I feel it only reasonable that I report my negative experience upgrading to X3. After being bombarded with email ads, I decided to take the upgrade plunge. I went to the Cakewalk site, compared specs, verified that I was eligible for an upgrade, and put X3 Studio into my cart. Checkout did not work. I needed to contact customer service. A lengthy wait time later, I paid and was issued a D/L link. After a lengthy download, I ran the install program. I input the provided password and received a "password invalid" error. After multiple retries and serious frustration, I called customer service only to discover that the wait times were so long that all I got was a busy signal! I then fired off an email requesting help - last Tuesday! It has now been eight days and I have had no response. Granted one holiday and 2 weekend days should not count but what about the other 5 days? Is anyone at home?
 
Needless to say I am NOT impressed with the situation. The wait continues!

holidays are always busy ;-)
I would call direct. staff has said the wait times are down to about 14 minutes on good days.
 
though ive never heard this invalid password, you may be able to avoid having to deal with tech support by inquiring about that problem here.
 
are you running as administrator, are you copy/pasting the serial in to the install app ?
I cant say ive heard of this issue before.

Thanks for the input. I read the troubleshooting guide which suggested that the problem might occur when the install is not run by an administrator. I retried in admin mode but nothing changed. I copied and pasted directly from my account page at Cakewalk.com so the serial number is correct.

As someone who issues passwords to users quite often at work, check that you aren't copying an empty space before/after the password by accident.  It happens a lot and hard to catch because passwords often end up as bullets.
 
But yes, Cakewalk email support is not awesome.  I often turn to the forums because I live in Canada and don't want to pay to be on hold.

PeeBus
Thanks for the input. I read the troubleshooting guide which suggested that the problem might occur when the install is not run by an administrator. I retried in admin mode but nothing changed. I copied and pasted directly from my account page at Cakewalk.com so the serial number is correct.

Please forgive my question, but your wording was a little unclear in my read.
 
You indicated 'retried in admin mode'.  Did that mean you were signed on to a user account that has administrator privileges, or did you explicitly right-click on the Sonar launch icon and click on 'Run As Administrator'?
 
I ask, because the above are 2 different things.  You want to do the second option, explicitly right-clicking on the Sonar launch icon and then clicking on 'Run As Administrator'.  This will give you more privileges than simply logging on to an account that is an administrator type.  (It has to do with a higher level of privileges granted in an 'execution token' that is created with the 'Run As Administrator' mode of execution.)
 
So, IF you hadn't done the above, and tried the above, and it didn't work, then perhaps you could try one more thing: copy and paste the serial number and/or registration code into Notepad, and then copy it back into the clipboard from there and paste it into the appropriate spot in Sonar.  I have seen in the past where some flakiness with formatting prevented proper evaluation of serial numbers and such, when copied from a web page, and using the Notepad trick stripped off the weirdness and then it worked fine when pasted in after running it through Notepad.
 
I hope any of the above gets you up and going.
 
Bob Bone
 

For issues like this, you can open up trouble tickets online. That may get faster attention since these get triaged.  Go to the problem reporter section of the support page and  that should get quicker attention. Not e-mail, but actually create a trouble ticket explaining your problem, frustration and lack of support in the body of the ticket.

Guitarmech111
For issues like this, you can open up trouble tickets online. That may get faster attention since these get triaged.  Go to the problem reporter section of the support page and  that should get quicker attention. Not e-mail, but actually create a trouble ticket explaining your problem, frustration and lack of support in the body of the ticket.

Please don't advise people to misuse the systems we have in place. This type of activity is partially what cause things to be backed up. They are not the same systems and are not managed by the same people. Doing this causes everything at Cakewalk to slow down, including response times from TS and CS as well as bug resolution from Development. 
 
PeeBus has an open case with us. The best thing to do would simply be to reply to the staff member that sent an email to him last week. This would have notified our guy immediately.
 
If people are not hearing back, I'd recommend calling in or sending me a Private Message on the forum. I'm always more then happy to investigate as well.
 

chuckebaby
holidays are always busy ;-)
I would call direct. staff has said the wait times are down to about 14 minutes on good days.
 

FYI, that was a bad day. Average hold times are less then 2 minutes for Technical Support and Customer Service.
 
 

PeeBus
I feel it only reasonable that I report my negative experience upgrading to X3. After being bombarded with email ads, I decided to take the upgrade plunge. I went to the Cakewalk site, compared specs, verified that I was eligible for an upgrade, and put X3 Studio into my cart. Checkout did not work. I needed to contact customer service. A lengthy wait time later, I paid and was issued a D/L link. After a lengthy download, I ran the install program. I input the provided password and received a "password invalid" error. After multiple retries and serious frustration, I called customer service only to discover that the wait times were so long that all I got was a busy signal! I then fired off an email requesting help - last Tuesday! It has now been eight days and I have had no response. Granted one holiday and 2 weekend days should not count but what about the other 5 days? Is anyone at home?
 
Needless to say I am NOT impressed with the situation. The wait continues!

PeeBus, I see what happened here, and it was a mistake on our agent's part. Your Serial Number does not match your installers. I will send you an email right now with proper instructions. I'm very sorry about this :/
 
I'll notify our guy internally of the mistake.

Ryan, I will do whatever needs to be done to get a resolution for any of my issues. I will try the suggested routes first and then get creative after that.
 
With so many changes recently at Cakewalk with their personnel, I have been bit by the support issues.  Your support process evidently is lacking or there would not be reports about it. It is a management issue that needs to be addressed. 8 days is way too long to wait for a support response regardless of the situation. We would rather see resolutions and not excuses for these support anomalies.

Conley, I've already discussed this with you, but this case was easily addressed by the OP replying to an open case. Your suggestion was not necessary and only complicating the process. You're stepping into threads to try to point out flaws with our system, which you know very little about.

Ryan, This is a user forum and I was trying to help a user get resolution. I have replied to your support e-mails and have also waited a couple days for feedback. I fully understand why. Please don't think I don't.

I will post where I feel I need to as far as helping a fellow user.

I am glad to hear that you are trying to resolve these issues.