Honestly, how long should I hold off buying X3 before all the bugs are out? It hasn't been out that long and I blinked and "c" is out. I missed "b" completely.

Depends on your version of a "bug". If you bought a DAW based on that as your purchasing decision, you would never own one LOL! I'm sure it's SOLID, as I have not heard about any show-stopping issues. The only reason I'm holding out is because I want to see what video improvements are implemented in X3d.

+1!
 
Overall X3 is very stable, so if you have a specific concern with something, it might be better to shout that out and get a response to it. Many of the issues noted are not "show stoppers" and have workarounds to them. Some may also be dependent on your OS, plugins, etc. Take a bit to look at the forum posts and see what applies to you or not and then can ask more detail on things that concern you.
 
 

Nothing is perfect, but I think X3 is working very close to what it is intended to be. Just check that you avoid using hardware or plugs that are known to generate problems because not every problem is CW's fault. 
 
Enjoy making music with this outstanding software! 

X3 is working very well here.  Solid and feature packed.

Agreed. I've installed X3c on a desktop and laptop, both very different, and it has provided stellar performance.

I'm running X3c on a win 7x64 laptop with an i7 CPU and 8gig of ram and also on my studio production PC with an i7 3930 k running win 8.1 x64 with 32 gig RAM.

It runs well on both machines. There are a few VST 3 issues to work and it's caused quite a few crashes to the desktop but they're known issues and that's between Cakewalk and various vendors to work out. It's 95% there for me. It's certainly the best of all Sonar releases that I've encountered and I came into Sonar at 3 Producer Edition. I find it stable and very smooth on both machines. The C update has caused a few problems for some pele so I would install and only do the B update. If every things fine then don't do the C update or even better, after installation and each patch update set a Windows restore point and you will be able to roll back to any previous state you choose.

Waiting till end of year and for the right price, would rather finish off X2 projects with X2 and let you guys finish the X3 debugging for me, which is the joy of late adoption :)

Thanks for all of the responses.  Right now I'm running X2d.  It still has some bugs that I have learned to live with.  I guess the updates came so fast on X3 I wondered if they rolled it out too soon.  I think I will still wait until the end of the year but is sounds like many are satisfied with X3.  The color coding is long overdue.  That in itself would be a welcomed site. 

I think audio software is one of those apps that are bound to have bugs for one user or another simply because it depends so much on the hardware used (that changes/updates/upgrades every two months or so), OS, and specs of the computer.  As well as the learning curve to a new user of setting things up, which leads to a lot of user-error which Cakewalk must sort through.

I am a web developer, and we have to test a lot on a lot of different platforms... but man Cakewalk is on another level with the degree of testing they have to do.  This is why I'm not surprised or upset that my beloved UAD is not officially supporting every single DAW out there.

Having said all that, I think the fact that we are on X3c is great.  It should commitment to this product by the guys at Cakewalk.  They didn't put it out and ignore these forums.  They have taken our bug reports and made use out of them.  There is nothing to be upset about IMHO.