Anderton
The forum is a good place to seek confirmation of bugs for two reasons - think of how many times someone has thought there was a bug, only to find out it was pilot error or some system issue, or the reverse when people find a bug and others can confirm and reproduce. However, the #1 way to deal with bugs and the only one that expedites the fixing process is to enter them into the company's bug tracking system. The forum is not a good venue for tracking because it doesn't "connect" to the bug-tracking world within Cakewalk.
Forum "noise" is helpful from an anecdotal standpoint, but if the people at Cakewalk think a bug is serious and needs to be fixed, they will do so regardless of whether people complain about it. Also bugs can be tricky. I found one seemingly very minor bug that I would never have complained about because it seemed trivial. But I entered it into the system, Noel checked it out, and he found that it actually was a manifestation of a more serious bug that was not minor. So, it went through the system and was fixed. By doing so, it fixed some other issues as well.
I agree with the points. However to be more specific the list of bugs I compiled
here have the following criteria:
1) Bugs must be easily reproducible via clear steps and be validated by other forums members.
2) An issue
must be logged in the Cakewalk problem reporter, and an issue number is quoted*
* The only exception so far has been this issue where it seemed to be "logged" via the forums (although there was no actual confirmation of this via Cakewalk) rather than through the usual process. BTW when I mean forum noise/showstopper - well remember the 64 bit precision engine thing, that was pretty clear...
Cheers... {Edited to remove the word "showstopper" as that could be debatable in that specific instance}