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They didn't buy Cakewalk, Inc. They bought a bunch of stuff that Cakewalk, Inc. (by then an extinct company) once owned. That stuff included the code and trademarks for a number of products, including SONAR. If they had been forced to also take on the old company's legal obligations, the deal would probably not have happened, and there would have been no Cakewalk DAW for the past 6 years. Any agreements and obligations like warranties, debts, upgrade plans, whatever, became null when Cakewalk, Inc. was dissolved. That's how liquidation goes. The SONAR Platinum lifetime upgrades license was an agreement between two parties, and one of those parties ceased to exist over 6 years ago. BandLab may decide to do any number of things as a courtesy to people who had agreements with the old company. So far those things have included 6 years of keeping the old company's licensing and download servers running, and issuing their rebranded version of SONAR with a free license. They have no obligation to continue to provide free licenses for products they make with the SONAR (or any other) code. These are not legal technicalities or "some hedge lawyer thing." This is the way the world works, and decisions about whether to buy such things as lifetime upgrade licenses must take that into account. Companies fail, especially in the music industry. FL Studio users are gambling that Image Line will be around for as long as they need them to be. I'm pretty confident that whatever the fee is for the upcoming Sonar, it will come as a pleasant surprise to those who remember SONAR Platinum costing hundreds of dollars. BandLab's costs to produce and distribute Cakewalk/Sonar/Next are way less than when there was a Cakewalk, Inc. with multiple tiers of management, marketing department, legal department, centralized headquarters with maintenance, lease, reception, utilities, and so on. The Bakers were doing it lockdown style before it was hip.

For clarity Bandlab purchased the intellectual property rights to the source code related the software SONAR. They did not purchase the business Cakewalk Inc. or any other aspect of the business. That is still owned by Gibson. Any grief over what was paid to Gibson needs to be taken up with them Gibson. At the time, 2017, a class action was discussed but we realised we would probably lose more money than it was worth pursuing.

I, freaking, love, this, piano!

The story I read was that the library started out as a personal project to solve a real-world problem, rather than as a commercial enterprise. Her piano was a key (!) component of her recorded sound, but impractical to take on tour. It was probably her engineer or producer who suggested sampling it for that reason. It was sampled by her own crew at her own studio. Nowadays for gigs she often plays "her piano" via a MIDI keyboard. My guess is that some marketer heard the story and figured the pun was just too good to pass up. I remember thinking it was a lame gimmick when the product was first announced, and was as surprised as everyone else when it turned out to be pretty good.

https://vstbuzz.com/deals/79-off-diva-bundle-by-the-unfinished/ 49€ plus VAT where applicable. For 2 weeks.

Along with 2 samplepacks In APRIL 2024 Issue Subscribers can get now https://www.zinio.com/computer-music-m3730

Buy Clipper, get Widener FREE* Offer valid between February 20th - March 31st, 2024. https://www.softube.com/products/Clipper Not tested yet...

Me, I don't know exactly what was included in the sale. The tone of your post seemed as if you have some anger toward BandLab. Did I get that wrong? Promises and indications made by whom? Official representatives of BandLab? What were the promises? In my memory, BandLab employees haven't made many promises in this forum, especially not specific ones. The most they ever say is that they are working on something or other, but even that is not definite. In any case, I like to go on whatever has happened, vs. what might happen. So far what has happened is that Cakewalk by BandLab is still free to download, register, and use, the company has announced that it intends to replace it with a new, improved program called Sonar that will cost money to license. Cakewalk by BandLab will continue to function as it does now, but at some point in the future its registration servers may be taken offline. They haven't said how much money they are going to charge, nor have they said when any of these changes are going to happen. Since I've been paying attention (6 years) BandLab haven't made any dikc moves (IMO), although I will say that I was really happy that the hard-timeout pop-up ad for Sonar that affected offline launches of CbB was dealt with in speedy fashion. 😏

Almost 40 years ago I bought my first acoustic piano, a baby grand made in Korea by Yeoung Chang. It was the most expensive thing I'd ever purchased short of my first home, so I had to finance it over 10 years. While I was in the piano store waiting for the contract to be drawn up, I walked around the room plinking on every piano in there. When I sat down at one of them, the hairs on my arms stood up. It was incredibly responsive and had a lightning-fast action. But it was the amazing tone that got me excited, bright and harmonically rich. I ran to the sales office and said "hold everything! I fear I'm about to make a big mistake - I have found the perfect piano!". The salesman barely looked up from the paperwork when he said "that piano's $60,000". OK then, carry on I said, crushed. This was in the mid-80's. For perspective, my aforementioned house had cost $43K. That piano was a Yamaha C7. Many years later, I'd come to acquire multiple sampled Yamahas. For a whole lot less money. It's still my favorite piano tone for rock 'n roll. Alicia's Keys is sampled from a similar model. Although itself a rarity (only a few were ever built), at its heart it's that classic Yamaha sound. When you hit a low note, it's got some real gravity to it. You just want to play the theme from Jaws. For $13, I am tempted to pick this one up despite having three or four nice Yamaha libraries already.

https://www.meldaproduction.com/subscription/ Just saw this while browsing Melda's website. The text below still talks about the old price of 49€ / month so this seems to be a very new thing. This has been and still is rent-to-own by the way, for anyone interested.

Run Native Access to update

When you wrote scrolling through the ones you have, I can relate -- and I think a lot of folks here can. I've accumulated so many piano sample libraries over the years, from NI, SampleTekk, e-instruments, Toontrack (ezKeys), 8Dio, SoundPaint, XLN (Addictive Keys), Orange Tree Samples, Embertone, Production Voices, Spitfire, SonicCouture, etc., and filled up multiple hard drives with sample libraries that I've been committing more time to pruning then I ever have. The hardest sample libraries for me to delete (psychologically) are the libraries I've paid for (while I've bought a few sample libraries secondhand, I have yet to attempt to sell a sample library I've purchased). Of course, it's far easier to delete something you got for free. I've long considered buying the Alicia's Keys library, but I had expected it would be included in KOMPLETE standard at some point. I have friends who own it and like it. I like the tone of it. At $50 USD on sale, it was always a maybe. At $13 USD, I bought it as soon as I saw the price (thanks @cclarry!). One edge we hobbyists have over pros is time. Pros -- at least some of the time -- have urgency to purchases. For instance, they'll need a certain type of instrument to fit a project they need to deliver in say, a couple of weeks. Sure, hobbyists may seek out a certain type of instrument to complete a project -- but we aren't on a timeline that has an economic impact. We can "wait it out" until there's a sale. Time's also in our favor when it comes to mature sample libraries. That is, there's clearly been a trend in the sample library business to heavily discount mature libraries, like NI is doing with Alicia's Keys. It makes sense on the balance sheet too, of course. As, when a library is introduced, a developer needs to pay back their production expenses, and libraries like Alicia's Keys surely paid back those costs years ago, so at this point, the costs are basically data storage and transfer, marketing and royalties incurred for each sale. In other words, they can afford to sell it cheap.

I feel that way with Oblivion Sound Labs. In fact, it's more like close to 100%. Even their free soundbanks are amazing. They really shouldn't be free. Diva owners have to check out their free soundbanks: https://oblivionsoundlab.com/product/radio-waves/ https://oblivionsoundlab.com/product/diva-oblivion/

I find for most preset packs about 20% of them are actually usable or inspiring to me while for the Unfinished stuff I own it’s more like 60%. So yeah, this guy is the best of the best. Ridiculous bargain.

Motorhead - The Watcher

Ok, seems that some of the links weren't updated when the old website was moved... so: 1. Log into legacy.cakewalk.com 2. Use this download link: https://legacy.cakewalk.com/support/dl.aspx?DLID=92 Essentially, change any download link that starts with http://www.cakewalk to https://legacy.cakewalk and it should work. I've let the web team know about the issue.

https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/55-Kontakt-Instrument/11889-Alicia-s-Keys Requires Kontakt Player

Run Softube Central to update

Review: https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2024/02/20/tilr-time-gate/ D/Ls: https://github.com/tiagolr/time1/raw/master/dist/TIME1.vst3 ... and ... https://github.com/tiagolr/gate1/raw/master/dist/GATE1.vst3 Tilr launched the Time1 delay and Gate1 gate and volume control plugins, free Windows releases available via GitHub repositories. The developer describes Time1 as an open-source delay modulator similar to plugins like Gross Beat or TimeShaper, while Gate1 is an envelope generator for gate and volume control.

It's called "The Time is Magic" a full length album, old school style, 10 songs are ordered to work as a continuous listen. i thought i'd introduce some of the songs on it, starting with this one: "High Time" https://batsbrew.bandcamp.com/track/high-time it's an acoustic number, has a cool feel to it. hope you dig it!

That joke was Supreme.

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Night Watchman:

free soundfonts. i use the sforzando player (free) The Blanchet 1720 – Play a virtual harpsichord copied from an 18th-century French instrument. It’s perfect for adding a touch of history to your music. The soundbank is available in soundfont or Kontakt 2 format. Either way, you’re sure to get a high-quality, authentic sound. http://sonimusicae.free.fr/blanchet1-en.html Christian Zell Harpsichord 1737 – 420 MB https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/728 The Small Italian – Small Italian is a soundbank of a harpsichord copied from an anonymous 17th-century Italian instrument. This soundbank is perfect for Renaissance and 17th-century music and is available in Kontakt 2 format and sf2 format. http://sonimusicae.free.fr/petititalien-en.html

$9 for this one by Experimenta. $39 for a bundle of 3 from RealSamples. I think these deals last only 19 more hours from me posting this.

They won't be on your products page. You have to open the Support > Knowledge Base page and search for Sonar 8. I found 8.0.1, 8.0.2 and 8.3.1 updates there. They can be downloaded by fixing the links as per msmcleod above.

I just installed and it occupies 7 GB on my samples drive. Maybe they're compressed ? 5 big .nkx files and some other stuff.

Did that just Dawn on you? 😁

😦 Ummmm... Make sure you've got space on your hard drive!

Your jokes add a whole new 5th Dimension to the forum. (I checked. They switched to Motown in the late 70s. 😁)

It takes a lot of smarts to say something genuinely clever and funny ! I got to give it to you , that pun was pretty good Kenny

That worked for me. Thank you very much. That's a nice job you did there!! Thank you too!!

I did a lot of research looking for a 2x2 interface for my Grandson. Yes those are good choices. The SSL2 + was my favourite pick so we are just waiting to hear back from a few local music stores. Here’s my video I made that lists them all.

Links is there and it works (just verified).

Miles Davis - So What:

Nik Turner's Fantastic All Stars - So What

sneaking another new one for folks to hear.... this is my 'rock waltz' it's a true story, about a friend traveling abroad https://batsbrew.bandcamp.com/track/the-travel-song

It refers to using it in the short term. Cbb will be available for some time to give users time to transition to Sonar which will be the only product supported going forward. I think we've all learned that lifetime messaging can be ambiguous right? 😉 The bigger question to me is why anyone serious about using our products want to use an old unsupported product, when a much better (and affordable) version is made available. If you want to see this product developed further, it's only fair that we ask for you to support us in turn. I don't think anyone expected that cbb would be indefinitely free forever. In the future there may be a free version (with some limitations) however.

Thanks, John. Band-in-a-Box evolved from a DOS 5 app, and PG Music keeps it back-compatible. That's a good thing, but it also carries some limitations. The limitations include the number of chords in a measure, timing of 120 pulses per quarter note, and no real time signature support. BiaB's grid is made of numbered cells. The cells can be 1, 2, 3, or 4 beats, and you can use those combinations to make them bars of music. But you don't have to. By using my EXPANDED styles, you can make each section of a cell a half beat, instead of a beat. This allows you to do these things: Put up to 8 chords in a bar of music, and keep it compatible with older versions of BiaB Put a chord on a beat and also the 8th not before the same beet, and keep it compatible with older versions Enter many cut time songs so that each grid Effectively change the resolution from 120ppm to 240ppm. Here is a free demo EXPANDED style https://www.nortonmusic.com/expanded.html - you need BiaB to use it. ------ I offer regular styles too. Many of the BiaB styles were made by people who are part-time musicians. Working at PG Music 40 hours a week and also making styles. The advantage I hope I offer is that I am a full-time, professional, career musician. I play sax, wind synthesizer, flute, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, and vocals. I've been in almost famous bands and local bars. I've played in rock, disco, country, Latin American, blues, and a variety of other genre bands. I studied music theory and arranging. So instead of buying styles that were made by an office worker who dabbles in music, you get styles from a career musician who dabbles in computers. I use the StyleMaker app, from PG Music, so they are 100% compatible with all versions of BiaB. Demos are here https://www.nortonmusic.com/styledemo.html and here https://www.nortonmusic.com/contents.html#biab I don't charge much, after the web host, shopping cart company, Visa/MC authorization company, Visa/MC Merchant's account, Business Bank Account, and other “silent partners” there is a little left over for me. Not enough to survive on by any stretch of the imagination, but I make my living playing music, so I don't need to make a killing on software. I also make Fake Disks (song disks) for BiaB. Explanation, and links with free samples are here https://www.nortonmusic.com/contents.html#fake And you can export my work from Band-in-a-Box and import it into Cakewalk. I could say a lot more. If you need more, whether they involve my styles or not, just ask. Notes ♫

Notes didn't give you a direct link, so I will. I highly recommend Power User Style Disk #17 that offers all Expanded Styles. I'll let Notes tell you what that means, but you want it! https://www.nortonmusic.com/contents.html#biab

You need to purchase my styles (Self-serving plug) Notes ♫

Melody Sauce 2 will be offered for only $29 instead of the normal $59 from today until March 4, 2024. https://audioplugin.deals/product/melody-sauce-2-by-evabeat/

real nice sounds.jack c

I checked on the manufacturer website and 79$ seems like the regular upgrade price.

"bunch"? They bought almost all what was the source of Cakewalk Inc.! Only that's what I wanted to state. Actually I didn't and don't want to argue about that old stuff, but it provokes me if people sugarcoat BL. There have been a lot of promises and indications in the last years and most is not true anymore. Just read the old theads. But maybe I (and some others) have just a growing fantasy, i.e. it's all pure imagination! That's what I said in other words, too!

It's like listening to morning radio in L.A. driving down I-5. Very cool👍🏼 BTW I like the picture.

I'm running sonar on a 10 year old pc with a very average graphics card and I don't see any performance degradation compared to cbb. The graphics look vastly cleaner rendered as svgs compared to bitmaps (no aliasing) and text looks much sharper too. This is especially evident if you are running at higher dpi resolutions like 2k or 4k. We have been paying attention to performance and have not seen any hit so far. In fact we've made other optimizations to rendering. Btw for those thinking they can’t upgrade without new hardware, my old almost 10 year old DAW PC is running with no issues on win 11 even though there's no TPM chip add the CPU is out of spec. There are ways to get windows 11 installed on older hardware

Hey, Bat! I just purchased the album and am downloading the FLAC files now. That was a quick 0.5 GB download. LOVE fiber-based Internet access! I live in France now, so the payment system added France's 20% VAT, but only to the original $7 minimum, and not on the extra $3 I tossed in. It kept mentioning euros, but charged me in $. I still have a US bank account and a dollar-based PayPal account in addition to my euro-based one, so I didn't have to pay PayPal's high currency exchange fees. This song f'ing rocks! Looking forward to listening to the others. We used to be neighbors when I lived in Flagstaff, but we're still neighbors via the digital world. Keep doing what you're doing! John

I made the mistake of starting with a folding tripod-style table (made by Samson, iirc) because it was compact. But it kept falling over. At one point it dumped my mixer onto the concrete floor in my garage and took out one of the mixer's channels. Another time it bent the power supply connector on another mixer, making it impossible to disconnect. So when I invested significant money in a compact digital mixer I was determined to never let anything bad happen to it. Here's what I'm using now. It's lightweight but quite solid and stable, height-adjustable and folds up flat for packing in the van. Those speakers look like a nice solution. I have used similar powered speakers, the ones made by Bose. I was amazed at how you could place them anywhere and not get feedback. Their only drawback was we couldn't get a whole lot of volume from them. But for low-volume gigs they sounded lovely. No distortion despite handling keyboards, guitar, drum machine and two vocals. My monitor strategy these days is to run mine (QSC K8.2) at low volume but up close. It sits atop a speaker stand about 18" from my ear. Being a PA speaker, it's full bandwidth, which is important because I am often mixing the band from the stage and need to hear the full mix (keys, guitar, drums, bass and vox) in the same proportions that are coming out the mains. I only wish QSC made a 6" version that wouldn't block my view of the audience as much. I totally understand. It provides a depth and texture that you don't normally hear in live performances, and therefore makes you stand out from the crowd. It sounds great with my own PA, but unfortunately I often play venues with house systems that aren't stereo. Or for that matter, anything close to high-fidelity. Pearls before swine. But if I was, say, playing in a house band in a quiet restaurant with quality reinforcement, then I'd absolutely revisit Omnisphere. As well as Keyscape, for its electric pianos, and the IKM Hammond, and probably Zebra2 for synth leads. Sadly, that's not my world. Well, your first mistake is "refusing to go broke in the process". I gave up on that principle a while ago. That old washer/dryer makes grinding noises but still has a few years left, I can live with that leaky faucet a while longer, and my car is Italian and therefore built to last forever. I agree, using a controller that's designed for abuse by musicians is probably a much better idea than using a laptop. Assuming, of course, that it's rugged enough to be a key piece of your rig. Or cheap enough that you can afford a spare. I would definitely advise buying a nice padded hardshell case for it if it's going to travel at all. When I think about it, it scares me how many individual devices I have that could halt a show should they fail. So I try not to think about that.

Gary, I ran that particular tweak and it did seem to make a big difference. Here is another video that goes into a possibly more specific breakdown of the Ultimate Power Plan settings: Again, I have to go back to the dramatic difference my stability became after installing the RME interface and drivers. It would be interesting to see if things held steady let’s say if I went back to the Arturia or Focusrite. That might be something to investigate, but for now I am feeling a confidence in my system that is hard to explain. Joyfully, Simeon

For advanced time signatures in BiaB here is my workaround: Remember, each cell in the BiaB matrix does not have to be a complete bar/measure of music. It can be a fraction of a bar, or two bars, depending on the song, and what sounds best. For 5/4 time, I will set the first cell for 3 beats (using F5 dialog box), and the next cell for 2 beats. That makes the two cells,equal one 5/4 bar of music. Repeat for as long as there is a 5/4 meter. Depending on the song, the first bar might be 2 and the second one 3. 7/4 is similar, either 4 and 3, or 3 and 4. For 6/8 taken in 2, I'll choose an appropriate sw style (as marked in the style picker dialog) and each cell will be 2 measures of 6/8 or one measure of 12/8. Sometimes using a 3/4 style, which will make 2 BiaB cells one 6/8 measure works, especially, but not always, if the 6/8 is taken in 6 (slower tempos). None of these hacks need a special EXPANDED style, just an appropriate PG Music or Norton Music style. Notes ♫