sharke
The trouble with that advice Noel is that it doesn't give anyone any more information by which they can make a rational decision on whether or not to go with a new DAW. People are naturally worried that if for some reason they have to reinstall Sonar in the future, it might happen at a time after which the reactivation servers have been shut down. Ultimately the nightmare scenario would be not being able to load projects and losing work. It doesn't matter how much we're reassured that this will never happen, or how much we're assured that we'll receive some kind of offline key,  I think everyone's aware that the current situation is one in which anything could happen at any minute on the whim of Gibson. 

To add to that.. who is really running Cakewalk?
Who is developing this new license auth code?

If Noel really has left (I assume he has?) then he really can't do anything at all to assure any of us.

CakeAlexSHere
We know that Cakewalk was not in profit under Roland...

One thing to bear in mind here, that many SME's gearing themselves up to be sold tend to show a loss in profits both before and after the sale. This is often due to the company's focus moving off sales to preparing themselves to be sold, followed by the usual restructuring that happens after the new company takes over.
 
I'm not saying this is the full story, but it would certainly contribute to the drop in profits.

Agree.

CakeAlexSHere
Again post got deleted. Repost..

1) I don't "claim" anything. Read the Reddit thread if you wish to analyse the source.
1) Cakewalk didn't make any money. It lost money.
2) Mac version was abandoned and they just released a dogppile version so they could just say they kept their promises. It was a ridiculous idea from the start, would have been nice to have... But really really... Crazy. Costs are too high to develop for an unprofitable company. Not sure it could compete with logic either. Other DAW's also had Linux.
3) Sonar artist is the cutdown version. Granted not on Mac.
4) You should really read the Reddit thread I posted.

Regardless of Gibson's problems (which is a fair point) if Cakewalk was in a better place it would have been much easier to sell. At present it's unlikely, and regardless all the staff has left.

(FFS posting this again because spam scanner keeps deleting).

Yes you are indeed claiming a lot based on unsubstantiated anonymous information which is not even fully correct. Its not worth speculating what could or couldn't have happened since that's all would be - armchair speculation. The fact is it did happen - there were issues and situations that triggered this event. Some that could have been changed and some that couldn't.  All I can say and hope for is that I am hoping that will be a positive outcome for the users and the product in the future.

^^
Craig seemed to engage and he said he thought he knew who it was (of course now I've finally mentioned his name, what I was trying to avoid, he'll probably be in here denying it, but people can read the thread and check for themselves). Anyway that was enough validation for me, plus everything he wrote seems to make sense and very little disagreement. That's just my opinion people should make their own.

Regardless the debate is was it credible source or not, I say it was, would you say it is Noel even though you may disagree with him?

I have no doubt that not all of what he said was fully correct, he did say he was not that high up the chain of command, he was quite transparent about that.

sharke
 
The trouble with that advice Noel is that it doesn't give anyone any more information by which they can make a rational decision on whether or not to go with a new DAW. People are naturally worried that if for some reason they have to reinstall Sonar in the future, it might happen at a time after which the reactivation servers have been shut down. Ultimately the nightmare scenario would be not being able to load projects and losing work. It doesn't matter how much we're reassured that this will never happen, or how much we're assured that we'll receive some kind of offline key,  I think everyone's aware that the current situation is one in which anything could happen at any minute on the whim of Gibson. 

 
Sharke I have a lot of respect for you (as you know I hope based on our past communications) but you are reacting emotionally rather than rationally to this. We clearly said that as and when there was more information it would be presented. Transitioning a company can take a fairly LONG time - it doesn't happen overnight. The fact that there was a transition team of a few people (myself included) obviously means Gibson wants to do something to "transition" the company. So why not wait until such event happens and make up your mind based on facts instead of speculation? I've already said publicly that none of what you indicate as the nightmare scenario would happen since we've already planned for such an escrow situation. Whether I am there or not users wouldn't be left hanging like that. Thats the least we could do to take care of people but I'm sure it will never get to that.
 
>>Your last paragraph is certainly interesting and is going to get a lot of people talking. Does Noel know something? Is there something on the cards?
If course there is something on the cards - why would there be a transition team if not? But nobody can predict the future including Gibson so there isn't anything to share about timelines or events till it happens.
Crossgrade offers happen all the time and of course companies are going to jump on an event like this. The timing was poor I'll admit but there wasn't anything we could do to change the past.
 
>>Regarding bugs, I cannot shake off my hunch that something really weird happens to Sonar projects the older and larger they get.
That hunch is incorrect. Most of your bugs were corruption related and caused by weird interactions with plugins. Although large projects can expose such bugs more since more memory is used by the app but its highly unlikely to be related to the actual size of the project. I personally investigated some of them and could never get them to happen. Unfortunately looking through a million lines of code to speculatively fix problems can be a huge time sink. We definitely did put in a lot of time to find them and indeed found and fixed many issues you personally reported. As you say even you could barely repro them yourself - so now imagine what it takes for a developer to try and fix it with no recipe and just using imagination!
I can assure you however that EVERY piece of software I have actively used has mysterious issues like that - some on a much larger scale. And I include Music production software - I wont name names but I've had some bizarre issues in all the Daws I used for testing our plugins. Its all dependent on how you use the app and your workflow whether you see them or not. If everyone saw them they would have been fixed a long time ago.
 
And to the point Chuckie made about being disappointed that updated info was provided since the announcement: I'm really sorry about that but as much as I believe in transparency, we don't own Cakewalk personally so we have to abide by the process Gibson is following. Anyone who has been through something like this would know that there is a legal process involved. The few remaining folks at Cakewalk who are helping are not even fully briefed on all the details for confidentiality reasons so there isn't much new to share right now.

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]

CakeAlexSHere
).

Yes you are indeed claiming a lot based on unsubstantiated anonymous information which is not even fully correct. Its not worth speculating what could or couldn't have happened since that's all would be - armchair speculation. The fact is it did happen - there were issues and situations that triggered this event. Some that could have been changed and some that couldn't.  All I can say and hope for is that I am hoping that will be a positive outcome for the users and the product in the future.

Thanks Noel!

We are (I am) very sad at these events for sure. I for one continue to use Sonar and plan to do so as long as possible. You and the other Bakers created an amazing piece of work and though it all a wonderful community.

I hope the new year was good to you and the team outside of this and hope as you say, something happens to brighten all our futures.

I will continue to maintain positive thoughts for all of us and dream of a newly empowered Sonar to emerge!

Please sign the petition against Gibson to save SONAR Cakewalk.
https://www.change.org/p/...ampaign=share_petition

What Shark was describing it seemed to me is corruption is with project files over several versions.

Being a QA tester as well I've seen this happen with a lot of complex software. What happens is after a while the project file format needs to change, however the code does not allow for fuly backwards compatibility and thus corruption with the file structure. The way to get around this is to write cleanup code to make sure the projects files are "cleaned up". Such is the nature of agile methods Devs can argue this is an enhancement request and not a bug, it gets thrown on the back burner and so the story continues. Another reason could be that the project file format design itself was insufficient or flawed (I do hope that gets published one day btw).

Enough speculation for you I hope.

Please sign the petition against Gibson to save SONAR Cakewalk.
https://www.change.org/p/...ampaign=share_petition