Jesse G
LBJ,
 
You have an excellent website man, best of luck to you and your group.
 

Thanks man - my band or my studio? Or... both, hopefully! :O)

mixmkr
In the "old days"...I didn't have time to learn the control room of a studio I'd never worked in before.  You take off running and hope the patch bay is sensibly labeled and the tape machines had good brakes!

Have you ever run live sound on a "large" show?  Imagine everything you'd expect in a modern recording studio, including a desk than can handle 128+ channels (over several layers) and only a few hours to learn how to use it before there's a live audience between you and the stage....   Such fun.

If you're walking in never before seeing a Midas, Yamaha.... board or similar...you deserve the grief!!
That's where some experience makes a sharp learning curve.  Doing live sound was too stressful for me.  ...except for the fact that mistakes where gone in an instant.  Nowadays everything is recorded and preserved in all its' glory.  Think the VanHalen "Jump" screwup!!  

Small analogue mixers, even big analogue mixers, are all basically the same. Constrained to all work the same with a similar layout by the electronics.
Digital mixers, on the other hand, are like DAWS.  They all do exactly the same but every manufacturer goes out of their way to ensure all the features and functions are in totally different menus and given completely different names just to p off sound engineers

I've mentioned here as well as the FB group that while I have no intentions of leaving Sonar anytime soon, I do indeed need an exit strategy in the case that Cakewalk is indeed dead in the water; never to be revived again. Learning a new DAW inside and out is going to take time to where I'm comfortable making the switch for my daily workload. I'll stick with Sonar and spend a bit of time each week learning the in's and out's of my other options so that when the time comes, I can transition smoothly but here is why I need this:
 
1. Windows can indeed break your DAW. If we've learned anything from watching Windows or even OSX the past few years, it's that a single update can literally bugger everything depending on what exactly they change within the OS at that point in time. If that happens and we're not ready to make that transition, we're gonna have a bad time.
 
2. Sure, we can defer the update... till Microsoft decides that you've deferred it too long and you're getting it whether you like it or not regardless of how you may or may not have turned off the updates in registry. Probably won't break anything still but there is always the risk. Better to have that plan in place.
 
3. Well you can always just take it offline all together. Great, but then I have to deal with trying to install new plugins via a secondary machine which someone mentioned until Windows decides that the only way it's going to get that update is via networked computers over the LAN (which is a feature in Windows that you can turn off, but I've never tested it long term to see if it remains off).
 
4. So install it via offline installers. Not everything works with offline authentication and many plugins these days are requiring you to have a connection in order to authenticate.
 
5...6...7... there are many many other things. The bottom line is that you end up with a recording studio that is frozen in time while you hope and pray nothing happens to it, your install and that you are okay staying on the same computer for a few years at least. There comes a point where it becomes more of a pain in the ass than it's worth and at the end of the day, it's a DAW; one of many and eventually it's going to get left behind as it stagnates. The one benefit that Sonar carries is that many of it's features were ahead of it's time so it's going to be a while before others overtake it in many areas.
 
I'm not rushing my foot out the door; I'm being realistic and with that comes that understanding the only real option at this point is not to freak out, but to create a strategy for myself that enables quick and smooth migration. I believe that a lot of the people freaking out about this issue and who are already leaving Sonar behind cold turkey are not the professionals you're speaking of. Like any migration, it's something that is going to be a slow and long process.

Bitflipper is right.  In my own situation, after 8.5.3 Sonar started moving steadily away from what I was looking for in a DAW, my account eventually became badly fouled up, and I somehow existed but didn't exist.  Even posting to the forum became impossible, and it was no longer worth trying to fix (I have reregistered under a different user name today simply to be back in touch with forum members-old name was Noldar12). 
 
I still use Sonar 8.5.3 on an old XP system that I keep off the net.  When that system finally dies I will likely migrate to Cubase as that is where most Midi/orchestral/notation users tend to end up.  I do wish Cakewalk had not died.  But corporate product choices were made, and it appears that the Bakers eventually had little or no control over key aspects of Sonar's direction, and here we are.  But, the software does still work and making a rush decision in response is in most cases not a good idea.
 
 

TerraSin
1. Windows can indeed break your DAW. If we've learned anything from watching Windows or even OSX the past few years, it's that a single update can literally bugger everything depending on what exactly they change within the OS at that point in time.

When I first started thinking about this in earnest (see my thread on the topic) I wracked my brain trying to recall a single instance when a Windows update killed SONAR, but could not.
 
If you've got such an example, I'd like to research it to determine a) what the problem was, b) whether there was a workaround, and c) whether it's a potential showstopper today. Any links to forum conversations or, even better, MSDN articles would be greatly appreciated.

bitflipper

TerraSin
1. Windows can indeed break your DAW. If we've learned anything from watching Windows or even OSX the past few years, it's that a single update can literally bugger everything depending on what exactly they change within the OS at that point in time.

When I first started thinking about this in earnest (see my thread on the topic) I wracked my brain trying to recall a single instance when a Windows update killed SONAR, but could not.
 
If you've got such an example, I'd like to research it to determine a) what the problem was, b) whether there was a workaround, and c) whether it's a potential showstopper today. Any links to forum conversations or, even better, MSDN articles would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not saying it has, I'm saying it *could*.
 
For example, when Microsoft created Vista, there was a major compatibility issue with legacy software because of restrictions they put in place for security purposes. Many of those issues were fixed in later versions of Windows with the compatibility agent for legacy software but it took them years to hash that out and it's still not perfect on many applications. Say that Microsoft decides to once again change the way that applications work within Windows that completely breaks everything again... it absolutely could happen just like it happened only 10 years ago.

bitflipper, I have similar experience. Windows update never killed Sonar on my PC... The only difference was it was killed OS itself... Is it counting? ;)

Windows has never caused any problems to my audio/video editing PCs except when switching from x86 to x64 when all drivers had not yet been ported to x64.  I'm now confident I can use SONAR as long as I want to.