It's the business /marketing team that needs convincing, rather than the devs ;-)

kennywtelejazz
I play guitar and I like to tune down even now and then , so I'm currently running mine tweaked as the X3 Eb Producer Edition  
 
Yeah ,  I know it ain't really funny  ……just killing some time after a late night music session 
 
Kenny
 

It may not be comedy, but it's close enough.

Anderton
 
The ability to interact on the forums will go in cycles. Remember, Cakewalk is a small company. If they're on the forums, they're not doing something else. For example, there's now a video series on the virtual instruments by Karl Rose that needed to be put into production. Dan Gonzalez just finished a comprehensive video series on compression and the PC2A, as well as some stories for the blog (as have I). There's always more to be done than time to do it, so the company needs to make choices about how to best use its resources. I think they're doing a very good job of juggling priorities.
 

Product roadmaps, which includes updates, are not for public consumption. When Cakewalk has announced something in advance, it's because they're 100% SURE it will happen. Anything under 100%, even if it's 99.9%, doesn't get announced.

This!

Hi Folks,
I wanted to jump in here to clear up some confusion on how Cakewalk processes and handles bugs and how we use the forum as a resource.
 
Cakewalk receives bug reports from a variety of sources including our QA/Tech Support/Sales staff, our Beta Team, and our users. Each report is reviewed and assessed by a team who understands the product and our user base very well. Bugs are prioritized and categorized in our bug tracking system using information from the Sonar Team, Beta Testers, and our users. Our commitment to software quality and the dedication of our skilled engineering staff has been able to bring our customers our most stable product to date. Each cycle it gets better and better.
 
With reports from our users, what is helpful to us in determining bug severity is info on how the defect is effecting your workflow, how common the defect occurs to the user, and how many users are affected by it. The public forum is used as one of many resources for this information and our staff monitors the forums regularly and this info to our bug database.
 
What is not useful to us is lists of bugs and/or simple comments on threads whether bugs are fixed in a release or not. This practice generates a high noise floor of superfluous information that becomes cumbersome for us to weed through, therefore making it harder to assign priority to outstanding issues. Our state of the art bug tracking system is already the best resource for known issues. In order to continue to bring you a high quality product, the forum needs to be a "natural environment" of users participating in a discussion about how to use the product, not a competing database for defect tracking.

Please continue to use our problem reporter and discuss issues that may affect your use of the product. User discussions are extremely helpful to us and we greatly appreciate your commitment to the product. Please keep in mind that any running lists of bug reports or unsolicited posts on individual threads whether something is fixed are not useful to us and may actually obscure our process.

Hi Dan,
The only problem with this is - us users have no view of what's going on with these bugs at Cakewalk. for example, we get an occaisional reply that something is 'being looked at' and then hear nothing.

That's what leads people to compare notes here - and try to find out if it's just them who are seeing the bugs, or if everyone else sees them etc.

I understand that it would be ridiculous for you to publish running commentaries on all the active known bugs - but maybe you could do a better job of informing the people who have lodged problem reports - as to what is happening.

Then those users could report back here that "The Cakewalk guys are on top of this...." Etc etc

Just sayin....

> Our state of the art bug tracking system is already the best resource for known issues.
 
So how do we get access to this so we can make sure we are not wasting time logging duplicate bugs? It's a bit of a timewaster logging dupe issues.

How do we respond when you withdraw an issue as not reproducible when we forgot a step, or maybe you might have missed something. Why must we always have to log the issue again?


And when you withdraw the issue as a duplicate, how are we supposed to track when there is no issue number?

Would you think a list of known issues would not be useful to people?
 
And as you probably know, we found 2 regression problems from the list in X3E last time.
 
Do you want to work with us in improving your product? We certainly have been doing our very best to work with you with minimal feedback from QA :) Some of us have been working pretty hard for nothing...

I'd rather not keep a list but it is all we have.
 
Thanks...

Hi John,
 
Reports that are sent in by users are verified and put into the cue for development. Email notifications are sent let users know the bug is in the system and being processed rather than sent into oblivion. How a bug gets processed is privileged information for Cakewalk staff only. We do not, nor should we, share this information. When an upgrade or update is released, we provide a report of bugs fixed in a KB article which includes the issue description and cwbrn numbers. 
 
As I stated above, user discussions are extremely helpful to us. If there is a particular issue or set of issues that are troublesome for you, please bring it up for discussion on the forum. I recommend using a separate thread and including cwbrn numbers if you have them. 

CakeAlexS
> Our state of the art bug tracking system is already the best resource for known issues.
 
So how do we get access to this so we can make sure we are not wasting time logging duplicate bugs? It's a bit of a timewaster logging dupe issues.

How do we respond when you withdraw an issue as not reproducible when we forgot a step, or maybe you might have missed something. Why must we always have to log the issue again?


And when you withdraw the issue as a duplicate, how are we supposed to track when there is no issue number?

Would you think a list of known issues would not be useful to people?
 
And as you probably know, we found 2 regression problems from the list in X3E last time.
 
Do you want to work with us in improving your product? We certainly have been doing our very best to work with you with minimal feedback from QA :) Some of us have been working pretty hard for nothing...

I'd rather not keep a list but it is all we have.
 
Thanks...

I think the confusion here is that people aren't using the form the way it was intended to be used.
 
The Problem Report Form was created for customers to communicate they're experiencing a flaw with the software and for us to communicate back to them when it was resolved. It was never meant to be a community driven bug tracking tool. Since technical support cannot program and fix issues, the next best service for interacting with customers was to let them have a notification that an issue was resolved. This is why members of the Tech Support staff developed this tool. That is the true intention of the form and the service. For the plethora of people who don't participate on this forum, they're very happy to have this as a service.
 
FWIW, the "duplicate" status we use is intended to be used as a way to let the SAME customer know they already have that same issue on file with us. It's not supposed to be used to just say "yeah we know, someone else logged this". If someone is doing this, they're doing it wrong. The person logging the report is supposed to notify you though of your duplicate report number. I'll follow up with staff to make sure they're doing it correctly.
 
To add, I've mentioned it a few times but we do have some ideas in mind for improving this tool for users who do use it a lot, such as yourself. Like anything, these things take time however. There are people (myself included) who are working non-stop on improving a lot of the services we offer, these tools being some of them. Soon enough we'll start trickling down some of the enhancements to these tools to customers.
 
Nevertheless, what I'm vaguely referring to still does not create an open bug tracking solution. As Dan mentioned above, this is managed by Cakewalk staff.

Dan Cate [Cakewalk]
Hi John,
 
Reports that are sent in by users are verified and put into the cue for development. Email notifications are sent let users know the bug is in the system and being processed rather than sent into oblivion. How a bug gets processed is privileged information for Cakewalk staff only. We do not, nor should we, share this information. When an upgrade or update is released, we provide a report of bugs fixed in a KB article which includes the issue description and cwbrn numbers. 
 
As I stated above, user discussions are extremely helpful to us. If there is a particular issue or set of issues that are troublesome for you, please bring it up for discussion on the forum. I recommend using a separate thread and including cwbrn numbers if you have them. 

 
hi Dan,
 
I logged a bug several months ago and I know it is reproducible as others here had also confirmed the same. I have yet to have any response at all from the bug I reported. From my perspective the bug logged has gone into oblivion :/ I can't even access the bug I reported to see if there will be any progress on it or not...
 
Cheers
Jim

JimmyBoy

Dan Cate [Cakewalk]
Hi John,
 
Reports that are sent in by users are verified and put into the cue for development. Email notifications are sent let users know the bug is in the system and being processed rather than sent into oblivion. How a bug gets processed is privileged information for Cakewalk staff only. We do not, nor should we, share this information. When an upgrade or update is released, we provide a report of bugs fixed in a KB article which includes the issue description and cwbrn numbers. 
 
As I stated above, user discussions are extremely helpful to us. If there is a particular issue or set of issues that are troublesome for you, please bring it up for discussion on the forum. I recommend using a separate thread and including cwbrn numbers if you have them. 

 
hi Dan,
 
I logged a bug several months ago and I know it is reproducible as others here had also confirmed the same. I have yet to have any response at all from the bug I reported. From my perspective the bug logged has gone into oblivion :/ I can't even access the bug I reported to see if there will be any progress on it or not...
 
Cheers
Jim

Hi Jim,
 
I only see two fault reports matching your email address. Did you manually send a bug report in or was it through the fault reporter? If you sent it in manually did you use a different email address? If you know the CWBRN #s I should be able to look it up, but I only came up with two results that were from fault reports.
 
We don't reply to fault reports. Here's the additional info that explains what happens next:

Thank You for Submitting Your Fault Report!

We appreciate you taking the time to send us your Fault Report. We're sorry you have run into a crash. Using this information we will work our hardest to make improvements and provide our customers with the best products possible. 

What happens next? 

When you submitted the report details, a .dmp file generated at the time of the crash was also sent to us behind the scenes. This file will be run through an automated debugging system that will analyze whether or not the crash was related to something faulting in your Cakewalk program or whether or not it was from a third-party plug-in, utility or hardware device. 

Using this information we can then isolate stability issues with aspects of the Cakewalk program as well as notify third-party companies of compatibility issues. 

PLEASE NOTE: 

This is an automated system that is used for isolating and resolving stability issues. Should our developers require additional information, they will update the report with any questions and contact you via the provided email address. Please understand that you may not receive a reply unless further information is needed or the issue is resolved. 

Also, please note that this form is NOT for Technical Support and is not reviewed by our Technical Support staff. Should you require Technical Support, however, we encourage you to contact our team so they can assist you directly. 

Thank you once again for your support, and thank you for choosing Cakewalk!
 
 
I hope that helps to clear it up!