So far, and I have to be honest, Platinum has been a bit of a disappointment to me.
 
There are a few nice refinements and additions, but I'm starting to wish I'd stuck with X3 and sat it out for a bit. When my annual subscription membership expires, I will be taking a long hard look at whether or not I will shell out straight away, if at all.
 
 
 
 

I'm with you.  In theory though by paying in full up front, we paid in advance for awesome stuff that's yet to come.  As the time remaining gets shorter and the bug list gets bigger ... well, we'll see  :)
 
 

SteveStrummerUK
 
So far, and I have to be honest, Platinum has been a bit of a disappointment to me.
 
There are a few nice refinements and additions, but I'm starting to wish I'd stuck with X3 and sat it out for a bit. When my annual subscription membership expires, I will be taking a long hard look at whether or not I will shell out straight away, if at all.
 
 
 
 

I'm sort of on the same page. My favourite change with Plat was the improved control bar, but it got broken on the second release. I'm sorry to say I haven't been able to use most of the Anderton content because I can't get the hang of his music style with the loops. I really hope this is not the trend for all releases.
 
I'm taking it 1 year at a time but I have managed to get 4 people on the Sonar bandwagon so Cakewalk got their moneys worth out of having me as a customer.

I can't say I am disappointed in the first year because Platinum actually affected a major problem I was having with X3 where the engine would crash and stop fairly frequently. It was not a show stopper for me because it never seemed to prevent me from finally getting a track down. However, with Platinum, I have not seen this occur other than a few rare instances. So something like that was worth an upgrade for me.
 
I can't say I am particularly excited by the promise of the drum replacement feature. Just not something I will really need. I have gotten some good use out of Anderton presets though.
 
At this point for me, if I get a few decent additions to features (not necessarily earth shaking changes), I think I could be tempted to have another round of membership.
 
But this thread is really not much about the CW plan as much about the trend in the music software industry to get perpetual payments to use software we previously held a license to use without further payments.

 
 
I still don't understand the continuing and seemingly endless (favourable) and unnecessary comparisions between the SONAR model and the Adobe model.
 
If they are so dissimilar, why do so many of you have to keep on pointing it out. We're intelligent people, we know they're not the same and how they differ.
 
As it happens, I subscribe to Adobe's Photography Plan which allows me to use Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5 (now Lightroom CC), and before I did so, I undertook a detailed bit of research into whether it was worth it for me, or not. I compared the price of subscribing to this Plan against my average spend on upgrading the 'buy to keep' versions of Photoshop Elements and Lightroom. As I'd planned/budgetted on upgrading to each new version of Lightroom and to every second or third version of Elements (so far I've purchased #2, #5, #8, #10 and #11), the main comparison was of course the price.
 
As it happens, the two alternatives work out very similar (it was about 50p a month on average more to subscribe to the Plan), so the decision then had to be based on two other factors - namely the extra features Photoshop offers over it's little brother Elements; and the fact that I'd get to keep each 'purchased' version of Elements and Lightroom against simply 'renting' the Photography software.
 
As it transpired, and after giving Photoshop a pretty intensive (free) month's demo, I decided that the best option for me was the subscription model.
 
As it so happens, Lightroom 5 has today been superseded by Lightroom 6/Lightroom CC - the former is the purchase outright version and CC is the Creative Cloud version. I'm downloading CC as I type
 
As far as new features and workflows are concerned, I have to say that the change from Lightroom 5 to 6/CC is light years ahead of that from SONAR X3 to Platinum. The feature that's got my attention is Lightroom's newly added ability to merge multiple images to HDR inside the program, as opposed to exporting them outside to Photoshop, Photomatix Pro or Nik HDR. This might not seem quite so momentous, but the biggie is that Lightroom allows you to merge to a Digital Negative DNG (similar to RAW) file. All the other programs merge the source images to JPEG or TIFF. TIFFs are good, but have nowhere near as much information and latitude as DNG/RAW. A similar process can be achieved in Photomatix to create a 32bit merged file, but this 'image' can only be reopened by a program that can handle HDR 'coded' files.
 
With the addition of some real improvements and additions in the masking tools and auto-synch feature (applying the same edits to many images automatically), Adobe have really brought Lightroom bang up to date, and as far as the HDR to DNG processing goes, have created something that no other software can, at the moment, compete with.
 
I really hope SONAR 2016 gives me the same 'buzz' as it continues to arrive in its monthly roll-outs.
 
 

lludwick
I spent 50 years in my software engineering career both as a consultant / contract worker and a paid staff employee. When I started there were nothing but mainframes with COBOL and Assembler on IBM mainframe DOS (not PC DOS)  and MVS. In the beginning, I was treated pretty much as a superstar actually having some pretty impressive spending allocations when I travelled.
 
As the years progressed and the market was flooded with programmers, the salaries started to drop dramatically (in relative terms of inflation) and the quality of the programming became abysmal. In my early years, bugs were a sure way to get yourself fired, but now they are accepted. Certainly there is more complexity, but the tolerance level is way to high. It is pretty much a relief to be retired at this point.
 
I would agree that software engineers are underpaid. They are taken right out of college at miniscule salaries while the experienced programmers let go ... all to cut costs. Talk about "Penny wise and pound foolish."
 

45 years as a software engineer here ... and then last year I retired (he said with a massive smile).  The problem always was and remains that the people who allocate the money have no skills to distinguish between a bone fide software engineer and a hack programmer.  The quality engineer will at best make about 40% more money than another individual who is not even 20% as effective.  The fact that someone develops quality code that is maintainable and has a low defect rate often goes unnoticed.  The squeaky wheel gets noticed.  Stuff that just works usually is assumed to be nothing special. 
 
I am happily out of it, but I really feel sorry for the sh*t my former colleagues have to put up with.  It really does seem to be getting worse.

44 years here, but I started young and now can't find "real" IT work mostly due to barely veiled age discrimination.  Oh well...