Time to move on?

cwestmont
Background: Long time customer and have invested a ton of time and money on Cakewalk Sonar and DAW hardware over the years. I have an engineering background and am no stranger to a wide range of software, hardware and operating systems. This last bit is only to suggest that although I make plenty of mistakes, lack of experience is not the main issue.
 
I have found my recording and production progress over the last 6 to 9 months stymied by crashes, predominantly related to Melodyne 4. This week alone, probably 80% of my precious DAW time was spent waiting for reboots, and/or trying to find, fix or avoid potholes.  I am at the end of my rope, and neither Cakewalk nor Celemony seem to be on top of the problem.
 
I have started using a Mac for a local community college music class, and the learning curve for the resident DAW software is pretty easy.  Even though it would be a huge (and expensive) leap, I am considering the move to Mac.  My first preference would be to stay with Sonar on Mac, but the silence about the Mac release is ominous given recent history. 
 
My options appear to be:
1. Grind it out and avoid using Melodyne until Cake/Celemony get it together. 
2. Upgrade to Platinum or whatever current version and hope that fixes it.
3. Jump to Mac and new DAW software. 
 
I don't want to spend more time trying to debug this stuff.  I want to make music.  Given the reputation of the Mac and my recent experience,  option 3 is feeling like a leading candidate.
 
Bottom line is: Cake, I want you to win.  But life is short and I've got to have some sign that the ship is not rudderless. 

eph221
There's not a day goes by that something goofy doesn't happen with SPLAT.  Seriously.  

tlw

MarioD
FWIW - A friend of mine got tired of the problems he was having with Windows, virus protection and such so he sold everything and bought a Mac.  He was bragging to everyone about the ease of using it and the fact that it was so safe to use on-line.  About 8 months later he was crying the blues.  He got a virus and loss all of his programs and data. He didn't think that he needed any backups with a Mac.
 
Moral of the story is the old "the grass looks greener on the other side" ain't necessarily true.
 

Acquiring a virus on a Mac or any other Unix-like system is pretty difficult to do if you follow even basic security principles such as not explicitly giving something permission to run its installer if you don't know what it is. Of course, if you disregard basic stuff like giving administrator accounts passwords you'll quite likely end up in a mess. And the same applies to Windows. If you're one of those people who thinks system alerts are a silly nuisance and just hits 'yes' every time a pop-up asks for your permission to do something whether you know what that something is or not then be prepared for trouble.

And not backing data up to a different drive to the one it normally resides on, and ideally not even an integral part of the same computer, is just plain stupid no matter what OS or hardware you have. Nothing is immune to hardware failure.

I guess some people learn from other people's descriptions of what went wrong for them or can go wrong and take steps to avoid it happening to them. And some people just have to learn the hard way.

Macs come with a very good backup system, Time Machine, that runs automatically unless the user switches it off. Though the way it works can be intrusive for audio/video work, in which case the free Time Machine Editor program which enables Tome Machine scheduling comes in handy.