Tell them about your (I hope you have it) lifetime free updates and ask them if <insert their DAW name here> offers that?

PJH
 
Yes and I do believe it's not in the gear so much as what you do with it.

You answered your own question Oftentimes you will find those who can't/don't do have plenty of time to criticize those who do do (I got doo doo into a post without vilotaing the TOS!). The end result is all that matters, and unless you told them, no one would know "how" anyway.
 
At least they didn't ask "How did you do that with Gibsons?!?"
 
Ignorant people (by choice) abound, it is a waste of time entertaining them.

Branding seems to be very important
Cakewalk needs an endorsement from a major producer
I have no idea how to go about doing that.
 
How many guitarists play Strats because of Jimi Hendrix or Les Pauls because of Jimmy Page.
 Ibanez became a player after Steve Vai and Joe Satriani came on the seen.
 

No need to make excuses, pumping out tracks like that does all the talking for you.
 
Killer guitar tones, great tune.

MarioD
Frankly I don't give a damn what people say.  I like Sonar.  Besides you can't tell what DAW was used by just listening to a CD or MP3.

Love this post.  The market which is the listener doesn't search iTunes or Amazon for tunes made by certain DAWs.
 
Sad that there are people (often amateurs) who have insecurity issues with the DAW they use. I see this with users of FL Studio - often voted the most popular DAW. 

The easy answer is the fan boy gravitation to mac.   So many young guys who want to get into any sort of 'technical' trade that involves using a computer fully believes that it has to be a mac or it cant work.
 
So once you adopt mac...  naturally you have to start to adopt a DAW that is available on mac.  These DAW's become guilty by association(or I guess...innocent by association in this case).
 
some of the other DAW's get a rep of being good.....  simply because the end user is primarily a mac user.  In some cases, the DAW is only available for mac.  So that bias kicks in.  Mac is better and this DAW lives on mac so its better than anything on windows.
 
And other gullible folks believe it, so the cycle continues.
 
 One of my other hobbies is car stuff.  I like drag racing.  The exact same thought process is alive and well in that endeavor as well.  Certain products are treated like the plague simply because it isnt brand xyz.  Then the myths and rumors begin to develop that you cannot do XYZ with a certain brand product.  You NEEED "this thing" if you want to be able to compete.  If your car runs the number with non-worshiped items....you're practically accused of lying.  "No way you're turning 6800 rpm with a big block chevy using an HEI with hydraulic roller lifters and running bottom 10's in that heavy car".  "Thats either an MSD and solid rollers or you have nitrous hidden somewhere."  If there are any car guys out there..you will get it.  
 
too long of a story short....   if sonar would deploy something on the mac platform, that would do worlds for increasing its credibility.
 
Folks will quickly learn that it is one of the most elegant DAW's out there.  I do think expanding to mac is the first step towards dusting off some of the stigma

greg_moreira
it also doesnt help that if you want to search youtube for a video on how to employ a certain mixing technique or how to use a particular plugin, or mastering tips....etc....  almost no matter what you come across...  the guy in the video is likely using protools.
 
  [ ... or some other more popular (and probably Mac based) DAW ...]
 
Dont make it a "how to use sonar" video.  Make it a "how to use parallel compression the right way video", and just happen to be using sonar as people watch.

 
^I think this is a big one right there.^ I know the Cakewalk team has made videos, but they're just not coming up enough on seaarches. 
 
If every time someone googled "How do I do [certain audio engineering task / technique]" and just added "in Sonar", they should get at least some Sonar-centric videos on the subject. Often/usually, there's just nothing for Sonar that relates at all.
 
If you don't have full-time staff that does that all year long, you should. They could of course work with other departments such as marketing, but if a big part of their job description was "Make popular audio engineering videos using Sonar tools that ARE EASILY DISCOVERABLE on the web, it might go a long ways to helping shed this stigma.
 
Also, as long as I'm here and fantasizing that an actual employee is read this: you guys really need a doc manager, one that CYCLES through the docs all of the time updating them as product goes through upgrades, major AND minor. Because what you have up there now is stale. Nothing kills user confidence in documentation better than finding plenty of obsolete content.
 
Chris
 
 

stxx
Sonar unfortunately has less users than many of the other daws. Polls have shown that over and over. Why? Good question as it's been around for a very long time. Only rhing I can think of was the lack of apple support for all these years. For a long time, apple was the defacto standard for music computing. Also, clearly avid really knows how to market their stuff. Personally I don't care because I think sonar is miles above the others. I read recently that protools is now boasting about Track freeze. Sonar has had that for years along with fast offline bounce and many other great features. Everything but apple support which now that sonar has it might help but we need much better marketing to convince the music community sonar is a SERIOUS piece of software

the lack of a mac version has been the excuse for sonars lack of respect etc for years, i don't think it is as simple as just "lack of apple support", i think it goes deeper and back a long way. i think a few places a long the track sonar (or predecessors) have got a bad rep, and you could argue for good reason, there have been some stinkers (x1 etc) from what i read around the traps and from experience a lot of people see all the long standing bugs, the quirks, the need for far to many workarounds to get things to function properly which otherwise don't (we all know what they are) the support issues wouldn't have helped and that has been discussed ad nauseum around the traps, we have all read about these things many times, and i think it is going to be hard to recover from those missteps, the buying public have long memories.
 
i read a post just the other day on another forum where someone was talking about sonar's stability, or lack there of, and perceived stability. the reasoning was that maybe the majority of vocal sonar users were long time users, and as such have had years to get to know sonars quirks, long standing bugs and issues, and therefore the multitude of workarounds required to side step these things, they know what buttons to push and what buttons not to push, and therefore sonar is stable to them, forgetting that it is years of experience that has taught them what not to do, where as a new user not knowing all of this may find themselves continually hitting these 'quirks' 'bugs' 'issues' whatever because they don't know about the need for workarounds and such, they are just following the manual, and as we know there is a lot in the manual which is out of date and or just plain doesn't work as described. i thought about this for a while and i can see where they are coming from, for me it was a valid comment. don't shoot me, i am just relating what others are thinking. I have used cakewalk products since pro audio 9, left when the magnificent x series began (x1), returned for x3e, then departed not long after platinum was released when i found something which to and for me was better, i had no stability issues myself with x3 or platinum, (and am a lifetime member), but then again, i did know how to avoid certain things which newer users may not. i can see where they are coming from, and no allegiance to any company or daw, i just use what i think is best and suits me the best.
 
anyway, i don't think it is as simple as a mac version, playing the devils advocate, what say in 2 or 3 years time, after a mac version of sonar has been released, things are still the same? sonar still isn't getting the recognition users think it deserves etc, what are we going to blame it on then?
 
as to the pro tools boasting about track freeze yada yada, you might say sonar is now boasting about ripple editing, but wait on reaper has had that for years, see what i mean? so what? sonar users also made a big who har about the new routing in sonar, reaper has had superior routing than sonar for years, and some would say still has, so what? (i'm no pro tools fan, and reaper isn't my main daw, just saying)
 
as i said i have no allegiance to any company or daw, i use what i think is the best for me, what suits me the best, i see things as i see them and don't apologize for that, some people think cakewalk/sonar is terminal, and well that may be the case, i think it will take a lot, more than just a mac version to turn things around, there is a lot of dislike, hate even towards cakewalk/sonar out there, for whatever reason. it may well be that a side effect of the development of the mac version is that the aging core of sonar (perhaps the exterior as well) and everything will get a kick and hit a home run, i certainly wouldn't mind, if it turns into what i think is a better daw than what i use now, i win , and my lifetime updates/membership pays off, if not so be it.
 
it's just how i see it, my opinion, which like anyone's opinion neither makes them right nor wrong

Anderton
 A lot of people have asked me what I use in SONAR to get the sounds in my projects.

But...but...that's 'cause you're THE Craig Anderton. 

PJH
 
@ Chris, yes, I do agree - who says that a track has to be around 4 minutes?
 

Umm.... I believe it was Billy Joel.  "It was a beautiful song, / but it ran too long / If you're gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit / So they cut it down to 3:05." ;-)

tenfoot

pilutiful
Little do they know it's not about which DAW, it's about the engineer behind the DAW.

Maybe the artist/s on the other side of the microphone make a bit of a difference too:)

One things for sure. It's not about the daw. Which is my point. 

The Grim
as to the pro tools boasting about track freeze yada yada, you might say sonar is now boasting about ripple editing, but wait on reaper has had that for years, see what i mean? so what? sonar users also made a big who har about the new routing in sonar, reaper has had superior routing than sonar for years, and some would say still has, so what? (i'm no pro tools fan, and reaper isn't my main daw, just saying)

Then again, people aren't going into Reaper forums or Pro Tools forums and saying "Why don't you guys have Mix Recall? Why do I have to pay $300 for a vocal alignment tool when SONAR has one built in? SONAR does DSD import/export, I deal with Japanes clients, when are you guys going to get with the program? Why do I have to record an entire session at 96 kHz just to make two or three synths sound better...SONAR has had that for two years? Why do your programs do such a crappy job of importing Acidized files? And why can't you edit them to make them better? Why don't you have ARA integration, like SONAR and Studio One? Why isn't your Drum Replacer as good as SONAR's? SONAR's step sequencer has all these automatable functions, why don't you? And why do I have to ReWire Live into your program - SONAR has a Matrix view? I can't generate tab from your program, either. I still have DirectX plug-ins, SONAR lets me use them and you guys don't?" 
 
When you look at it from this perspective, I think Cakewalk has done a terrible marketing job of SONAR's advantages. So there are all these people who don't use SONAR doing negative marketing, and SONAR users doing positive marketing because they really like the program - but only in this forum, because they're too busy making music to go into other forums and complain about what other programs don't do that SONAR does