quest4success
I bought Fruity Loops in 1995, or sometime around there, with Lifetime Updates.  Splat  is my primary DAW but I just updated, for free,  to Fl Studio 12.  Image-line is still making money and developing their software.  Customers are happy and the product keeps getting better.  Stop the HATING and let Cakewalk handle their business.  Just my $.02. 

Just what I was thinking. CW certainly isn't the first company to try this model; Image-Line has been offering free updates to FL Studio for years. With the potential new customers from the Apple version, I'm not too worried about CW's future prospects.

Anderton
 
Andrew, you could say this 1,000 times in 1,000 different threads, and then some people would start posting "Why does Andrew keep telling us that SONAR is very important to Cakewalk and not going away? He would not be doing this if there wasn't something to cover up!"
 
Just sayin.' Go to the "January 2015" drawer in your office's file cabinet, and put these kinds of posts in the same file folders as "Cakewalk will never deliver monthly updates," "Cakewalk has no incentive to deliver any monthly updates now that they have our membership money," and "Cakewalk will be out of business within one year of being acquired by Gibson."

This.

tenfoot

Anderton
Andrew, you could say this 1,000 times in 1,000 different threads, and then some people would start posting "Why does Andrew keep telling us that SONAR is very important to Cakewalk and not going away? He would not be doing this if there wasn't something to cover up!"
 
Just sayin.' Go to the "January 2015" drawer in your office's file cabinet, and put these kinds of posts in the same file folders as "Cakewalk will never deliver monthly updates," "Cakewalk has no incentive to deliver any monthly updates now that they have our membership money," and "Cakewalk will be out of business within one year of being acquired by Gibson."

This may be true Craig, and I understand your frustration, but I have to say the details of the lifetime deal have taken a while to be clarified. It is not just the tin foil hat brigade that have had questions; it is also some very loyal users including forum hosts. It is much easier to accept change when you have all of the information. The  'pre huge, no, big announcement announcements' fuelling speculation did not help the process.

Making assumptions that Cakewalk is going to dump SONAR in a couple of years to get people to pay for updates all over again is NOT a detail that needs to be clarified. It flies in the face of everything that has been stated clearly and emphatically by CW in multiple threads. Andrew stated it once again, clearly and emphatically. That is what I responded to, and that is what is frustrating - not some "detail."
 
CW is saying essentially the same thing FL Studio did about their free updates, but I don't recall people speculating that FL Studio was going to be pulling some kind of giant con. It's insulting, especially given how the previous "gloom and doom" speculations to which I referred were so spectacularly wrong.

Anderton

tenfoot

Anderton
Andrew, you could say this 1,000 times in 1,000 different threads, and then some people would start posting "Why does Andrew keep telling us that SONAR is very important to Cakewalk and not going away? He would not be doing this if there wasn't something to cover up!"
 
Just sayin.' Go to the "January 2015" drawer in your office's file cabinet, and put these kinds of posts in the same file folders as "Cakewalk will never deliver monthly updates," "Cakewalk has no incentive to deliver any monthly updates now that they have our membership money," and "Cakewalk will be out of business within one year of being acquired by Gibson."

This may be true Craig, and I understand your frustration, but I have to say the details of the lifetime deal have taken a while to be clarified. It is not just the tin foil hat brigade that have had questions; it is also some very loyal users including forum hosts. It is much easier to accept change when you have all of the information. The  'pre huge, no, big announcement announcements' fuelling speculation did not help the process.

Making assumptions that Cakewalk is going to dump SONAR in a couple of years to get people to pay for updates all over again is NOT a detail that needs to be clarified. It flies in the face of everything that has been stated clearly and emphatically by CW in multiple threads. Andrew stated it once again, clearly and emphatically. That is what I responded to, and that is what is frustrating - not some "detail."
 
CW is saying essentially the same thing FL Studio did about their free updates, but I don't recall people speculating that FL Studio was going to be pulling some kind of giant con. It's insulting, especially given how the previous "gloom and doom" speculations to which I referred were so spectacularly wrong.

Apologies Craig - you are absolutely right.  I lost track of the thread title and OP, and out of context your response struck me as uncharacteristically myopic. My bad:(

Perhaps the reason why this and the other similar topics were created, is because of these factors:
 
1) When I read Cakewalk's hype about "big changes in June" the thing I kept thinking about was: reboot.  In other words, Sonar as we know it would be replaced with something else.  Just like Pro Audio was replaced with Sonar, and then Sonar 8.5.3 was replaced with Sonar X1, and then X3 was replaced with the subscription version.  For days/weeks this is what I thought would happen.  I was actually looking forward to a reboot, not for any UI changes (meh), but because a rewrite of low-level Sonar code might finally fix the bugs I've been fighting!
 
2) The June announcement did not promise a new version of Sonar, but instead a new pricing scheme and Mac support.  This was a let down, because not only do I prefer the more Windows-y 8.5.3 versions, but also there was no promise of a reboot which would increase the chances of fixing the existing bugs.  Not only that, but since the developers would be focusing on Mac, there would be even less development time for Windows bug fixes.  It is only natural for development priority to favor getting new users (and their money) rather than perfecting things for existing users (whose money you already have).  The assumptions I'm making here are based on 25+ years experience as a software developer.
 
3) The price of the lifetime subscription is abnormally close to the price of a single year subscription.  I was expecting lifetime subscription to cost $1,000 or at least $500 (based on other companies' lifetime subscription pricing).  But $199 is surprisingly low.  And then I read that other people were getting it for only $99.  This aggressively low pricing immediately raised "too good to be true" alarm bells.  These alarm bells, combined with my previous thoughts of a reboot, naturally made me wonder: what if the reboot will happen as soon as Cakewalk uses up all the lifetime subscription money, and in such a way that we are somehow forced to start paying again? Or, even worse, what if the "desperately" low pricing of the lifetime subscription indicated that Cakewalk was in danger of going out of business?
 
 
To me, this was a very natural line of thinking.  Go ahead and call it tinfoil hat.  Call it mean-spirited.  Call it trolling.  Call it ignorant.  Call it whatever you like.  I don't care.  The fact is, that is how my train of thought went.  And I'm sure I'm not the only long-time Sonar user who, hoping for bug fixes, interpreted the "we need money now" announcement skeptically/pessimistically.
 

Tripecac
  I don't care.

I don't either. Hopefully this discussion will not continue for the lifetime of SONAR Platinum.

Hopefully this discussion will not continue for the lifetime of SONAR Platinum.

 
If you want the topic to die, then why did you just post to it, thus bouncing it back to the top?
 
I agree that this topic is not full to trawl through, given all the finger-shaking, finger-pointing, and accusations of irrational behaviour (with all the precision of finger-painting).
 
If you re-read the initial post, you will see that it actually started logically and analytically, as a reaction to Cakewalk's pre-June hype and subsequent announcement.  The post was fueled, perhaps, by ongoing frustration over Cakewalk's inability (or unwillingness) to fix bugs that have been repeatedly reported, but was questioning rather than plaintive.
 
All of the last-word wisecracks and insults and troll-y emoting and antagonism in this thread... well, those are uninvited elements that other people brought into it.  Apparently, some people in this forum CANNOT RESIST posting their snappy one-liners. 
 
I asked my daughters the other day who their favourite Simpsons characters were.  One of them chose Lisa.  One chose Bart.  Sometimes this forum seems like a small handful of Lisas surrounded by a sea of Barts (and the occasional Nelson, Comic Book Guy, or hapless Ralph).
 
I definitely empathise with Lisa, forever trying to get a rational (if possibly alarmist) word in edgewise, having to wade through a sea of puerile and dogmatic noise to get at some actual answers. 
 
Well, that's the Internet for ya... Springfield, USA. 
 
Cheers.

Anderton
[ especially given how the previous "gloom and doom" speculations to which I referred were so spectacularly wrong.

I didn't realize there were this many Blues artists that used Sonar.

This really is like a big family...the kids are all cranky and it's that time of month for mom. :)
 
If I over analyze this any more than it has been already I'll need a shrink. For gosh sakes you get lifetime upgrades until August. If you don't stop going round' you'll miss the window.

Andrew Rossa [Cakewalk]
.......................................
Let me just squash this right now. There's no plan to retire SONAR Platinum. There's no plan to change the name and do a bait and switch. We've been in business for over 30 years and we try to do the right thing by customers. We still plan on making other products as well. We have been doing that for almost 30 years as well. SONAR is still very important to us which is why we are even more focused on making it better. 

 
Cool, that's good enough for me...Consider previous comments in this thread null! And I stand admonished hahaha!
It is appreciated that you took the time to make this unequivocal statement Andrew, and I accept 100% it at face value!
 
Thanks