I'll chime in. I did beta work way back when Michael Nicholas was doing the support. I left because I was busting my butt to make the program better as were all the testers. The results were 3 versions of cwpa that were loaded with bugs that still got released. I actually started using Paris audio or something. Then Cake PA 9 came out, which was one of the best versions ever.

I used Sonar but didn't really jump back on board until Sonar 5, which to me was another killer version. 6 came out and I had nothing but problems with midi. One of the bakers contacted me to beta test a few things to help fix the midi and we did. I felt pretty happy to have been a.part of that.

After the fiasco of Sonar X1, I was asked to be a beta tester and jumped at the chance in hopes we'd never see anything like that again. Of course I took it too seriously and had to be reprimanded a few times. I nearly left twice because I just felt like once again, I wasn't being heard. Features being changed and altered by people that develop the program.....while people like me sat and used it working 14 hour days. I told one dude in private "if you used this program to complete 3-5 songs in their entirety, I'd be impressed." He never replied.

As things progressed, we testers were starting to make a difference. We had more baker interaction and could actually speak to them when we needed them. Getting to know Noel and Willy, Keith and a few others was quite awesome. Sometimes they took the baker hats off and were just like us.

Gibson took over and baker interaction was less and less. A few guys were let go or left making the work load insane. Bug reports remained open so I sort of lost my will to push on. Besides, by this time the program was really stable anyway. All the stuff I found was minor....but I still did the work. From sort of backing down from the beta stuff, I stayed away from the forum too. I gave away a lot of free advice and ate quite a bit of crap at times. It wasn't worth it to me to get all huffy over people who wouldn't have the guts to say what they said on here to anyone's face in person. Seeing people like them running around saying whatever they wanted made me sick. I was glad the bakers hired us to be forum hosts. To this day I've never banned a soul...so if you got roughed up, it wasn't me! ;)

The good thing about my beta work here was, dropping the Cakewalk name helped me get into other companies where I test like ceremony, fxpansion, acme bar gig and Fractal Audio where I'm now also a legit endorsed artist sitting along side of guys like Vai and Petrucci. So it's been a really great experience for me and I have no regrets.

As long as Sonar works for me, I'll not be jumping ship. I have a well oiled machine. I don't need to update and upgrade to the latest and greatest all the time. Drivers, configurations, troubleshooting, aren't you guys tired of that? I retired my two work horse computers from the net, updates and upgrades. I turn on my system everyday and work without issues like I'm using a hardware recorder. If I was left with sonar plat and these machines for the rest of my life, I'd be golden. Don't be too fast to look for something else if what you have works great. :)

-Danny

Danny DanziI was glad the bakers hired us to be forum hosts. To this day I've never banned a soul...so if you got roughed up, it wasn't me! ;)

I know exactly who it was that nuked me. He didn't like my posts about a newly released version of Sonar that I was A/B comparing with REAPER. Same machine, same midi and sound hardware, and I was posting my observations and thoughts about the differences I was seeing.

Well gents, in that case thank you for revealing yourselves as it gives me the opportunity of saying a personal thank you and also allows me to say that "I take my hat off" to you for all your hardwork because I have benefited greatly from your input.
 
I've really enjoyed Sonar from version 8.5 Pro through to X1 Exp, X2a and then a jump to Platinum.
 
I have to say that I always lagged behind a version until an update or two came out to ensure I didn't get serious problems or stability issues which is why I held on to 8.5 until X1 Exp came out and then the same with X2 until X2a came out.  I then skipped X3 and a few months after Platinum came out, bought into the lifetime offer!!! :-(
 
Good work gentlemen and you've just reassured me as to why I won't be jumping ship for a considerable while because I'm in the knowledge of knowing that I have a well developed, stable and fully featured program.  I have to say though, after spending many hours researching issues and info in this forum, I wasn't surprised to see some of your names here.
 
Cheers guys!  :-)

Danny Danzi
Gibson took over and baker interaction was less and less. A few guys were let go or left making the work load insane. Bug reports remained open so I sort of lost my will to push on. 

Looking back to the final few months on the beta forum, I guess Baker participation was indeed a lot less. And I did get a little disheartened with the lack of official response when bringing up problems on the forum. There are a ton of open bugs in my tester account and some of the recent ones seem like stuff they should have fixed fairly quickly. 
 
The most disheartening thing for me was lack of progress in the ongoing problem of Sonar resetting plugin settings when loading projects. I saw many people report this in the public forum over the years, and they did fix a few of the problems at one point, but over the last few months the problem came back with a vengeance and loads of my Waves EQ plugins were having their settings hosed every time I loaded a project. I lost so many hours of mixing because of this, and nothing drove me closer to quitting Sonar and moving to another DAW. Imagine if Photoshop was loading your photos with all of the edits gone, or Excel wasn't saving spreadsheets properly. There would be an outcry and the bug would be #1 priority. In the case of Sonar, I had "let us know if you come up with a recipe" and didn't receive much more response to the problem.Looking back I guess this was them being stretched beyond capacity. I couldn't come up with a recipe because the problem was random, but still, I figured that a Baker would be able to "reverse engineer" the problem and come up with some clues as to what might be resetting a plugin's settings randomly. 
 
Just a few weeks before doomsday I isolated a bug which was the biggest clue I'd gotten yet - If I adjusted a parameter in the Waves EQ with the ProChannel or FX Bin turned off, turning it back on would move the EQ parameter that I'd just adjusted. And it was reproducible with a recipe. I was so excited about potentially finding a loose thread which would lead to the wider issue being solved. After all, here we had a reproducible case of something messing with a plugin's settings - perhaps the settings were being hosed during project load when all of the ProChannels and FX Bins are activated in the project? 
 
Of course, I kept checking back to that bug's status but it remained open and I never heard anything back about it. It pissed me off, but I guess there was a more desperate struggle going on at Cakewalk HQ. 
 
 

James, as it appears that we are witnessing the death of a star, out of the last few versions of Platinum, which would you say is the most stable and reliable?  I've still the 2017.08 version running because I was concerned that the last two versions had introduced some new features which now won't get these new bugs squashed!

RickJP909
James, as it appears that we are witnessing the death of a star, out of the last few versions of Platinum, which would you say is the most stable and reliable?  I've still the 2017.08 version running because I was concerned that the last two versions had introduced some new features which now won't get these new bugs squashed!

Honestly in terms of stability and reliability I would just stick with the latest. I didn't notice any significant changes in performance or stability over the past few weeks or even months. And since there wasn't much in the way of major new features introduced recently, I can't see there having been any new showstopping bugs introduced. Nothing that would affect anything other than the new feature itself, anyway. 

I tuned a couple DimPro basses for them once. Does that count?

mudgel
Somebody mentioned scook. It begs the question where is he? I haven’t seen him around.

He knew too much to be just one of us. Maybe he was a baker with an alias or even not.

I think overall we had the most stable SONAR yet, especially considering the big stuff that was introduced like patch points / aux tracks, which needed a hell of a lot of testing to get the bugs ironed out. But there definitely was less interaction in the last few months, and I know I had a fair few open bugs in my list too by the end.

I think we all had our "pet" areas though so some testers experienced less problems than others. What may have been smooth sailing for me with how I used the program was a nightmare for, say, James who was killing himself to track down those plugin issues that were absolute show-stoppers for him.

But we all wanted to help solve what we could. It's just a shame the time ran out for us all.

Hi-
 
I was a beta tester for SONAR 8.5, so way back in 2009/10. It was time-consuming and frustrating at times, but also rewarding. I'm glad I did it.
 
-Susan
 
P.S. No, we're not all "gentlemen"😉!