re Love/hate relationships
At the risk of being told, "MJ--Love It Or Leave It," and being shown the door, I'm going to say that I share your frustration. With MJ 7.2 I could burn music CDs just fine, and digital playback on CDs was flawless. In 8.0.xx I've yet to successfully burn a CD, digital playback won't work (many, many pops and crackles), and every time I rip a CD, and click "OK" on the notification box that the CD has been ripped, I lose all the little icons on the left hand side of the screen except the CD-R drive icon. I have to re-start the program to get them back. I've uninstalled/reinstalled, tried different configurations with the IDE/Atapi settings, uninstalled/reinstalled ASPI layers--come on, I've been here since 6.0 also, and have read a couple of posts here on Interact before. But when I post the bug reports for new versions, I keep getting the "try reinstalling" type responses. When I post the bugs, I'm really not expecting ANY personal response at all. But for some reason, the generic responses just annoy the hell out of me. I hate that.
On the other hand, I don't have any concerns over the gappy/gapless issues. Or normalization. Or skins. Or Viz. Or . . . . well you name it, because I don't use any of it. And, I haven't experienced your problem with going back to 7.2. I can uninstall 8.0.xx, use Norton WinDoctor to remove left-over registry instances of v8.0, and reinstall 7.2 easily enough. When I do, the above problems vanish. Reinstall any version of 8.0 up to the present, and they're back. So, I don't believe its some other problem (update drivers--come on--good advice for unfamiliar names who may not know). But I'm using the beta version because I love MJ and want to help, so any irritation I'm having is my own fault. I wasn't forced to jump in to beta testing. Plus, it's not like I was talked in to trying some buggy beta version of a pacemaker or something. If I can't burn with MJ right now, the Win XP burner works pretty well. And analog will surfice until the issue is taken care of. I think that they are aware that there are still problems and are giving it their all . . .