Hey,
 
I'm very content with X2 Producer, but the deal Cake is offering on the upgrade to X3 is hard to pass up.
 
Is it an easy and quick upgrade?  I don't want to spend a whole weekend downloading and installing software.
 
Thanks!

It is impossible to predict how easy an individual upgrade will be. In my case it went very smooth. For Producer there are about 5.5GB in 6 files (skipping DimPro and Loops and One Shots) from Cakewalk and the XLN installer and Addictive Drums from XLN to download (don't remember the size but it wnt pretty quick). After installing, the X3e patch, another 630MB download. Then a reset and rescan of the VST plug-ins.

Apart from the file download time, it was all extremely painless. I migrated the settings from X2, opened X3 and was away.
 
BTW, I read a recent thread from Noel saying in some instances its probably best not to migrate old settings to new Sonar versions - anyway no problems this end. 

Just one more thing, make sure to upgrade to the correct version. Some have purchase the X3 upgrade (currently $29) believing it was the X3 Producer upgrade. It is not, the $29 upgrade is the current promo price for what used to be called SONAR Essential, i.e. the most basic version of SONAR.

I was wonder about that from the other thread happening with almost the same title. X3 plain jane is pretty limited. I have Studio and it's a good match to what 8.5 had. Only missing a few plug ins really, my upgrade was only $98 from X1LE. 
I think the X2-X3 producer upgrade is still almost $200. I thought $29 sounded unbelievable. 

I believe Rapture is unchanged between X2 and X3, as well, so you would not have to install that either, and while I think about it, Perfect Space and Session Drummer 3 are identical too, and there would be no point to overlaying all of that content, since it is the same (assuming those were all installed already).
 
The above would save some install time, but not any download time.
 
The Loops and One Shots, and the Dim Pro files are about 7 GB of stuff you could skip downloading, following scook's advice, if they were already installed.
 
Bob Bone
 
 
 
 
 

The omission of the "Essentials" moniker seems to have caused some confusion. There have been quite a few threads about that. Hopefully they reconsider that tactic for the next release.
 
As far as the upgrade the installation of the program itself was as simple if not simpler than it was with X2. IIRC there were some problems with dropped extensions with certain methods of downloads with X2 early on that required some user manipulation but it was corrected. This, AFAIK, was not the case with X3.
 
As always a fast internet connection and using a download manager (or a browser with a download manager such as Firefox) will make the download go smoothly. Be sure to organize and keep track of the various components as they come in and put them in their own folder then on a backup of some sort (DVD's, external HDD, etc) in case you need to reinstall. Or of course you can just purchase the box/discs to avoid that.
 
The real weirdness comes in when you start trying to install/activate some of the extras like Melodyne and Addictive Drums. I had a particularly difficult time getting AD registered and had to contact their support department. It required me to use IE and do some funky disabling/enabling of browser options to make the registration take. I sent all the steps I had to take to Andrew so they could have the support guys know what's up with that so Cake support should be able to help you through if you have problems. Otherwise XLN has excellent support and they had a solution for me within a day or so. With Melodyne all went as planned for me personally but I have seen some threads where some people were having issues. Most notably in regards to those who already had the full version installed but a quick search of the forum should garner multiple threads on the topic that describe the solution.
 
That's all I can think of.
 
Otherwise X3 for the most part works pretty much the same as X2 but better. Something to be prepared to learn is the new Comping mode (took me about 20 minutes to fully understand it and I had to write the new methods down but it's pretty slick). However switching over to the Sound On Sound or Overwrite editing options will allow you to edit in a more traditional manner until you get used to comping.
 
Cheers.