Hope that helps push you down the road to new inspiration like it has me. I have been playing around with the new version for the last week and I've not yet even touched a bunch of stuff - still trying to get back 'into it'. A few things that stuck out for me: TH3 Cakewalk Edition, Application themes (color), fixes and performance improvements, Melodyne improvements (that don't work for me at the moment due to a Celomony issue), the free Addictive Drums kits (even though I have a very capable Roland e-drum kit (in my profile pic), the additional synths like updated Lounge Lizard, the Analog Session synth, new things (I think) in the ProChannel, and others. Now I look forward to the additional changes that will come down the road. Since I was able to see the additions over the past 2.5 years since I updated last, I found enough value in that for the lifetime update to be worthwhile. I just came from a similar spot where I haven't really used my DAW in a while and had X3 Producer. The archives are available for the years 2003-2017, and the years are linked on the right side of that press release page.Hey jpaul - just wanted to throw another vote in for 'do it'. For an example see this page for a description of what the Sonar 8.5 Studio lacks as far as the Producer exclusives: You can research the Cakewalk edition releases in the press release archives, where the edition differences are often discussed. It is not intended to take into account the plugins supplied with lighter editions of the DAW, or the 32-bit variety.

The spreadsheet referenced in this thread assumes the baseline of 64-bit plugins supplied with the Producer or Platinum versions of Sonar only.

That is an interesting thought for those that had lighter versions of Sonar most recently, and a bit of incentive to at least give CbB a try if they had an old Producer edition lying around. CbB should load anything that was installed with 64bit version of SONAR because it appears to plug-ins as current top-of-the line version of SONAR.

Cakewalk sonar x3 producer