While I love my SG I'm at the stage where I F**king hate Gibson... They've shut Cakewalk (the hub of my studio) down with no warning after selling lifetime updates and having a subscription based selling model. I personally have 6 months left on my subscription and am going to receive nothing from them in that time... tantamount to theft. They did something similar in the 90's when they bought Opcode and binned them too.
I'm not familiar with Cakewalk, but that really sucks. In fact there's a lot in the digital selling arena that really sucks. I never forgave Adobe for going over to subscription licensing for Photoshop, but I've moved out of a career in photography, so never did buy a subscription. Having to deal with intrusive DRM is bad enough, but having to rent your software too, it's a step too far for me.
I bet Gibson had something in the fine print you signed that you gave them authority to make changes and you were stuck with it anyway. Sorry this cakewalk has left you short. Bad Bad business.
We'll see about paying them, I pay through pay pal and they have very explicit rules on getting what you paid for. And by the sounds of it they're in turmoil so might not even chase it up.
I was not even aware of this type of thing going subscription, but personally I have always had a phobia and avoid subscriptions as much as possible. That sucks, but I don't think they can legally charge you for something you don't have.
You paid for Photoshop? That wasn't cheap! I got a copy years ago off a buddy, and a couple years ago I upgraded when Adobe put out CS2 for free.
Actually you're wrong - it was reasonably cheap (for what it was), and WAY cheaper than Live Picture - photo editing software that was superior to Photoshop, could run on a cheap Mac (rather than a dedicated workstation), yet deliver results and speeds of workstations costing 10x the price... (This was when 16Mb of RAM would set you back over £300, and a CD writer was £5,000+). Sadly, Live Picture didn't make it through to the digital camera age, and we're all cursed with Photoshop for eternity. (Back then PS was mostly a graphic designers tool, few photographers were buying software). As for the copy of Photoshop I bought, v2.5, it was quite reasonably priced, came on 7 floppy disks, and seemed to be the product of a company that cared about it's products at least as much as it's profit margins. Not the same Adobe of today... Unfortunately, the upgrades I ended up paying for were obscenely expensive, massively unimpressive, but unavoidable really, as I was using Photoshop as a professional tool for about 20 years, and making a good living from it. Then I took a part-time course at a local college, bought the latest CS suite at a student rate of half the price of an upgrade to just PS! Wish I'd spotted that opportunity much sooner - the course itself was a fraction of the cost of CS, (and, not surprisingly, educational). Yup, you're part of the reason Adobe adopted such aggressive DRM, and no doubt jumped on the subscription model so quickly. :) Does CS2 actually still work? That must be PS9, I'm surprised it runs on current OSs. But feature wise, it's got all you need. PS7 did too. In fact, I could probably have stayed with PS3, which brought in layers, but I couldn't have stayed on Mac OS7!!!
Reading threads like this always makes me think of what it must of been like being backstage at a Queen concert. All this talk of computers and nuclear fusion and stuff. PS- just kidding :)
It was around $600 when I got my "test" copy of whatever version it was, so I was more in the reactionary camp in regards to the insane price. If it was $60 it wouldn't have been such an issue. I've got it on a Win7 box with a ton of RAM and it does what I need it to do with no problems. Even going full tilt boogie that thing never goes much over 50% RAM use.
Sorry if I go off topic, but I’ve read in another forum that Fender might acquire Gibson. Is that credible?.