In  post#14 I suggested a quick way to get a pdf download. After several folks pointed out it didn't work I checked again and it only works on my iPad. On a PC with Edge, Chrome or Internet Explorer it doesn't work.

Anderton

Brian Walton
 
Many of us spoke up about this when the 1st one came out.  Somewhat sad that it fell on deaf ears.  
 
Just link a direct download on the rolling updates tab like they used to.

Click on "Read Now" in the Rolling Updates section, and with one more click you can download the PDF. I know people complain about signing up but that's spurious. You can use a bogus email address and have your browser remember the password, so the only difference from downloading the way people did before is one more click.
 
By hosting the eZine on issuu.com, non-SONARians can discover the general articles and reviews, it scales well, you can download an app to read it offline (as well as clip sections, and see thumbnails as you scroll through the contents), share it with others...on an iPhone you can open it in iBooks, print, copy, save it to iCloud, etc. So while I understand some people just want to download a PDF with one click, doing two clicks instead allows for a lot of options that other people may find desirable. 
 
And frankly, it's easier to just upload the eZine to issuu compared to creating an installer (which is why it was never in the CCC) or even adding a link. It's also really easy to make a change. When it was found the link to "You Mix, We Master" went to the video for last month, it was fixed in literally under 30 seconds by simply uploading a revised PDF. So there are a lot of upsides to hosting on issuu compared to Cakewalk doing it.
 
BTW I'm not "defending" this because it was my idea. I wanted to have it download along with the release, but when Cakewalk asked me to check out issuu.com I could see that overall, it had a lot to offer.

I signed up on the first release before the discussion.  I've had multiple "spam" emails from them and even tried to unsubscribe and got an email after that. 
 
I do not always use the same computer or same browser.  It is more than one extra click, as in this case, you have to actually create an account, not just enter a bogus email address and make up a password, then sign in with what you created.  Either I remember that or repeat the process every month. 
 
Cake could load the thing for download with google drive and create a link to that.  Which could be easily updated if an error was found by replacing the version. 
 
As I've stated before, hard to argue that you couldn't offer it both ways.  The community seems to pick up Cake's slack and upload it elsewhere for direct download. 

Brian Walton
I signed up on the first release before the discussion.  I've had multiple "spam" emails from them and even tried to unsubscribe and got an email after that.

 
Did you select preferences, and uncheck ALL notifications available from issuu? That should stop all emails. 
 

I do not always use the same computer or same browser.  It is more than one extra click, as in this case, you have to actually create an account, not just enter a bogus email address and make up a password, then sign in with what you created.

 
I am able to access it from iPad, Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android with one account. The platform remembers the account info, so after clicking on the forum link to the issue, it really does take only one extra click to download as PDF.
 

Cake could load the thing for download with google drive and create a link to that.  Which could be easily updated if an error was found by replacing the version.

 
Then there would need to be a pair of links, a pair of updates if a change occurs, etc.
 
The bigger issue is it takes a tremendous amount of effort to put out a monthly magazine with more pages of editorial than many commercial magazines. Justifying that amount of time requires making sure that it's providing the content people want, and can eventually reach an audience wider than those people who see a link in an update announcement. (Remember that the forum is only a fraction of all Cakewalk users, and there were constant issues with the previous eZine where people didn't know where to find it, or didn't know the place to find a link was in Rolling Updates, etc.) Now people will know that it's always available in one place, it can be embedded, and it works on any platform.
 
Also with issuu, we have anonymous metrics on which articles get read the most as well as overall circulation. After each issue we do a post-mortem to gauge article popularity. We need that data if we want the magazine to serve the community in the best way possible. Granted, if you download the PDF from issuu, we do not get that information. Fortunately, enough people read the online version that we can draw at least somewhat valid conclusions about how to improve the magazine.
 
Tech+Music is free, can be read online on any platform, and be downloaded as a PDF; also, I would like to think it's a pretty high-quality publication. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask the community to do something in return that helps us improve the magazine by knowing what interests our readers, and also lays the groundwork for expanding it in the future. I admit that is a biased viewpoint because as the person responsible, I want it to be popular. Otherwise, I would need to cease publication because I can't justify the time, which is what happened last time.
 

Yeah, that interview made me curious to hear his album 

Hey gang,
 
I just got a pro tip from the folks at Issuu - you do not need to create an Issuu account to read or download the magazine.
 
If you access the magazine from an embedded page, you can just download it. In the near future, I'll work on getting something more obvious up on our website, but for now our recent blog post embeds the magazine and provides an easy option to download the magazine.
 
Here's a link to the blog post with the embed:
http://blog.cakewalk.com/summer-of-sonar-heres-the-2017-06-update/
 
And here's a screenshot that shows the download button from the blog post:

That is a great alternative Alex. I did sign up so I could download the tech+music. Something I did not want to do. So thanks for this.

I wish I knew about that "non-member download" trick sooner, but issuu has a solid publishing platform for us so far, and I'm glad some of you are learning about other great publications up there as well. I'm also hoping other issuu readers start discovering Tech+Music as well.