Stevethesearcher


Brandon- Your first comment alarmed me

There has to be further upgrades. If not confidence in the product will be diminished and there will be a continual level of dissatisfaction.

Studio One and the competition are waiting in the wings to pick off dissatisfied Sonar customers.

Personally I want to stay with Sonar. However I dont have confidence that the boat is fully shipshape yet.  For someone like me further upgrades are essential. Otherwise I am not going to upgrade. Sonar 7 can stay on my old Laptop and reluctantly I will have to look at other alternatives for my new Laptop which I am buying in the summer.  

Brandon Ryan [Cakewalk
]

Sorry guys, but we aren't currently able to give any information on future updates. We'll let you know as soon as we have something concrete to offer.

I didn't even touch a different host other than Sonar in 6 of the 7 years I've been on board. Now I've got 3 others under my belt

dlion16


bottom line here: it was a tactical decision to create a new product and release it when they did. 

I'm sure they didn't plan to have so many bugs, but it was a tactical decision to not have a public beta or even a "closed" beta group from our large user community, and a tactical decision to not have one now.

It is also a tactical decision to not address the bigger picture. I can see what the potential marketing impact would be, but I'd man up and say:

"We really messed up on this one. We released a product before it was properly tested and made mission-critical solid. We've disappointed our customer base. We want to make amends, so we're offering those who bought X1 our assurance that we will make X1 right, the way you expect, the way you've come to love and trust our products for years. And we're setting up a new beta program that all of you are invited to join."

ba_midi


Ya know, I wish people would not make a separation between new users and older users (previous and/or pre-existing users).

The fact is - things should work.  Serious bugs should be addressed.

Why wouldn't new users want that as much as previous/existing users?

I don't get the logic.

mudgel


Let's face it when Cake believe they have a defensible position or Brandon makes a conciliatory effort to calm the waters or on occassion calls someone out for being way to mean, we get responses on the forum but at other times they're reading but not answering because there seems to be this climate of deniability developed.

I just stumbled on the ProChannel issue by accident and Noel complained that it wasn't reported. So not knowing about it they weren't able to fix it for X1b. I didn't find it till I had X1b. Can you imagine that after an update their premiere X1 component, ProChannel is broken.

I stated in another thread that cakewalk's beta program while secret to all of us is clearly demonstrating its effectiveness by the fruitage it delivers. Sorry to say but at the moment the description of its delivery is not flattering at all.

Anyway there MUST be another update at least to fix ProChannel. But sadly like so many I've lost confidence in what X1 is throwing up and will not work with it other than for curiosity sake in some occassional free time.

For me its 8.5.3 all the way until something better comes along. that will either be another DAW (using several now since X1 came out) or even SONAR X series should it ever prove to be a usable product. Cakewalk are going to have to pull out all stops to rekindle my faith in their current product and my future relationship with them

thomasabarnes


I bet Cakewalk will be relieved, if some of the forum users do choose to discontinue the use of X1 or any other Cakewalk product/s.

I understand you, but there's just a limited amount of work that can be done in a limited amount of time. A company's time is alloted by a time sensitive agenda.

I think the consequence of this, which is pert near unavoidable, is that Cakewalk is going to have to settle with, "you can please some of the people some of the time," or maybe even "most of the people some of the time.

UnderTow

thomasabarnes


I bet Cakewalk will be relieved, if some of the forum users do choose to discontinue the use of X1 or any other Cakewalk product/s.

 
That's the spirit! Shoot the messengers!
UnderTow

thomasabarnes


I'm happy with  X1.

I'm sure I don't use as many features as anyone using X1 as a professional producer, though I'm not sure just what that would entail.

I record audio and MIDI and use software instruments and effects and mostly basic MIDI editing tools. X1 works for me in this capacity.
 

SilkTone


It is really interesting to me that some people keep blaming the end users for the current state of things, yet:

• It is CW that chose the aggressive release cycle.
• It is CW that chose to add a huge amount of new features while ignoring many user's plea that a bug-fix cycle was much more needed at the time. Instead CW chose to do the exact opposite.
• It is CW that has an ineffective QA department. They don't even have test cases that cover AudioSnap or ProChannel. If they do, the people that write and/or execute those test cases are ineffective at their jobs.
• It is CW that chooses to ignore fixing old bugs that have been reported a long time ago.
• It is CW that chose not to have a public beta program, or at least an effective private beta program. I personally have offered on multiple occasions to help with beta testing, yet all I get is a paid for yet broken product.
• It is CW that chose to have a mess of spaghetti code, still based on MFC - a relic from the early 90's. There is no longer a way to fix a bug without break something else, even if they can track it down inside this mess of spaghetti code. This has become painfully obvious. This also means that there isn't going to be some magic patch that will turn Sonar back into a functional DAW. It isn't going to be X1c, X1d or X1e. Welcome to a perpetually broken product.

But hey, let's blame the customers, telling them to "calm down" and not to "get would up". I think the only blame that can be put on customers is falling for the promise of "DAW 2.0" with all the wondrous things it was going to bring, or believing CW when they said they were going to fix X1. We should have known better than to give CW our money in exchange for what we believed to be working product. I'm never making that mistake again, that is for sure.

As far as I'm concerned, Sonar is no longer fit for any form of professional use, and I don't see this changing if we look at the state of X1 and its two patches thus far. Yes all software has bugs but Sonar has fallen off a cliff. From now on I'm using another DAW to start all new projects with, while unfortunately still being stuck with Sonar due to older projects that I still need to work on. That was $100 down the drain since I'll be using 8.5.3 for those existing projects.

Pretty sad really since I used "Cakewalk Pro" from "Twelve Tone Systems" before it even had the ability to record any audio at all.