For those of you who thought they ever got unsatisfactory support from Sony/Sonic Foundry let me share my recent experience with Cakewalk with you.
I purchased Ultrafunk's Sonitus: plugin pack v3.0. This plugin pack was purchased and now owned by Cakewalk. Recently I discovered that Cakewalk added DX automation capabilities to this plugin pack. I was therefore interested in visiting their website to find an update/upgrade option. There was none. In fact I was led to a page on their website that directly contradicted this information.
http://store.yahoo.com/cakewalkdirect/sonitus.html
Quotes from their website:
"Sonitus:fx is a series of professional audio processing tools for digital audio editing, sound design, games, multimedia, film or studio work. These plug-ins have been enhanced with DirectX automation, and can be use with SONAR, Home Studio, Project5 or any application supporting DirectX or VST."
"IMPORTANT NOTE: Registered users of SONAR 3 Producer Edition & Ultrafunk customers with Release 3x of the Sonitus:fx plug-ins do not need to upgrade. No changes were made beyond updating the UI to include the Cakewalk logo. All functionality remains the same."
All functionality remains the same? Then what does "These plug-ins have been enhanced with DirectX autiomation" mean?
I thought this might be an oversight on their part, so I went to their website looking for a way to contact support regarding this issue. I looked under alomost every link on their website entitled "support","download", "purchase" and "Products" headers on their main page for a way to contact them. I found nothing. My next step was that I posted a message in their user forums....there was no Sonitus forum, so I posted in the Sonar forum, thinking it would be the most likely to get a reply. I got many user replies, stating that yes this seems like a problem. No one from cakewalk. One user posted a techsupport contact link for me. I used that link to contact cakewalk's techsupport. 5 days later I got a tech support reply back stating, "This is a sales support issue, please contact our "Sales Support". The original message I sent was highly scrambled around and wasn't in my "Sent box", because the link I used was cakewalk's own message sending template. Therefore, instead of the techsupport just forwarding my message onto the proper support area, so that it could get properly addressed, now I had to go hunt for their "sales support" contact, which they didn't give me in the reply message, and also I had to rewrite my entire message. I became highly annoyed at this point. A user from their forum again, pointed me to the correct contact information, which was located under cakewalk's main page under the heading "About". I guess the "About" heading was the last place I would have thought about looking at for a support contact regarding a Sonitus plugin.
At this point I had 2 seperate threads going in the Sonar forum consisting of 50+ replies each, and had been viewed over 2000 times each. A hot topic like this, you can be gauranteed Sony would have addressed it in one manor or another from their support......but nothing from Cakewalk. The next step I contacted Cakewalk "Sales Support" as directed. I got a reply back in 4 days. Here's a quote from that reply:
"Thank you for contacting Cakewalk. We apologize for the delay in
response, but we have had a very high volume of email lately. You will
be able to upgrade to the newer version of the Sonitus:FX Suite for
$49.00."
They didn't mention how this transaction would be conducted and still on their webpage their was no "upgrade" offer for previous Ultrafunk users. So I posted this information to the user forums to update everyone that I had been having these discussion with. I later went back and my post with the above quote was not on the thread any longer. I thought maybe I made a mistake in posting , so I reposted the information. I went back the next day to the thread and again, the post was DELETED. After this, I was contacted via email by Cakewalk with the message below.
"Dear Brian,
The upgrade offer you were emailed is not available to the general
public and was offered as a courtesy to you directly. I apologize if
this wasn't made clear the first time around, but this matter could have
been quickly resolved by calling the toll-free Customer Service number
that was inlcuded in our email rather than posting to the user forums.
Please feel free to call 888-225-3925 to speak with a Customer Service
representative if you are interested in taking advantage of the offer or
for any assistance regarding Cakewalk products and services."
Wow!!!!! How's that for support? I just happen to be the squeaky wheel in this case. I was hoping they would have done the right thing and corrected their information on their website and offered other users like myself an "upgrade" option like the rest of their products offer. No such thing, instead they descide to oil the squeaky wheel and say screw the rest of our customer base who might have a simular situtuation. They even went as far as deleting 2 posts in their forums, which had the above $49.00 upgrade offer information, yet never posted one message in the thread to address the issue.
To make matters even worse, they don't even have any demo versions of the Sonitus pack, so that I could at least see if the automation in the plugins work in the Sony apps, before I even consider their personal upgrade offer.
To any of you considering purchasing Sonar or any other Cakewalk product, keep this story in mine. I've heard quite a few shared horror stories regarding Cakewalk and their support. Don't walk away from Cakewalk, but RUN!!! To me this is the most unethical offer I have ever seen and was mishandled throughout the Cakewalk company.
Update: Cakewalk just deleted the entire thread that this discussion was on. I guess the truth hurts when exposed.
I purchased Ultrafunk's Sonitus: plugin pack v3.0. This plugin pack was purchased and now owned by Cakewalk. Recently I discovered that Cakewalk added DX automation capabilities to this plugin pack. I was therefore interested in visiting their website to find an update/upgrade option. There was none. In fact I was led to a page on their website that directly contradicted this information.
http://store.yahoo.com/cakewalkdirect/sonitus.html
Quotes from their website:
"Sonitus:fx is a series of professional audio processing tools for digital audio editing, sound design, games, multimedia, film or studio work. These plug-ins have been enhanced with DirectX automation, and can be use with SONAR, Home Studio, Project5 or any application supporting DirectX or VST."
"IMPORTANT NOTE: Registered users of SONAR 3 Producer Edition & Ultrafunk customers with Release 3x of the Sonitus:fx plug-ins do not need to upgrade. No changes were made beyond updating the UI to include the Cakewalk logo. All functionality remains the same."
All functionality remains the same? Then what does "These plug-ins have been enhanced with DirectX autiomation" mean?
I thought this might be an oversight on their part, so I went to their website looking for a way to contact support regarding this issue. I looked under alomost every link on their website entitled "support","download", "purchase" and "Products" headers on their main page for a way to contact them. I found nothing. My next step was that I posted a message in their user forums....there was no Sonitus forum, so I posted in the Sonar forum, thinking it would be the most likely to get a reply. I got many user replies, stating that yes this seems like a problem. No one from cakewalk. One user posted a techsupport contact link for me. I used that link to contact cakewalk's techsupport. 5 days later I got a tech support reply back stating, "This is a sales support issue, please contact our "Sales Support". The original message I sent was highly scrambled around and wasn't in my "Sent box", because the link I used was cakewalk's own message sending template. Therefore, instead of the techsupport just forwarding my message onto the proper support area, so that it could get properly addressed, now I had to go hunt for their "sales support" contact, which they didn't give me in the reply message, and also I had to rewrite my entire message. I became highly annoyed at this point. A user from their forum again, pointed me to the correct contact information, which was located under cakewalk's main page under the heading "About". I guess the "About" heading was the last place I would have thought about looking at for a support contact regarding a Sonitus plugin.
At this point I had 2 seperate threads going in the Sonar forum consisting of 50+ replies each, and had been viewed over 2000 times each. A hot topic like this, you can be gauranteed Sony would have addressed it in one manor or another from their support......but nothing from Cakewalk. The next step I contacted Cakewalk "Sales Support" as directed. I got a reply back in 4 days. Here's a quote from that reply:
"Thank you for contacting Cakewalk. We apologize for the delay in
response, but we have had a very high volume of email lately. You will
be able to upgrade to the newer version of the Sonitus:FX Suite for
$49.00."
They didn't mention how this transaction would be conducted and still on their webpage their was no "upgrade" offer for previous Ultrafunk users. So I posted this information to the user forums to update everyone that I had been having these discussion with. I later went back and my post with the above quote was not on the thread any longer. I thought maybe I made a mistake in posting , so I reposted the information. I went back the next day to the thread and again, the post was DELETED. After this, I was contacted via email by Cakewalk with the message below.
"Dear Brian,
The upgrade offer you were emailed is not available to the general
public and was offered as a courtesy to you directly. I apologize if
this wasn't made clear the first time around, but this matter could have
been quickly resolved by calling the toll-free Customer Service number
that was inlcuded in our email rather than posting to the user forums.
Please feel free to call 888-225-3925 to speak with a Customer Service
representative if you are interested in taking advantage of the offer or
for any assistance regarding Cakewalk products and services."
Wow!!!!! How's that for support? I just happen to be the squeaky wheel in this case. I was hoping they would have done the right thing and corrected their information on their website and offered other users like myself an "upgrade" option like the rest of their products offer. No such thing, instead they descide to oil the squeaky wheel and say screw the rest of our customer base who might have a simular situtuation. They even went as far as deleting 2 posts in their forums, which had the above $49.00 upgrade offer information, yet never posted one message in the thread to address the issue.
To make matters even worse, they don't even have any demo versions of the Sonitus pack, so that I could at least see if the automation in the plugins work in the Sony apps, before I even consider their personal upgrade offer.
To any of you considering purchasing Sonar or any other Cakewalk product, keep this story in mine. I've heard quite a few shared horror stories regarding Cakewalk and their support. Don't walk away from Cakewalk, but RUN!!! To me this is the most unethical offer I have ever seen and was mishandled throughout the Cakewalk company.
Update: Cakewalk just deleted the entire thread that this discussion was on. I guess the truth hurts when exposed.