Lord Tim

This is the actual graphic: (Obviously parts will look transparent on a white background like this, open it in a new window to see it) As you can see, it's quite large, and bitmaps don't scale as well as vector graphics, which is the entire reason they're updating the UI on Sonar. Additionally, this forum software is made by https://invisioncommunity.com/ Every forum is different but every one I've used so for or have been admin on has recommended large graphic sizes so they can be resized down properly by the forum software. This is something that should be taken up with them, not Bandlab. Also, this is what I'm seeing on all of my machines: I dunno how it looks on your machines but this is scaling pretty well for me for a bitmap image, and much less pixelated than the one you posted. Perhaps your browser or display scaling is set incorrectly? At this point, I'm honestly unsure if you're trolling or not. I think Jesse spelled it all out pretty well earlier.

That is sensational! HAHA!

It was rubbish.

..... Going to do it anyway!

I think the real question is, should you put motorbikes on pizza? 🤔 (I actually don't mind pineapple on pizza. Sue me! Bah.)

I'd assume a lot of that would also be offloaded to a GPU as well, reducing CPU load even further.

That's a bitmap. It doesn't scale properly. Like vectors do. Which is the entire point.

Weird! One solution is to add in some other plugin (even, say, Sonitus EQ) after the reverb on the bus and have the output gain turned up by the same amount that this thing is dropping, and leave it in bypass mode for when you're mixing. Then on export, enable it. Not overly elegant but if you do love the sound of that reverb, that's a way to at least get around the problem.

In this case it turned out to be a hijacked audio driver, which is always a risk you're going to take by using onboard audio. Even if it does work, you only need to see Lucie's other thread to see that even getting stuff to play isn't always the be all / end all of things when there's other apps running. This is exactly the reason so many of us always recommend even a cheaper ASIO interface with good drivers, it sidesteps quite a lot of these issues entirely.

Sonar is basically the next stage of the SONAR Platinum / Cakewalk by Bandlab line and will open your legacy projects (from what I understand it'll still happily open old .WRK files from the early days too) but as I understand it, Next is a whole new product that has its own thing going on. It'd be nice to see some kind of import tool, absolutely! But I guess if this is similar to Bandlab Studio, then you can upload your project to the Bandlab servers inside Cakewalk like we can now, and then open it up inside Next. It won't be a 1:1 thing but it'll be enough to get a project idea across from platform to platform.

Just to clarify again for people, this is the old Gibson era SONAR Platinum product that's been discontinued for over 5 years. There has been no pricing information released for the new Cakewalk Sonar (or Cakewalk Next) as yet.

The "check activation" thing has been talked about a lot and the short answer is: 1. Small team, finite resources to support the product, so the more people on a current product, the less wild goose chases for old bugs that may already have been fixed in the current version And 2. Bandlab is a business, they want to know how many active users they have. They invested in the Cakewalk IP for a reason, and I doubt it would have been cheap. I know I'd want to know some metrics on my userbase if I just dropped a wad of cash on a product.

Alternatively, you could buy a version of an app, get 2 or 3 updates during the course of its lifespan, then you have to buy an upgrade to the new version, with no fixes going to the previous version. Many companies do this. If anything, having ongoing support while you're paying for a subscription (or whatever it would be called) is actually more flexible than that. Your app doesn't stop working when you stop paying, unlike other companies like to do, and you get ongoing updates spanning different revisions rather than being locked into a single version update cycle.

Do you think they would be using the same graphics, names and even website for the last 5 years if they didn't have the rights? This would have ALL been part of the Intellectual Property. Remember when Bandlab announced Cakewalk back 5 years ago and it was identical to SONAR Platinum? Now 5 years on, if you opened up SPlat from back then, there's a heap of stuff you'll notice is missing, let alone bug fixes. The idea of this is the rebrand, and the GUI which has had a lot of complaints in the forums recently about being blurry in places on high resolution monitors. They can either stick Bandaids over the top of the problem or they can bite the bullet and do the work to fix the problem, which is a MAJOR job considering it's a completely different paradigm as far was how the UI is created. Not surprised this is taking a lot of time to do, and not surprised that this will be the only real headline feature in the first iteration of the new product either. Not directed to anyone in this thread in particular, but nobody here is crapping on anyone for asking questions - it's obvious stuff is still being worked out at Bandlab HQ that the Bakers can't talk about yet, so it's fair to speculate. But man, there's a lot of "the sky is falling" and general FUD in these threads, threats to go to another paid product and learn a new system if they make this one a paid product (WTF?), or just general misunderstandings. At the end of the day, nobody here is your mum - if the terms going forward don't work for you, people all have the choice to go wherever they please. But throwing toys out of the cot because of speculation is ridiculous. Let's see what's actually happening first, this isn't even day 1 yet.

The naming scheme is throwing a lot of mud into the water, unfortunately. What we had prior to Bandlab was a Gibson-owned company called Cakewalk. The flagship product of the Cakewalk company was an application called SONAR Platinum. Gibson closed down the Cakewalk company, and then sold all of the code, names, artwork... all of the Intellectual Property... to Bandlab Technologies. Bandlab Technologies used that code to create a product called Cakewalk. This isn't the company Cakewalk, it's what they named the application. Cakewalk the company is defunct. Now that there's 2 products in the stable at Bandlab, they renamed the product that was formerly called Cakewalk to Sonar. This isn't SONAR (all caps) Platinum, which was previously owned by the previous Cakewalk company, this is Cakewalk Sonar, owned by Bandlab. They obviously have the rights to all of the naming schemes, which was part of the Intellectual Property they bought from Gibson. Was it the right choice to call this new version of their application Sonar? That's debatable. I like it personally, but it's certainly confusing a few people.

The have tech support now, either by submitting a ticket HERE or mailing support@cakewalk.com but they obviously need to keep paying these people moving forward...

So to be clear, you don't like the possible direction going forward, you don't find anything in Cakewalk to be a killer feature, your last group of posts have been nothing but critical of the software and forum in some way... why are you still here? I would have moved onto a "better" DAW years ago.

From what I understand from the posts by the devs, other than the new UI update that's coming and probably a few new bells and whistles, this is going to be identical to the current CbB under the hood on launch.

No you don't if you only purchase their intellectual property, which Bandlab did. They didn't purchase the company at all, just the code to make the program. They also hired the programmers that Gibson fired. But this is 100% a new unrelated company otherwise.

^^ This is good advice in general for any issue.

A car isn't software and it doesn't work like that anyway. If you bought a car from a certain dealer and they said "you have free car maintenance services forever" and then they went broke and closed the dealership, and then another dealership started selling models of your car, it's really going to be up to them if they offer any of the previous dealership's perks. In Bandlab's case, they bought the plans on how to build a particular bit of software and hired the engineers that made it, and really nothing else. And to their credit, they also let you use all of the third party options that were locked to the previous company's product, and still offered legacy downloads of that company's product if you already owned it, which is more than most companies would do. The beef really is with Gibson for shuttering things for those who paid for subscriptions, not Bandlab. As far as Cakewalk by Bandlab goes, they haven't started charging for it. By the sounds of things, it'll continue to be free but just won't be updated or offered for download for new customers, basically being superseded by Sonar. For whatever reason, they've moved to a paid model for the software now, and I guess it's up to us if we want to follow them down that path or not. Given the goodwill from both Bandlab and the team they hired (Noel and co), I'd be surprised if the plans were anything but fair.

Great stuff, glad you got it sorted

For anyone playing along at home, I got a test project from Lucie and it worked absolutely fine on my system, so it's not project specific at all. Audio interface is an onboard Realtek chip, which usually does work great with WASAPI drivers, so something is definitely weird here!

OK, this video says a lot. It's definitely not loop points or anything like that. This sounds like your driver is getting hijacked by something else on your system. Did you notice the audio dropped out when it was playing too? Are you using WASAPI Shared or Exclusive? Try either one. Also try putting a tick in Preferences > Audio > Playback and Recording > Suspend Audio Engine when Cakewalk is Not in Focus The other thing I'd suggest is rebooting and trying Cakewalk as the first thing you do when it starts. There's a good chance Chrome or some other streaming software is trying to take control. Other than that... summoning the forum's Smarter Person Than Me, please! I'm happy to be taken to school by someone who can figure this out.

Jesse has a fair point. Remember when we got the Arranger Inspector icon and it broke every user theme because all of the spacing was different? I remember making a custom theme when the Theme Editor first got released and I got about half way through it and realised it would all need to be overhauled if any new UI elements got added... and sure enough...! That put me off of making any new ones. (You crazy .STH Lords have my respect!) There definitely needed to be a new paradigm, especially since this is all bitmap based and that's not going to scale well to different resolutions.