Craig Reeves

1. You asked me what I felt Cakewalk did better than Ableton and I answered your question by stating the various things Ableton doesn't have going for it. It would logically follow that since I'm comparing it to Cakewalk, that Cakewalk does indeed feature these things Ableton is missing and these features are important to me. And if you look at some of my other posts putting Cakewalk on blast for every single thing, you'll find that I'm not the type to say things just to be liked here. 2. And yes, it IS my opinion. This is a thread about OPINIONS. It is my opinion that Ableton is overpriced. If they're still able to be sustainable with such a price point, that's great, but in my OPINION, I am not willing to part with $800 for it. 3. I don't know what SONAR's sales numbers were compared to other DAWs on Windows, but I'm willing to bet it was one of the best-selling DAWs on the platform, probably second only to FL Studio. Gibson shut Cakewalk down mainly because Gibson went bankrupt in 2018. Emagic went out of business in 2002 as well despite Logic being one of the best-selling DAWs at the time. And yes, there have probably always been more professionals using Mac programs than Windows programs. There are more professionals using ProTools than anything else. Most professionals do not have time to try every DAW and see which one is the best. Most professionals only have experience in the DAW they started in as they are too busy to learn anything else. And the idea that pricing is only important to "hobbyists" is laughable. MOST professional musicians are broke. You'll be surprised how often I have been in studio sessions with professionals who are still using cracked software because they can't afford to pay for what they're using. Many professionals work day jobs to try to make ends meet. So yeah, pricing is very, very important. And determining which DAWs are "professional" is mostly determined by who the DAWs are marketed towards and the opinions of its users, not so much their capabilities or features.

A few things... First off, since in an earlier post you asked about Ableton I will offer a few areas but I'm not really one to bash other DAWs too much, plus I think Ableton is a great DAW. But Ableton is vastly overpriced, simple and plain. There is no justification as to why the top version should be $800. Ableton's piano roll isn't as robust or as smooth, step recording is rudimentary compared to Cakewalk, no ARA 2 support, MIDI controls like velocity and expression can't be automated, no comping, limited support for .rex files, no mix recall are a few areas. Are there areas in which Ableton is better? Of course there is, so to each his own... And keep in mind, Cakewalk used to be $400 and many of the people still using Cakewalk today were people who were using it then. So compared to the other free DAWs out there, there are way more professionals using Cakewalk than Garage Band. If there were other DAWs that were truly better or if Cakewalk just simply couldn't deliver what I needed anymore, I would switch to something else, but there really isn't much Cakewalk isn't able to do. Every DAW has bugs their community hates, including Cakewalk. Logic Pro X has bugs, Ableton, Cubase, FL Studio, Reason, they all have bugs. Cakewalk is unstable and crashes too much....just like pretty much every other major DAW in existence.

You're absolutely right Lord Tim. Oftentimes when I compare Cakewalk to other DAWS it might sound like I like those other DAWS better, but the DAWS I compare Cakewalk to are DAWS that I left FOR Cakewalk. And I left for a reason. There are TONS of things I wish Ableton, for instance, did as well as Cakewalk.

Yes you are exactly right Kevin Perry that is the workaround for now. I was about to put up a Youtube video to show a workaround for that! But the feature still needs to be added because such a feature shouldn't require such workarounds. But I will later post a video on that very workaround.

For audio, as of right now, the only way to use Elastique to follow project tempo is through AudioSnap. The problem is that AudioSnap very often detects the wrong tempo and doesn't allow you to manually put the correct tempo in. In some cases, it will allow you to choose from a few tempos the algorithm guessed, but most of the time none of the tempos AudioSnap guessed are correct and so there should be an option to allow us to manually type in the correct root tempo. The groove clip loop editor (ALT+7) allows this. AudioSnap should as well.

Well the problem is that in order to follow project tempo using Elastique Efficient/Pro, the only way by which to do that is through AudioSnap, which AudioSnap doesn't do this very well. If Cakewalk had a way to automatically slip-stretch audio clips as you increase or decrease tempo, there would not be any need to go through AudioSnap to follow project tempo using Elastique. I would think such a feature would be pretty easy for Cakewalk to implement.

Cakewalk is one of the best paid or unpaid. It's not perfect, but no DAW is. The only real glaring weakness with Cakewalk is the timestretching. It's just plain bad compared to other DAWs in it's class, especially Ableton Live. This is mainly because AudioSnap is pretty much broken and Cakewalk tends to crash when stretching too many audio claps, that or the audio engine craps out and has problems. Outside of AudioSnap (which is broken), there isn't an automatic stretch-to-tempo outside of Groove Clip which is like, 15 years out of date.

Cakewalk's support is excellent. All the developers, including Noel, are amazing, talented and passionate about what they do. I complain about Cakewalk a lot it seems but I believe it is the best DAW in the world!

Yeah. It turns out the offending software was Streamlabs OBS. It slowed Ableton Live 10 down even WORSE. I just have to turn my latency up when that program is open it seems.

Nevermind, the problem was with another piece of software that was running in the background that was for whatever reason slowing Cakewalk down.

I have a very, very fast computer. So when I open heavy loaded sessions, my computer doesn't have any issues. However, I still get pops, cracks and late buffers not because my computer is slow (I have a Ryzen 9 3950X CPU with 128 GB of RAM on an SSD), but rather, the Audio Engine Load is around 30%-50% in many cases while the Audio Processing Load is less than 4% and Disk load is about 2%. Is the problem that Cakewalk hasn't modernized their software audio engine to take advantage of faster PC's like mine? And have other DAWS done so?

Ctrl+D: The unsung hero of workflow!

You're correct. I'll delete the post.

Exactly.