OK, slogging through all 32 pages of this thread should give me license to toss out a few brief observations.
I've been using Cake/Sonar since a fellow programmer on the CompuServe MIDI forum, a guy named Greg, suggested I give his new CP/M sequencer a try. I think that was 1987 (CP/M had actually been co-opted as MSDOS), and prior to that date I had been making do with the weird, unsupported, but insanely fast parallel control system in my Rhodes Chroma with a flakey Apple ][. Consequently, moving onto a stable CP/M system with a fully functioning MIDI card was a huge relief. One thing Greg seemed fanatically devoted to, and which is the main reason I've stayed with Cake and now Sonar all this time, is
convenience for the user. That meant personal support, since 12-Tone was a microscopic company, but it also meant that Cakewalk was easy to use. And it kept getting easier and easier, even with its original character-mode UI. Somebody was thinking like a
user.
There's been a lot of water under the bridge since Greg hung up his paper tape punch, but one thing really has been consistent for (virtually) 30 years (big celebration next year?) -- Cake is
still trying to be the most convenient DAW out there, and I see that in the coherence of developer dedication that has survived all the transitions, and in the continuous improvement of the DAW, and in the tireless, friendly attention to every single issue here on the forum, by Andrew especially (and Noel and everybody else), and most recently by this unexpected and wonderful lifetime membership deal.
So
big thanks for all that, and keep it coming, and I'll stretch my lifetime as long as I possibly can -- making music.
Allen