First, let me state that I'm a long-time user of Vegas Pro and have ZERO issues with the functionality/stability of that program or any other on my system. But, with YouTube being what it is, I wanted to have the ability to whip up simple music cues, and as a non-musician I purchased Music Maker Premium last summer figuring it would be a great way to do just that. Functionally, I have issues but it's overall fine. My problem is just getting the program to work in the first place.
Originally, last summer, I had an absolute nightmare with the program but figured that was because I was trying to run it on Windows 7. Well, in December I built a new 12th gen Windows 11 system, and shockingly all my issues continued on an entirely new and unrelated computer (nothing was transferred).
First, just starting it up, it randomly takes 30 seconds or more to automatically log me in. The issue is, until this happens, it considers itself the "free" version, and I cannot load any project more complex than what's allowed in the free version. Sometimes I'm sitting there twiddling my thumbs for a full minute before it suddenly realizes I OWN THE SOFTWARE. Why is THAT not the default action? Why does it not default to knowing my purchase status, since it's obviously capable of storing an encrypted key saying I DO own it? When the internet goes down, it usually becomes totally useless! But not always, which is weird.
Second, the audio drivers are buggy as hell. I use the Magix Low Latency (since most of the other options do NOT work right - like playing back at the wrong pitch or just not making any sound), and I prey every time that I start it up and first press the "play" button that when the cursor hangs at 2 seconds, sound will actually come out in a second and it just won't just hang permanently. And if I accidentally press the Recording Options buttons - OMG OMG OMG the driver keeps resetting itself and usually hangs or just doesn't seem to want to make sound after that, and it's time to reboot to get it to work again.
Third, so long as the program doesn't crash, if it starts off working it will continue working fine for hours and hours. But, when the program does crash - and it happens at least once a day when I'm working - it crashes hard. It ends up with a stuck process that CANNOT be killed by any means - and I've gone to extremes with process killing utilities to try to do this. And that's because if I try to start it again with the prior hung process still running, it complains that things won't work right as a second copy. But even worse, if I don't care about that, it WILL NOT log in and acknowledge that I'm using the premium version until that original process dies. And sometimes it WILL disappear on its own after 10 or 15 minutes. Otherwise, I have to reboot to continue working.
Forth, maybe it's because I'm at a higher DPI scaling, but visual representations of MIDI files in the editing workspace do NOT match the time scale. So when the cursor is playing over a MIDI file, the notes do NOT match what's being played, it's all out of sync. The main MIDI editing window is fine, and representations of waveforms are also fine. But the "ticker tape" of MIDI files is not scaled correctly and is this useless and very disorienting.
I think the only bug I've seen disappear is the one where exiting causes the program to just start right back up again. I had that on both Windows 7 and 11, but it doesn't seem to be happening since the last couple updates. I also used to frequently have an issue where it would suddenly refuse to load a file - even though the file is fine. I discovered that if I renamed it to something else entirely it would load okay, but with the original name there must have been something cached that was preventing it from working - but I've only had that once on Windows 11, and not recently.