there is no manual for Melodyne 4 Studio (or any other version 4 I would hazard to guess). To this day (3 years after release) there is no manual to download on the Behringer website for their Compact and Rack versions of the X32 Digital consoles,  both reasonably complicated beasts that operate quite differently to the full sized model. What came first -  the laziness of the consumer or the indifference of the company? 
 
On the upside,  I believe Sonars documentation is pretty darn good.  The sheer size of it often puts people off,  but this is largely due to repeated information in order for users to be able to find the answer they need in whatever context they are working without having to read the entire manual.
 
Slartabartfasts suggestion of a database of known bugs is an excellent one.  Trying to find out if a problem has been reported is all but impossible,  let alone official verification.  Not holding my breath on this one though as it's a tad awkward from a marketing perspective:)
 
A user based online manual where bugs/workarounds could be recorded is an interesting idea,  but in practice it could be an unruly beast.  A quick look over all the posts on this forum and even submitted problem reports shows that whilst there certainly are plenty of verifiable issues,  more often than not what people perceive as bugs turn out to be human error or operational unfamiliarity.  Editing and maintaining this behemoth could be quite a task.  
 
 

tenfoot
Slartabartfasts suggestion of a database of known bugs is an excellent one.
...
Editing and maintaining this behemoth could be quite a task.  

Where's Alex when we need him.
 

Kylotan
 
Thanks. I'm sure I'll be here off and on, until I can afford to buy a different DAW. But if there are no fixes for non-members then there's no point me reporting bugs either.

As you have voiced interest in Studio One previously, I just thought I would tell you that they offer a 'Cross Grade' pricing from users of other DAW's, I took advantage of this back around the time Studio One 3 was released, and to be honest I haven't looked back. Solid as a rock, not one single crash in the ensuing 8 or so months, LITERALLY not one. Awesome features (for me anyway), and no more of the not knowing what is going to be broken next month that worked previous;y, every month, month after month. Sure you can roll back, but is that really the point? I have tended to see the roll back feature through different eye's as time has passed, and tend to agree with others who seem to think that it is almost like an open license to release software that is not quite ready for prime time, because hey, you can always roll back, and like you mentioned yourself it is pretty much like being an unpaid Beta tester, I can't deny that feeling was there.
 
The change to Studio One was quite painless, a bit of time to learn your way around certain features and methods, but nothing really, I felt at home almost instantly and you just learn the other stuff as you go, but it was a breeze. I can get things done much quicker, and I have confidence in updating, and don't have that monthly lottery when update time comes around. Been using Sonar since Pro Audio days, left for a while at the start of the X series, came back at X3, moving to Studio One was the best move I have made in a long time.

I wonder how open the new feedback portal will be in seeing faults listed