Kinda wondered when (not if) this would happen, given Gibsons reputation these days. I feel very sorry for Noel and his team. Jumped ship around version 8 of Sonar - I never could get a stable environment and then, oddly, the thing that kind of catalysed my decision was playing with the (then new) step sequencer feature. I found that if you clicked a selected grid cell again, instead of behaving like every drum machine on the planet and clearing the pattern step, instead, nothing happened. The devs were baffled as to why I expected it to work that way. At that point I realised that the disconnect between the engineers and musicians had just become too insurmountable. Although Reaper at the time was fairly spartan it lacked one feature Cakewalk had in spades; crashes. Reaper just worked.
It'd be great to see the refugees from Sonar move to Reaper. I'm hoping it won't prove too challenging. Truth be told I didn't have any issues picking up the basics and Reaper's routing is for sure more intuitive (especially for MIDI) than Sonar. Now if you could just make free improvisation less clunky (i.e fit to improvisation as Sonar calls it) where the tempo grid warps automatically - yes, I know, it's doable in Reaper but not without some effort, it really is a key feature for working with non-EDM genres and should be painless. And keep plugging on with the scoring stuff - it's not bad, and certainly much better than Sonar's functionality which despite decades of pleading, they never touched.
Anyway, let's welcome everyone to the Reaper community. And I hope those talented folks find lucrative work elsewhere; these are specialised skills but perhaps plugin development or something?. Let's hope for the best...
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