I'm not that good of a musician, nor am I especially talented at recording, mixing or mastering. My workflow in Sonar barely qualifies for the name. I know relatively little about professional music production, so I haven't had a lot of value to add to the discussions between the very capable composers, musicians, engineers and producers on this forum. I have, however, been a software engineer for many, many years, and this subject is one that I do know something about, so I finally feel qualified to add something beyond a short comment to a discussion. I accept at face value the statements about how badly impacted folks are by some of these defects, and I can understand the frustration and doubt they are expressing.
Now, the posts in this thread have not been overly negative or egregiously alarmist in nature, just reasonable concerns voiced by reasonable people. But in the course of exchanging opinions they quite naturally state and restate their positions again and again, back and forth until eventually people voicing reasonable concerns begin inching toward some pretty unreasonable conclusions. These reasonable people are concerned that maybe Cakewalk is moving too quickly, maybe they don't know what they're doing with testing, maybe their QA process is shaky and that maybe the developers aren't testing even the most basic scenarios.
Such ideas, voiced again and again on this and other forums tend to transform themselves magically into statements of concrete fact that can and will fatally damage a good company's reputation. And left unaddressed, as Craig so ably stated, these "facts" become impossible to overcome. That's why I wholeheartedly agree with and totally support Craig's unstinting efforts to correct these misapprehensions.
We're talking here about two or three bugs that I've counted over the course of this thread, maybe there's more but that's all I remember. That's a pretty damned good outcome for a release of this magnitude if you ask me. I know, you didn't ask me, my "workflow" wasn't impacted at all and some guys were stopped dead in the water. Thank goodness Cakewalk left you the option to roll back or not upgrade at all. It sounds like just maybe the model anticipates and accommodates such situations, right? For crying out loud, give the model credit where it's due.
When I join a forum I tend to go back in time and read a lot of the old posts to avoid asking lots of redundant questions and to learn stuff I don't know. I've been a member here and a Sonar user for a long time but haven't really participated regularly until recently. One thing that struck me while reading a lot of the older posts is the number of complaints about how long it has taken Cakewalk to fix defects that customers bring to them, and at long last Cakewalk has done something about that.
This release model represents nothing less than a strategic push focused at least in part on addressing the age-old perception that Cakewalk is not concerned about the large backlog of defects. And make no mistake, this is a huge change for them, it just has to be. As a career software engineer, I understand how big and costly an effort formal releases are when executed only once a year, let alone once a month. I also understand what kinds of growing pains plague a product team when they move from a traditional long release cycle to an agile "release early, release often" process model. And I understand the organizational upheaval that takes place when a company makes changes like that.
I don't mean to belittle anyone's considered and well articulated opinions here, not at all, but holy crap, it's only been four months! I'm amazed and impressed that Cakewalk is getting it so right so quickly out of the gate. That tells me that they must have been an agile shop (or at least semi-agile) for some time internally. Yeah, maybe the release management side might have had a few burps, but as with playing a musical instrument, you just get better at the stuff you do really frequently, so I expect that aspect to improve over time as well. And I'll bet my next two paychecks that the drum map project loading scenario is now part of the formal regression test suite, lol.
Most of all, I am hugely impressed that the executive leadership approved such an audacious program to go with the transformation to a "membership model" when they could have done something a lot less aggressive and let the buckaroos roll in for a while.
Finally, I am personally grateful for the new content (which I have found immensely useful, thank you Craig!)
That is all. I will now fall back to my terse one line responses. Carry on.