michaelhanson
I skipped Sonar 2 as well Ed, because I was running Home Studio back in those days.  Once I jumped into Sonar, I have never missed an upgrade or a plug in that they have released for Pro Channel.  
 
Like AllanH, it has always been more about supporting Cakewalk, because I wanted to contribute to making sure that the software kept advancing. 

So we truly are twin brothers from another mother.

While it does seem a little too generous for Cakewalk to offer lifetime updates instead of sticking with the annual update plan, I gotta think that they wouldn't knowingly shoot themselves in the foot. As as discussed previously, the lifetime membership doesn't appear as though it'll be available to everyone...just a thank you to Platinum users who've renewed, etc. 
 
Considering these new announcements and aggressive plans for the future, I gotta think that the last 18 months have been quite successful for Cakewalk, thereby allowing them to offer a "too good to be true" scenario without risking their financial stability. 

TheMaartian
Bought the lifetime sub yesterday. This morning, SONAR | About told me I'm good until 12/24/2037!
 
Christmas Eve.
 
Do the Bakers have another present in store for us in 21 years?
 
And my new G&L guitar is on the UPS truck out for delivery.
 
What a day!!!

After you get the latest update from CCC (or manually install) you should have the infinity symbol.

bapu

michaelhanson
I skipped Sonar 2 as well Ed, because I was running Home Studio back in those days.  Once I jumped into Sonar, I have never missed an upgrade or a plug in that they have released for Pro Channel.  
 
Like AllanH, it has always been more about supporting Cakewalk, because I wanted to contribute to making sure that the software kept advancing. 

So we truly are twin brothers from another mother.

Other than you got the Alembic.     Bazz bros.

streckfus
While it does seem a little too generous for Cakewalk to offer lifetime updates instead of sticking with the annual update plan

If you have kept up you would know that the annual update plan IS NOT being abandoned. CW staffers have repeatedly said here that it's your choice between the two.
 
The offer for lifetime expires on Aug 31. That alone should tell you that annual plans are NOT going away.
 

bapu

streckfus
While it does seem a little too generous for Cakewalk to offer lifetime updates instead of sticking with the annual update plan

If you have kept up you would know that the annual update plan IS NOT being abandoned. CW staffers have repeatedly said here that it's your choice between the two.
 
The offer for lifetime expires on Aug 31. That alone should tell you that annual plans are NOT going away.
 

Yes, I know. I was referring to other comments expressing concern about what lifetime updates would do to Cakewalk's revenue. The point I was trying to make was that although a lifetime update plan may initially seem like a huge gamble, the fact that it isn't being offered to everyone along with their aggressive plans and track record over the past 18 months indicates that they appear to be in pretty good shape and we shouldn't worry about any of this "end of life" stuff.

As a Console1 user I am super pleased woth the new announcement.
 
Also I love the idea of the workspaces and swip gestures.
 
And improved plugin load is ALWAYS a good idea.
If all of this happens in 2016 I would be hugely impressed!

OK I did the deed and am now officially a Lifer (To Infinity And Beyond, as the saying goes). Thought I'd put in my 2 shekels about the announcement, since everyone else and his dog seems to have done so already...
 
1. Lifetime Updates. I've heard some complaining that it's a 'cash grab', and cparmerlee has pointed out that in essence they're asking us to prepay for 2017 updates, before we've even received all the 2016 ones we've already prepaid for, so that we won't even break even on what we likely would have paid until 2018. That's fair enough, but given the ROI that I've generally seen from CW over the time I've been trusting them with my investments in music technology, I still feel it's a relatively safe gamble. If they somehow drop the ball so completely that I feel truly let down, it will be pretty much the first time in our long association... and I will still feel overall that I did fairly well out of the bargain. But I doubt it; I'm betting I'll be a happy camper well into 2018 (and I'm not usually a betting man). 
 
2. Sonar for Mac. I posited in the Giant Great Big Enormous Speculation thread (not suggesting this was an especially brilliant observation, but as a point of departure) that the Lifetime Updates thing was a dip into their pool of existing users' goodwill that would provide a cash bump to help finance some big developments, that would in turn bring in enough new users to keep everything ticking along, so that everybody wins in the long term. That still seems like a reasonable enough assessment of the situation to me. If Sonar for Mac is that big new development, so be it. I don't currently have any use for it, as I have no computers running MacOS and no plans to switch - BUT, at least now I will have that option if it becomes salient for whatever reason. Virtually everything else I'm invested into is cross-platform, aside from Sound Forge which I use less and less these days and haven't updated in a few years. With Sonar running natively on MacOS, I *could* switch if I need to, which is nice to know.
 
But even if I never do, I don't have a problem with it. As Craig has pointed out elsewhere, all of us wild speculators don't really have any idea how any of this fits into the overall business plan, and we lack any of the likely substantial data and research it's based on. CW is not a big company, but they have managed to stay in business for a long time, and they have the backing of a much bigger company that has been in business for a much longer time, so I highly doubt these decisions are made capriciously. If they are betting the farm on this, they doubtless have pretty solid reasons for believing it will pay off. I sincerely hope it does, and if my vote of confidence by pre-paying to be a Lifer helps them make it happen, and stay in business, and keep sending me Awesome Updates until the end of time, then I'm happy to give it. Plus, it will be nice, one day, when someone asks me what platform I work on and I say Sonar, not to get a quizzical blank stare. I'd like to get a (much more appropriate) approving nod. 
 
3. Commitment to Awesomeness. What can I say? I am in favour of Awesomeness. I think Sonar is pretty awesome already, and the people that made it so are telling us they have plans to make it more so, and letting us in on *some* of those plans. What's not to like? I don't really do much in the way of take and comp editing, but hey - as above, I might someday, and it's nice to know they're working on making it Double Plus Awesome. Same goes for Console 1 integration - I don't have one, don't plan to buy one immediately, but I hear good things about it and you never know. I am, on the other hand, very very excited about Ripple editing, which will impact me much more directly. But someone else might not care about it, and that's how it goes. I find it weird that people are actually upset about CW putting resources into developing features that don't impact them directly and immediately. That just seems very self-defeating to me - what happens when the shoe is on the other foot? 
 
Anyway. Enough said, I need to get back to work, but these were my thoughts as I made the decision to plonk down the PayPal and make this thing permanent.
 
Put a ring on it, as the song says...

subtlearts
OK I did the deed and am now officially a Lifer (To Infinity And Beyond, as the saying goes). Thought I'd put in my 2 shekels about the announcement, since everyone else and his dog seems to have done so already...
 
1. Lifetime Updates. I've heard some complaining that it's a 'cash grab', and cparmerlee has pointed out that in essence they're asking us to prepay for 2017 updates, before we've even received all the 2016 ones we've already prepaid for, so that we won't even break even on what we likely would have paid until 2018. That's fair enough, but given the ROI that I've generally seen from CW over the time I've been trusting them with my investments in music technology, I still feel it's a relatively safe gamble. If they somehow drop the ball so completely that I feel truly let down, it will be pretty much the first time in our long association... and I will still feel overall that I did fairly well out of the bargain. But I doubt it; I'm betting I'll be a happy camper well into 2018 (and I'm not usually a betting man). 
 
2. Sonar for Mac. I posited in the Giant Great Big Enormous Speculation thread (not suggesting this was an especially brilliant observation, but as a point of departure) that the Lifetime Updates thing was a dip into their pool of existing users' goodwill that would provide a cash bump to help finance some big developments, that would in turn bring in enough new users to keep everything ticking along, so that everybody wins in the long term. That still seems like a reasonable enough assessment of the situation to me. If Sonar for Mac is that big new development, so be it. I don't currently have any use for it, as I have no computers running MacOS and no plans to switch - BUT, at least now I will have that option if it becomes salient for whatever reason. Virtually everything else I'm invested into is cross-platform, aside from Sound Forge which I use less and less these days and haven't updated in a few years. With Sonar running natively on MacOS, I *could* switch if I need to, which is nice to know.
 
But even if I never do, I don't have a problem with it. As Craig has pointed out elsewhere, all of us wild speculators don't really have any idea how any of this fits into the overall business plan, and we lack any of the likely substantial data and research it's based on. CW is not a big company, but they have managed to stay in business for a long time, and they have the backing of a much bigger company that has been in business for a much longer time, so I highly doubt these decisions are made capriciously. If they are betting the farm on this, they doubtless have pretty solid reasons for believing it will pay off. I sincerely hope it does, and if my vote of confidence by pre-paying to be a Lifer helps them make it happen, and stay in business, and keep sending me Awesome Updates until the end of time, then I'm happy to give it. Plus, it will be nice, one day, when someone asks me what platform I work on and I say Sonar, not to get a quizzical blank stare. I'd like to get a (much more appropriate) approving nod. 
 
3. Commitment to Awesomeness. What can I say? I am in favour of Awesomeness. I think Sonar is pretty awesome already, and the people that made it so are telling us they have plans to make it more so, and letting us in on *some* of those plans. What's not to like? I don't really do much in the way of take and comp editing, but hey - as above, I might someday, and it's nice to know they're working on making it Double Plus Awesome. Same goes for Console 1 integration - I don't have one, don't plan to buy one immediately, but I hear good things about it and you never know. I am, on the other hand, very very excited about Ripple editing, which will impact me much more directly. But someone else might not care about it, and that's how it goes. I find it weird that people are actually upset about CW putting resources into developing features that don't impact them directly and immediately. That just seems very self-defeating to me - what happens when the shoe is on the other foot? 
 
Anyway. Enough said, I need to get back to work, but these were my thoughts as I made the decision to plonk down the PayPal and make this thing permanent.
 
Put a ring on it, as the song says...

No matter how I may kid about the announcement you've expressed my feelings exactly subtlehearts.
 
I too own a license for Mixbus, Studio One 3 Pro and Reaper. All Mac OS cross platform. So, if sometime in 2017 or beyond I would be required/compelled to go to a Mac, it would seem I could as long as my RME interface still works there

Zargg71

tzzsmk
lifetime license sounds really nice,
but what really matters is the licensing/activation system,
with all respect to Cakewalk, CCC is not pleasure to work with,
for serious studio use of Sonar, computers being completely offline (due to security and functional reasons), it appears fairly impossible to use Sonar - I would really like to see something like "export iLok license" within CCC, so it would be possible to run Sonar on offline production computers

For this, you use offline activation.
I hope they never go iLok

Using the CCC and trying to install it on a computer not conected to the internet, was a pretty major pain.
 
I spent many hours yesterday trying to get it to actually install.  I had various problems, trying on different Win 7 computers to determine if there was perhaps an issue with one of them, etc..(these are all computers that run X3 Producer perfectly).  Even connecting to the internet instead of the real off-line activation.
 
I still don't know why I installed it with the CCC, got the green light and the launch button.  Yet nothing happened after hitting launch.  Nothing.  I eventually just launched the .exe by itself to try to get it to work.  I'm concerned that the CCC isn't going to see it on the next update, and I don't know how any overrides are going to work and I don't have the disc space to let installs pile up.