martinh

8 minutes ago, Johnbee58 said:

I'm curious.  You people don't seem to have much faith in that they tell us Cakewalk by Bandlab will remain FREE indefinitely. So why such discontent?  If you don't want to pay the sub DON'T! You won't be any worse off than you have been for the past 7 years.  Is there something you're worried about in this deal? Just curious.

?John B

PS I don't know about anybody else but I just got an update this morning for CbB.  That tells me the future for it is pretty secure for now at least.

 

I have zero faith that Cakewalk by Bandlab will remain FREE indefinitely.  Its not the way modern business models work.  Even if it costs them $0 to leave it alone and working, its drawing potential business from Sonar.  The money/strategy folks who run companies will never allow such a thing.

 

2 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

The more they delay that answer, the more it confirms that there's a high chance this is what they'll end up doing. Same with not giving a straight answer in regards to subscription plans.

 

Yea.  I'm not suspecting  bad intent yet, but  I've spent too long dealing with business law not to seek clarification of  statements like:

"We have no intention of pulling the rug  out from under existing Cwb users." 

While this may seem reassuring, I've see similar language  parsed as:

"We have no intention of pulling the rug  out from under existing Cwb users, and  that's  why we're offering them the opportunity of buying  Sonar subscriptions when when we shut down Cwb."  Or;

"We had no intention of pulling the rug  out from under existing Cwb users at the time we made that statement, because we had not decided on a  final product and pricing structure."

As I said, it's their product and  they can do what they want,  I paid for Sonar Platinum before, and  I'm planning to go on to "new" Sonar if its not prohibitively expensive,   but I do rather wish  they'd be upfront about this issue - yes or no .  Anyone from Bandlab care to comment? 

Outside the issue of the desirability of Sonar as a new  ( and potentially very good) paid product that i will probably buy, be it on a subscription or single copy model, I'm still seeing a lot of ambiguity whether users will be able to "freeze" a  Cwb  system and continue to run it in the future.

None of the statements from Bandlab  staff  in this thread  confirm,  to me,  that the "end of support" of Cwb does not include turning off the the current authorization server, and that the first time Cwb attempts its periodic  reauthorization after the end of support, it will fail and shut down.

I'm not saying that Bandlab cannot do this.  They have no contractual obligation to continue Cwb that I can see.  But it would  reassure a lot of users if we could have an unambiguous answer to this question.   

2 hours ago, michaelhanson said:

Martin,

I've seen others calling Lifetime subscribers as fools, naive or having some general lack of wisdom.....as in what did you expect. 

I suspect that most assessed the situation as I did.  We were paying for regular updates anyway or we were on the current Gibson subscription model.  I knew it was a gamble, but no more than buying into any piece of software.  For the price at the time, it was a reasonable gamble that the company "could" stay alive, but if it didn't make it and honor, it wasn't a huge monetary loss.  The odds were certainly better than betting in Vegas.  

To your point though about cynicism, I can relate.  Burn me once, not to get burned twice. 

Incidentally, my Gibson LP's are still my best instruments and since new management took over Gibson, the 2019 to present guitars are pretty spectacular.   

I have to admit the financial loss was minimal compared to some other software/equipment I have purchased over the years .  My irritation was more with  the entire   Henry Juszkiewicz dog and pony show and the fact that new ( and not always useful) features were clearly being prioritized over stability and bug fixes.  IMO  Bandlab had done an excellent job on stabilizing a platform that had a deserved, if sometimes overexaggerated reputation for locking up to a white screen in the middle of a project. 

 My '72 Deluxe  is still going strong  

I’m still on the fence here.  This seems like a positive development as the product was clearly costing Bandlab money to develop and stabilize but not generating any cash in return, and probably not driving a lot of sales for other Bandlab services. This could not go on.   IMO, things  will be fine if a couple of conditions are met.

 [1] An existing Cwb installation should continue to be viable, even if it requires re-installation because of a crash,  i.e.,  the last version should  be available as a  stand-alone .exe, and no longer need to "phone home" or be authorized by a server. 

[2] “New” Sonar should be available on a pay-per-version or per-year model that also remains viable in its present state if a user chooses not to continue to upgrade.  (Yes I was one of the fools who trusted Gibson with 100s of dollars  for “lifetime updates,” which is why I have some cynicism here. ) 

If , on the other hand, they go to a model where a subscription is required to keep existing software running, that would be the breaking  point for me.  

Me too .   If you move to another part of the project without stopping the transport, Drum Replacer loses sync.  

Thank guys.  I'm glad its not just me.  I found that I can get the waveform to come up eventually, but sometimes it seems to take several clicks on the clip to get it to draw, and on one occasion I could not get it to draw without exiting and re-starting.

  MH

HAs anyone had any problem with drum replacer recently?  I'm running 2019-07 build 79 64 bit.  The  DR editor comes up, but it doesn't show any wave forms at all in the display?