Anderton
Okay, but that never came up in discussions about how to document the updates. Seemed like the emphasis was on being able to move fast.

I think the discussion was separate from rolling updates.  IIRC, it was early in the S-Plat release when folks wanted copies of the PDF *before* they purchased so they could check it all out before making a purchase commitment.  This was pre demo availability.
 
I'm pretty sure it came up again when Rap Pro was released.  IMO, this gets attention because it is very common to be able to user's manuals as part of presales.
 
Anyway, I was just being a snarky azz and shouldn't have brought that into this discussion.  Sorry 'bout that

I think the tactic itself is sound, if a little outdated. When I worked in a music shop and we were selling a lot of Logic (4, at the time), we would get a lot of people in there asking for demonstration and how to do certain things. Logic, when bought, came with a paper manual as thick as your fist. One of our first answers was always "have you checked the manual?" - it was easy to pick out the pirates. Nowadays with ubiquitous internet and YT demos of everything from recording your band to building a particle accelerator (seriously) I'm not sure it helps a lot.

The antipiracy/pdf discussion seems to have take over here. Not to belabor the point, but unless Cakewalk were to lock down the HTML help system, the absence of a pdf is not an effective strategy to stop piracy. Anyone who is capable of cracking the Sonar code and making an installer that will work without accessing the Cakewalk servers is probably capable of unlocking the help system or creating a pdf version from the HTML. There are a bunch of dedicated applications to do that, and an old pirated version of Acrobat Pro could stitch pages together into a fully functional document. As previously mentioned, in the days when making a physical copy of a printed paper manual could take many hours at a copier and use several reams of paper, it was more work than a ten year old with dreams of a musical future, access to file sharing, and no money was likely to bother with, but it cost more than the developers were willing  to spend to print one as well. When even a pdf is more cost than it is worth to the developers...

Sanderxpander
I think the tactic itself is sound, if a little outdated. When I worked in a music shop and we were selling a lot of Logic (4, at the time), we would get a lot of people in there asking for demonstration and how to do certain things. Logic, when bought, came with a paper manual as thick as your fist. One of our first answers was always "have you checked the manual?" - it was easy to pick out the pirates. Nowadays with ubiquitous internet and YT demos of everything from recording your band to building a particle accelerator (seriously) I'm not sure it helps a lot.

I was one of those that did read the Logic manual. I loved Logic. In the past with Pro Audio and Sonar the manual was the way to assure people were in fact owners of the software. Heck, on this forum we often checked by referring to a page number to be sure the poster actually had it. I still do it sometimes not for that reason but to make it known that it is covered in the manual. It beats telling people to RTFM.  Something we often said back then. LOL.
 
 
 
 

I also want to say it is really great to have Susan back. She always asks good questions that often get great conversations going.

John
I also want to say it is really great to have Susan back. She always asks good questions that often get great conversations going.

Thanks, John!
 
-Susan