dubdisciple
Demonstrating that disgruntled ex users will sometimes post on forums complaining tells me nothing but the obvious. People who abandon a product tend to have the bizarre need to trash it afterwards. What this tells me more than anything is that give any product decades of existence in internet age and do a google search for negatives and you will get massive hits. What this doesn't tell me is whether cakewalk had a reputation for bugs so widespread and commonly known that it was an every day conversation. A search of reviews certainly does not support that claim. Most reviews of sonar don't mention bugs. Negatives are mentioned but buggy does not seem to be the consensus .
I don't think anyone's claiming that the sole reason Cakewalk died was because of Sonar's reputation for being buggy. But, it didn't exactly
help matters. Nor is anyone claiming that Sonar's bugginess was "everyday conversation." Of course it wasn't. Why would it be? Also, I find this tendency to dismiss people as "disgruntled ex users" to be a little problematic. It insinuates that people's negative experiences with Sonar can or should be dismissed as irrelevant, perhaps that they're too bitter and twisted to offer an objective opinion. Let's imagine you've invested thousands in Sonar over the years, and the program becomes problematic for you. Bugs, crashes, weirdness, you name it. The problems persist with no fix forthcoming. Even really stupid bugs that should have been prioritized years ago. Your music sessions are frustrating, you're even losing work. Your experience on the Cakewalk forums is that people dismiss your problems as user error, or hardware related, and people question why you feel the need to "trash talk" Sonar. But regardless, your problems with Sonar persist. So in the end you switch DAW's and you're happy. Every now and then someone on another forum asks if anyone knows anything about Sonar. What are you going to do? Keep quiet? Offer no opinion at all? Of course not - you see someone about to drop $100's on a program that you know contains some very serious flaws, and you relate your experience. I don't see why doing so should be dismissed as the rant of a disgruntled ex-user. It's not as if they initiated a thread entitled "Sonar is Crap." Someone asked a question and they responded. If they "felt the need" to do something, it was to give advice to a person who was in the market for a DAW, not just to trash something for the sake of it.
Also, very few DAW reviews go into detail about bugs. That's because many bugs don't reveal themselves until you've been using the program in depth for a while. For instance, I don't really see half of the problems I see with Sonar until I have a really big, mature project with a lot of data flying around. I might not get to that stage during the course of writing a DAW review. It's like Amazon reviews - I always look for the ones which have updates. Because most of the reviews on there are based upon the customer's initial feelings about a product. A few months down the line, you might well have a different opinion about a product, but not everybody goes back to change their review. As an example of this, I once bought an air humidifier based upon the reviews it got on Amazon. It was very highly rated. Three months down the line, my humidifier developed a leak which meant it would empty the entire reservoir on the floor. Going back to the reviews and reading them in more depth, I found a few updated ones which described exactly the same problem happening to people after a similar spell of time. So as helpful as reviews are, they're very rarely the full story.