guitloud
Sorry to voice my disappointment that it will not be included in any of the subscription packages. The only reason I paid for the subscription was with the incentive that product upgrades were part of the subscription. Rapture and Dimension Pro are both included products in the Professional and Platinum subscription levels. This is a product "upgrade" to those already included products. For you to say it is not included is infuriating to me as I was dubious of the subscription model to begin with. Thank you for bringing my fears to fruition.
Dimension Pro and Rapture were originally sold as
separate instruments apart from SONAR. They were introduced in 2006, and the first Cakewalk instruments sold for the Mac as well as Windows. When they reached their twilight they were included in SONAR. Dimension Pro became part of SONAR with version 8.0 and the full version of Rapture with X1 IIRC.
If you think the subscription program has not brought a raft of product upgrades of course you are entitled to your opinion, but I think it is an extremely difficult opinion to justify. As pointed out in a different thread we are through 16% of the year's membership. There is
84% more to go, on top of the upgrade from X3 to where SONAR was when the new version was released in late January. Look at what was included in the first two releases. I do not know of any other DAW that has released that many new features, fixes, enhancements, and content within 60 days after the release of a new version.
To think Rapture Pro accommodating the architecture of previous instruments somehow makes it simply a cosmetic change from what came before fails to realize that Cakewalk spent a lot of effort making sure that it would be
compatible with the investment users had made in libraries and the learning curve for Dimension Pro and Rapture, as well as with programs and samples they had produced over the years. In addition to being compatible with those two synthesizers, there are new modes, a new browser, new page organization, at least a doubling of the sample library, and presets designed by pro sound designers like Justin Lassen, whose work for Sony is well known. And, there's the whole Performance element.
Sure, Cakewalk could have factored in the cost of updates to all their products into the cost of membership. Then people would have whined that the price was too high. Not everybody wants their membership to pay for instruments. There are plenty of SONAR users who have Komplete, or Omnisphere, or whatever. They want - and paid for, and have been receiving - updates to SONAR.
To dismiss Rapture Pro as simply putting two instruments together, and therefore requiring an upgrade to instruments that were never even a part of the original SONAR, seems unrealistic to me. Cakewalk has been working on this instrument for at least two years. It is not some minor update they can just give away for free to people who received Dimension Pro and Rapture late in their product cycles, as freebies bundled with SONAR.