Turbo1
Please sign the petition against Gibson to save SONAR Cakewalk.
https://www.change.org/p/...ampaign=share_petition

I assume you mean "for" and not "against".
I don't think a petition is going to change the situation, it's a business, it will be dealt under those conditions (money mainly), not what customers think.

"Lifetime updates" obviously meant within the products lifetime. Right now the product does not appear to be alive.

The medium where the installers lie on does not matter, just take backups. What matters is that the software can be activated.

Keni
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!

You have the right attitude Keni. Although I have no control over the outcome myself I too hope that there will be a future. I think one thing all users of music software in this age should do is take a step back and think about what it means to support the software from the companies you use. Its a very fragile industry and software is being constantly devalued making it harder and harder for companies to survive. Its tempting to think that companies are huge and will make it without the support of every one of us but that isn't the reality.

CakeAlexSHere
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.

Again incorrect speculation. We always had a backwards and forwards compatible file format from the get go so this was very rarely the cause of problems. And any issues regarding compatibility were always at the topmost of the list and were squashed even before release most of the time.

Fair enough. QA testing of forward and backward compatibility is a nightmare however unless you automate it.

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
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.

 
To be fair, I don't think I'm reacting emotionally at all, just the opposite in fact. Note that I'm not one of these posting "This is BS/class action lawsuit/they have screwed us once and they'll do it again/they just took our money and ran/I've just read the news and I'm in tears" kind of ranters. But a rational viewpoint to take would be to consider the possibility that a whole bunch of things could happen in a situation like this, regardless of the reassurances of Cakewalk staff (whom I assume have the best of intentions throughout). Sometimes, making up your mind has to include some kind of speculation. I have a smoke detector in my apartment based upon the speculation that a fire might take place in the future. Humans evolved the ability to speculate for a reason. 
 
 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]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.

 
There you have it - nobody can predict the future. A transition team is a good sign, for sure - but is that any guarantee that the company will fall into the hands of a new owner? Anything could happen. I'm sure that when you're actually there on the scene, and you know people, and you're privy to certain conversations and meetings, then you probably have a much more confident idea of what is or isn't likely to happen. For the rest of us, we're almost completely blind and we have to take into account every possibility, one of which is that the development of Sonar might never continue where it left off. 
 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]>>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!

 
Looking through my bug list, I can see that yes, some of my bugs were plugin related, but on the other hand, many weren't (certainly not "most"). Also, I often came across problems which I posted about on the forum (frequently including a screencast) but which I never got to submit reports for because I didn't even come close to finding a workable recipe. Many of them were related to stuff like automation, looping, moving clips, internal MIDI routing etc and I could never reproduce them in a fresh project. They only ever happened in large and/or aging projects. For instance, I sometimes come across a situation in which drag-copying a clip with "select automation envelopes with clip" enabled would result in the original clip's automation being destroyed. I'd try it in a new project and it would work perfectly. I frequently run up across weird stuff like that which defies all attempts to recreate in a fresh project, and it sure doesn't sound like an issue with plugin corruption. As another example I will sometimes encounter the strangest MIDI related stuff going on, like notes being triggered in one track's synth when hitting mute or solo on a completely unrelated track. Or recently, I have found that in older projects I sometimes encounter a track which has none of its plugin automation parameters exposed in the automation edit filter. Oftentimes the problem goes away on a fresh launch of the project, making it even harder to pin down. 
 
I don't think I use any plugins which are "shady" or have a reputation as being problematic. It's all pretty respectable stuff from companies like Waves, NI, Soundtoys etc. And a lot of the problems I had weren't crash-related (although I did have my fair share of crashes and hangs) - many consisted of basic functionality of the program acting weirdly. 
 
 
 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
 
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.

Noel,
I edit that comment (and removed that part) because the last thing I want to do is bombard you with a slew of questions and drive you away from this forum. Its a good sign seeing you here and I want to keep it that way.
 
 
 
 

I can't quote Sharkes last comment without being seen as a spammer.


Noel could easily state it just takes one plugin to do it, and there's no way you could actually tell from an outsider's perspective.

You could state that you don't experience this with other DAWs using the same plugins.

Looking at the way things were handled from a customer perspective I am stating feedback when logging bugs was poor, often zero, rarely two way.

Nice to see Noel finally making an appearance. I'm afraid it's a bit late to stem the flow of users to new software. I'll keep Sonar installed and leave a candle in the window. My unfounded suspicion is that we'll have a re-branded Sonar in the future but any past agreements re. lifetime updates will be gone. That's where it all falls apart for me. We'll see.

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
 I think one thing all users of music software in this age should do is take a step back and think about what it means to support the software from the companies you use. Its a very fragile industry and software is being constantly devalued making it harder and harder for companies to survive. Its tempting to think that companies are huge and will make it without the support of every one of us but that isn't the reality.

Glad to see Noel commenting, and good to hear there's hope for SONAR going forward.  I completely agree that all of the DAWs have bugs, probably about the same number.  Whether they affect you or not depends on your workflow and the features that you use. 
 
I have experienced several of the issues that Sharke has, and my point with posting the bug lists earlier was that just because you have not seen bugs in your workflow doesn't mean that others who have must be doing something wrong.
 
Personally, I thought that Noel and company were doing an amazing job of feature updates and bug fixes on a  monthly basis, and I have always supported Cakewalk by buying every single update (up until I bought the lifetime updates of course) as well as some of the other products.
 
At this point though I have taken advantage of 2 of the cross-grade deals to learn Studio One and Cubase.  If SONAR comes back I may switch back, and I will continue to use it to access old projects.  I still think it's the best DAW for the features I want and the workflow I use.  Studio One could use some MIDI improvements and Cubase lacks ARA.
 
Bottom line is I prefer to use a DAW that is being actively developed, where bugs have a chance to be fixed, and where new features are coming.  As I said before it's a perfectly valid choice also to image your drive, be judicious with OS updates and keep using SONAR for the next 10 years if you want.

And at this point the Sonar forums disappeared from the home page.

Edit.. my bad, appears to be a minimize/maximize button on home page that got pressed?