Larry Jones

Annabelle - I found a list of DAWs that are accessible to screen readers on this blog: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/music-software-accessible-we-rank-best-worst-apps-will-butler Please note these are the subjective rankings of a blind music producer and teacher. The top four are Apple only. The first one that can run on Windows is Reaper. This article is four years old, but "Sonar" is number seven on the list. By that time, SONAR did not exist, having been replaced by Cakewalk by Bandlab. It says that the architecture of Windows makes it difficult to build in accessibility. The list is only a small part of the article, and there is much more information there. I don't know how hard it is for your screen reader to parse formatted text on the internet. If you think it would help, let me know and I will copy and paste the article into a plain text editor (Notepad) and send it to you. Good luck!

Click here.

May I ask what Presonus pulled?

Haha. For the past ten months or so I've been thinking if I don't like what New Sonar has to offer, I'll just say a (bittersweet) goodbye to my favorite DAW and switch to something else. Thanks, @John Vere for pointing out that if I do that I will lose access to the past 20 years of projects, including some that were never all the way finished. I still have a couple of older, buggier editions of SONAR, but I dread firing one of those up and trying to get anything done. I could make it my full time job for the next few months extracting stems from those old projects, but of course I used a lot of plugins that only work with SONAR or CbB, and I've never had occasion to extract stems before, so I'd have to learn how to do that, and probably get a new drive to hold all those redundant files. Jeez. April Fools on me, I guess.

This ^^^is what I think. The problem for users is, the biggest fish we have to fry is the one installed on our computers: CbB/New Sonar.

We're not. Their website describes Bandlab as their flagship product (their words), which, according to this thread, now has a hundred million users, probably a few more than Cakewalk/New Sonar. I expect the bulk of corporate and engineering resources will go to the flagship. I'm sure CbB users will get the best CMG can offer, but it's likely the Bandlab platform with its huge user base will come first in the allocation of promotional and development money. I'm the first to hope for a great product when New Sonar is released, because I want to keep using it as my main DAW. But in light of the current situation I do have a "plan B."

I looked up Caldecott Music Group (CMG) and I see that it is apparently the new name for Bandlab, while the name "Bandlab" lives on as the name of their online collab platform. The Bandlab app is pretty much useless to me, but it's described on the website as their "flagship" product. This does not bode well for those of us who need a full-featured, powerful DAW, but it does kind of explain their failure to deliver a product nine and a half months after announcing it, as CMG's priorities might lie more with Bandlab, not Sonar.

Pretty soon everyone will be a "producer,"

Nope. I obsessively checked this forum hundreds of times over the nine months since last Spring's new product announcement, hoping to find a release date and pricing for a finished product (not gonna lie -- if it was not affordable for me I was going to have to look elsewhere). It seems that on the very day I resolved to create my current project in Studio One, there was a kind of sneak release of... I don't know, but maybe the final New Sonar. So I didn't know about it until a week later, when I was too busy climbing the S1 Learning Curve. @Noel Borthwick has said it's "not a beta," but reading the forum it looks to me like it's not a finished product either. I'm not technical enough to make any useful critiques of beta products, I don't have the kind of video monitors that would reveal the goodness of the new vector graphics, and forum members here have uncovered enough problems with the current "release" that I don't want to get involved right now. When Bandlab says New Sonar is really ready, I'll join in on a (free) trial period, fingers crossed that my fave DAW for the past twenty years is still The One for me.

Have to say I was a little upset that he seemed to be "moving on" from CbB. I was using Pro Audio and SONAR for some time before the Gibson debacle, and was happy to pay the $$$ to keep it up to date, so I didn't know much of anything about the other DAWs out there. I think the biggest version was SONAR Platinum at ~$400, so I felt like I was using a legit product that was in the same league as other four hundred dollar DAWs. When Gibson pulled the plug, I tried a few other DAWs, and actually bought Samplitude and Studio One. So when Mike started to say CbB was merely the best free DAW and he was going to focus on S1, I took it personally. Couldn't help it. I'm not a cheer-leading fanboi, but hey -- I'm in touch with my sensitive side. This nine-month tease that's been going on has got me starting to use S1 exclusively. After all this time, the one element Bandlab has touted as the biggest and best development in new Sonar -- vector graphics -- is the one element forum users seem to find is not up to par. Bad color choices, blurry text, buttons that don't light up, etc. I mean, why wait nine months to put out a trial version, and then not get the UI right? It shakes my faith. I'm hoping a paid version of New Sonar gets released while I'm still young, and that it kicks ***** so I can buy it and get on with making music. But at the moment I'm learning Studio One. I'm not one of those "...create in Live, mix in Sonar, master in Studio One" kind of guys. I'll choose one DAW and stay with it. Who has time to get good with two, three (or more) programs?

Haha! @John Vere, I believe you and I had this discussion a couple of years ago. The people who populate the Bandlab Universe can barely be called musicians, and the "work" they do bears only a passing resemblance to music. Great idea, facilitating collaboration, but during the worst of the pandemic I was able to produce several song projects with a five-piece band whose members are spread all over the country, without ever getting everyone together in the same room, and we even made videos! We drop-boxed files back and forth and it was not easy, but easier than using Bandlab. Edited to add: I'm not including my colleagues here who have crossed over to become Bandlab users in the "barely musicians" category. You guys are the best, and you raise the quality level anywhere you go.

Unless you are an executive at Bandlab, you don't know this for a fact, and you are just speculating. You might turn out to be correct, but your forceful "this-is-the-way-it's-going-to-be" presentation is, at this point, really just guesswork. We are all -- as we have been for the past nine months -- waiting to receive the final verdict from Bandlab.

I think what you are leaving out is that Bandlab is currently in a somewhat tenuous position with their flagship DAW, having announced it nine months ago and still not delivered. I don't think I'm the only long-time Cakewalk/Pro Audio/SONAR user who is a bit testy about being told the current free DAW is at end of life, and the replacement won't be free, and then suffering this interminable wait with very little info about what's happening. (Please note I don't use it because it is free. It became free while I was using it -- and paying regularly for upgrades.) So I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that when the beta of New Sonar expires, Bandlab will ask for more money to keep using the final release, simply because they will want to accommodate their existing customer base, which has been, all things considered, quite loyal and patient. I think the most likely scenario (and what do I know?) is that those who ponied up for the Bandlab Membership mainly to get access to New Sonar will be allowed to keep that access as part of their membership. After the membership expires, I'd expect to have a choice between re-upping and buying Sonar sans Membership. Otherwise I'd go from being testy to being cranky.

@Chris Ward I've been following this thread since the start. Sorry I don't have the solution, but I'd like to suggest that if your problem is fixed, you should show the answer right here, so that future readers will have ready access to all the context of the previous three (or more?) pages. On that glorious day you can edit your original post and add the word "solved" to the title. Also, if you want to alert another forum user that you're saying something to them, type the @ symbol and then start typing the user name. A menu of names will drop down. Find the user you're trying to alert and select that name from the list. Good luck!

@John Vere Are you one of The Knights Who Say Ni? Asking for a friend.