Paul P
The best solution seems to be to do something like a yearly update during which you learn all the new features and the new bugs and then go back to making music for another year. Just like the old way of doing things.
You can do that with the present system; you choose when to update. The only potential difference is if you wait a year to update, more bugs will have been fixed because they would have been fixed shortly after their introduction, as opposed to being introduced all at once with a big update.
The current way is just alpha and beta testing. Nothing wrong with that, if it was presented as such.
If you look at the bugs introduced each month and multiply by 12, I suspect you'd have about the same number of bugs introduced with a yearly update. However, bugs get fixed faster with the current model. What it really boils down to is whether you want immediate access to a feature like Drum Replacer or real-time synth recording, or are willing to wait for a period of time after it's introduced so that any bugs unearthed from heavy use are fixed. But, you have that choice, whereas you didn't before.
I would like to add that for us regular forum participants all this is well known. But think of a new hobbyist/musician/user who puchases SONAR. I imagine many wouldn't even be aware that this forum exists, let alone the necessity to read it obsessively.
In theory, that's what the notifications option is about - to inform people of SONAR-specific things without requiring sending an email or going to the forum. But as to reading the forums obsessively, bear in mind that some of the issues found are a) pilot error or exposing a system incompatibility, and b) relevant only to specific situations. For example someone has posted that exports don't work post-Ipswich, yet I've done lots of exports, including the new multiple clips option, without problems. So reading the forum and finding out someone thinks there's a problem doesn't affect me.
A good example of a
reproducible bug is the Arpeggiator not bouncing the arpeggiated notes. But I rarely use the arpeggiator, so by the time I do, it will probably be fixed. Meanwhile, there's the arpeggiator plug-in. Again, I wouldn't have known about this without reading the forum, but it wouldn't have mattered.
I don't think it's necessary to obsess about things. You download the update, you read about how to use the new features, done. If you encounter a deal-breaker problem, you roll back. Or, you just wait and update every few months or every year or whatever.
The new system is all about choices; if anyone wants the system to work as it did before, that's one of the choices. Perhaps Cakewalk's mistake in rolling out the membership thing was not offering only two options: get monthly updates, or buy a yearly version. That wouldn't have affected anything Cakewalk did, except that once a year they'd take the most recent download (which would contain all the features and bug fixes from the previous 12 months), give it a version number, and offer it for sale as "SONAR X4" or whatever. Basically it's the same thing as a current member downloading once a year instead of once a month, except that you'd pay at the end of the 12 months to get the updates that happened, instead of at the beginning to get the updates that will happen.