e3do
Serious question: Would it be foolish to still buy Sonar Professional if I can get a couple of productive years out of it?

My honest answer? You would be stark raving mad to pay for Sonar right now. You have no guarantees for how long it will run, even though it will likely run for a while yet. 
 
Luckily, I don't think they are selling it anymore, so I don't think it's a choice you can make.
 

e3do
If I have a questionable version of a different product (like Sonar Producer 7), should I just use that until something hopefully moves positively forward with this interface?

That's your best bet, but I think you would be better off yet moving on. 

e3do
Serious question: Would it be foolish to still buy Sonar Professional if I can get a couple of productive years out of it?
It's the only interface I ever liked and I'm am finally going to buy it legitimately.
If I have a questionable version of a different product (like Sonar Producer 7), should I just use that until something hopefully moves positively forward with this interface?
Any feedback would be appreciated; i'm sure others would like to know

You'd be out of your mind to buy Sonar at this point. Consider yourself lucky that you didn't. But please, go and buy something legitimate. Dodgy licenses is part of the reason we are in this situation.

I'm considering quitting this wonderful hobby I've had for most of my life because it would be too much for me to start over. I may still look at Cubase and ProTools before deciding what to do. Cakewalk: this is the biggest disappointment I could have imagined."
  
Why don't you just continue to use Sonar?  Has it disappeared or quit working?

TerraSin
Cakewalk needs to be sold, not closed. Closing down for any amount of time is a death sentence.

 
100% agree! This is such a colossal FU to its loyal base. It's like the CEO knows how important or impactful Sonar is to the market, but will not let it go under his watch. I've flirted with exploring other DAWs in the past but loved Cakewalk too much to do it. 
 
Why not sell to another company or at least Presonus and let your legacy live on through assimilation? The whole thing just doesn't make sense, especially after doing a subscription model and being so close to an Apple platform option. What they needed was to bolster their marketing and make a push.
 
Dear Cakewalk (Gibson) Executive team: I realize you have an obligation to be profitable, but could you please not screw your loyal customers in the process?! I'm sure you could find a far better solution to keep Cakewalk from dry rotting/dying!

I can only speak for myself here. but im in my late 40's.
It seems Sonar itself was aimed at users in their later 30's and up.
I didn't see any youth joining Cakewalk as their main DAW. I watch a lot of You tube videos and just don't see the youth using Sonar. Im guessing the ratio is low. 15% youth to 85% older musicians/engineers/producers like myself.
 
I enjoyed Sonar very much and I still do but I think the downfall may have been targeting older customers and not injecting enough youth in to the program. And another negative would be not listening to its users enough but instead making major DAW choices by panel committee. How many times have we (as users) asked for features only to go on deaf ears until a year later when Cakewalk says; "That might be a good idea".
A great example would be color schemes. We asked for color schemes back in 2011. We only got a theme editor in 2016.
 
I saw a disconnect from its users and I still see that disconnect now as we are all patiently waiting for an off line authorization and we still haven't heard from Cakewalk in over 3 weeks. I understand legal matters, but its just ridicules.
 
I am still a huge Sonar Fanboy but even I know the difference between what it is... and what it isn't.

Just learned of this.
 
that'll teach me to not read my Cakewalk emails
 
OUCH!
 
 
Any news on the 'offline' authorisation?
I was just about to do hardware refresh on my DAW and will ned re-authorisation.

Twigman
 
Any news on the 'offline' authorisation?
I was just about to do hardware refresh on my DAW and will ned re-authorisation.

The servers are still running. AFAIK the information in the FAQ is still valid. The activation process has not changed.

New to Sonar, only three months in and at almost 50yrs old, it's been hard work thus far to get my head around DAW.
Spent a wee fortune on a music recording set-up with a custom built Win10 PC. Focusrite Scarlet18i8 and Presonus monitors. Shure mics and decent cables. Even punted for the Editor Keys Sonar keyboard. I'd hooked up with an Indie studio and it runs off Sonar Platinum. I'd opted to go for Sonar Pro while I was at this learning stage and just starting out with self recording. Not sure what the future holds, but I'm sticking with Sonar for the time being. Hopefully the servers are secured and kept online. It's not cheap with all the plugins etc I've invested in also, so if Sonar goes down on my system, it will be a  huge disappointment.   

chuckebaby
 
I enjoyed Sonar very much and I still do but I think the downfall may have been targeting older customers and not injecting enough youth in to the program.

I think they actually did a fair amount of work over time to target a newer audience, but it was a pretty tough nut to crack. And I remember times when plenty of users were complaining that they were headed in that direction. Groove clips, Matrix, step sequencer, new cross-platform synths, Brandon and Seth Webcasts. They probably got a small boost from all that, but not enough.
 
I'm guessing one of CW's biggest problems was that not enough existing customers were upgrading. Even now you can see a lot of posts from people who are using an older version and are gutted by the news. ;-) Times are changing.

Found out last night, bummed out could hardly sleep.  I have been using Cakewalk products for so very very long, decades.  DAW has been in hibernation for months due to some work going on it the house, that finished so I cranked her up, went to cakewalk.com and bam got a smack right in the kisser.
 
The Cakewalk team was awesome, I enjoyed the product, the forums (lurking, lurking).  I wish everyone the best, hopefully someone will purchase the intellectual property (come on cakewalk employees) and Sonar will be back.  I am going to give Studio One a try, I suck at recording anyway so it shouldn't matter that much :)
 
Good luck, happy holidays!