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Why is Cakewalk by Bandlab free?


synkrotron

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41 minutes ago, Bapu said:

I have samplitude and mixcraft.

 They are dead  to me. Not worth my time. Not even Samp v4.

Wasted a total of $200 on those two.

I got the deal on Samplitude Pro X3 suite and I like some things about it.  I have used Spectral Layers Pro so the deal was worth it to me.  I'm just a hobbyist that use to be more involved with music in church setting. Now I just dabble in some orchestration type music for my own pleasure. Studio One with its arranger track should be what the doctor ordered. I just have to find the time to spend with it. I don't need the gapless engine like some of the EDM crowd and Cakewalk has been good to me all these years that I keep hanging around. I'm not like Scook and some of the other experts but I have used the software for a long time.

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2 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

I don't see a bunch of companies looking to buy Gibson either,  and they are a household name even non-musicians know.  

While I do think both markets (DAW and Guitars) are generally over saturated, there is a decent sized market and people did buy products in these catergories, the question is who they bought from.  

Everyone in the market had a choice to buy under the Gibson umbrella or from another company.  I bought a Heritage Guitar (before Bandland bought them) because they ere better than Gibson is today (I also own vintage Gibsons).  I bought my DAW from Gibson, since Sonar was better than other DAWs.  However, both of those choices came from someone that is far more educated in these areas than your average consumer.  Each of these companies had a very difficult time reaching the average person.    If they had, the story would be different.   

While Cakewalk adoption has been strong/exceeded expectations of Bandlab....the crazy thing is people are still out there using (and buying) other DAWs when Cakewalk is offered for free.  I understand this from Mac users (who are only a fraction of the personal computer market), but the rest of Windows owners.  They are still paying hundreds for a "similar" product, that doesn't even look as nice?  I think the points to a larger problem that being the best isn't always enough to stay afloat.  

It's because Instruments, Effects Packages, Plug-Ins, and features like AAF support are worth money too.  Free is nice, but it's a pretty barebones package.  You really need to add a lot on top  of it to approach what those other DAWs offer out of the box... and many upstarts won't need to buy anything after buying those other DAWs; at least not for a while.  The value-adds are often more than worth the increase in price.

Melodyne Essential is $99, by itself.  Most Paid DAWs bundle this.

Instruments and Effects Packages can easily run into the $200+ range if you get something as good as what MAGIX, MOTU, Steinberg, etc. bundle out of the box.

At the end of the day, the price of those DAWs is actually quite small, and "Free" for a bare bones package like CbB isn't really that attractive of a value proposition to many.  People are discriminate with their choices.  It's so easy to do research on these  things, these days, and you also are fighting the momentum other products have in the media (i.e. YouTube, Tech Press, etc.).

SONAR has existed long enough that Professionals who already own all the Plugins, Instruments, etc. that they need have already - largely - settled on a DAW...  SONAR itself, or something else.  I don't think it will get the sort of "DaVinci Resolve" effect people are hoping for because DAWs are still - largely - perpetually licensed (or have that option); and many people don't feel the need to constantly upgrade their software year-over-year; especially on Windows, which has excellent backward/forward application compatibility.  I think  if his was an NLE, it would have been more disruptive.

I also think that it could have been a bit more disruptive on macOS, because that platform actually has more room for competitors "under" the "Standards," compared to Windows.  The Windows application ecosystem is extremely cutthroat, because there are also viable options for people at the lower end of the market for low cost ($150 or less), which deliver a very nice (more complete "out of the box") package.

 

Edited by SomeGuy
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11 hours ago, marled said:

But in one thing you are completely wrong! That guy in my avatar picture, he's really a "glass half-empty" one, it's me in 1985. Looks cool, doesn't it

You are busted as a total John Lennon clone, then. 😝

But yes, cool indeed. The shades and the expression are very much my "1985 face." The ladies loved it. I looked more like the guy in The Jam, though.

The '80's were my least favorite decade so far, but the silver lining was that as a 20-something, I had plenty to be disaffected about. 🤣

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28 minutes ago, backwoods said:

what's the davinci resolve effect? is that some hot new daw everyone is talking about?

Yes.  BMD reduced the price of the paid version from thousands to $999, then to $299 and released a Free Version that's better than any consumer NLE and many Prosumer NLEs for free.  It's basically the industry-standard color grading platform, and they purchased Fairlight and EyeOn and integrated Fusion (VFX/Compositing) and Fairlight (Audio Post) into the NLE... then added collaboration features.

So it's very hot and it's being recommended to any and everyone because it's "Free" and people are tired of paying super high Avid prices or Adobe subscriptions, among other things.  Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

The hype train is at a fever pitch.

Theoretically, something like this could have happened with Cakewalk, but I think the purchase coming after the shutdown hurt (so many people may still view it as a "dead" product)... and also the  DAW market isn't as ripe for disruption as the NLE market is/was.  DaVinci's standing as a premiere color grading platform also helped it, as people are using that aspect to sell others onto it (Since LOG and HDR are FADs now, even with Smartphone apps like Filmic Pro 😛.  SONAR never really had a selling point like that, and a lot of the really good stuff was stripped out of the package, anyways.

The DAW market is also full of "Competitive Upgrade" offers.

I would say, though, that this should have basically killed Audacity on Windows 😛  No point in using that over Cakewalk, unless you value HDD space that much (or need to import/export formats Cakewalk doesn't support).

Edited by SomeGuy
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8 hours ago, Bapu said:

I have samplitude and mixcraft.

 They are dead  to me. Not worth my time. Not even Samp v4.

Wasted a total of $200 on those two.

For me, Samplitude is one of the better Daws out there. For I don't like those EDM style ones! Yes, I confess I am one of those old farts!

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17 minutes ago, pwalpwal said:

I tried this a few years ago, but came back to windows because of VSTs and games 🙄

Yeah, I'm not saying this is a workable option right now.

I also looked at Linux a couple of years ago and, for the same reasons as you, I never bothered. I check about every year or so, see how things are going on the DAW side...

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16 minutes ago, synkrotron said:

I had Samplitude.

It was a dogs breakfast and after about a month of creating a "test project" with it I uninstalled.

Each to their own, as the saying goes...

Ditto.  I hoped to at least use the FX/synths in CbB or a.n.other DAW but I couldn't.  I did get SF11, Spectal Layers (which I still don't understand!) and some Izotope plug-ins bundled so it wasn't a complete write off.

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2 hours ago, synkrotron said:

Yeah, I'm not saying this is a workable option right now.

I also looked at Linux a couple of years ago and, for the same reasons as you, I never bothered. I check about every year or so, see how things are going on the DAW side...

it was fine for the officey internetty stuff but rubbish for leisure activities :D

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4 minutes ago, pwalpwal said:

it was fine for the officey internetty stuff but rubbish for leisure activities :D

Know what you mean...

I installed it on an old laptop which originally had Windows XP on it. It was slowly grinding to a halt. So I wiped it and installed Ubuntu on it and gave it a new lease of life. Great for interwebs and e-mail stuff :)

I think I ran Gimp on it too...

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9 minutes ago, pwalpwal said:

it was fine for the officey internetty stuff but rubbish for leisure activities :D

Regarding commercial (i.e. not free) software for Linux, I wonder if this is more likely due to lack of users, or lack of commercial developers? Chicken or egg thing?

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4 minutes ago, abacab said:

Regarding commercial (i.e. not free) software for Linux, I wonder if this is more likely due to lack of users, or lack of commercial developers? Chicken or egg thing?

could also be an open source culture thing

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3 minutes ago, pwalpwal said:

could also be an open source culture thing

I did read somewhere that the current fragmentation of  Linux  development beyond the kernel level into various "distros",  (i.e. https://distrowatch.com/.) and  desktop environments (i.e. Gnome, KDE,  Xfce, etc.) would make it difficult to distribute a commercial software package that would easily work on all flavors of the OS.

There is one project that may solve much of this concern, and is called "Flatpak". https://flatpak.org/

Build for every distro

Create one app and distribute it to the entire Linux desktop market.

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2 hours ago, pwalpwal said:

dunno flatpak but the distro/desktop thing makes sense, although it does imply that using windows avoids that issue! (win version, ,net version, etc etc etc)

With Linux desktop, there isn't just one company calling the shots and setting standards like with Microsoft or Apple does with theirs. So there is that.

Plus, I think you were also correct about the open source culture. They are not that friendly to closed source software, which is typically the case with commercial software not being open source.

That is where a company like Red Hat killed it in the commercial Linux server space. They provided a standardized version of the server software that enterprises could count on to run their businesses on. And sold support for it.

Sadly, the Linux desktop still has a long way to go to reach broad commercial acceptance. What's really crazy is that it could be done. Look at what Apple did when it redesigned Mac OSX based on Unix/BSD. So Mac is really a desktop gui environment for a Unix OS (I realize that oversimplifies things a bit, but just for the sake of discussion and to save space ;)).

Edited by abacab
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18 minutes ago, abacab said:

Sadly, the Linux desktop still has a long way to go to reach broad commercial acceptance. What's really crazy is that it could be done. Look at what Apple did when it redesigned Mac OSX based on Unix/FreeBSD. So Mac is really a desktop environment for a Unix OS (I realize that oversimplifies things a bit, but just for the sake of discussion and to save space ;)).

budget budget budget... oh how i laughed when macs switched to intel porcessros, and then to some hack-of-linux as an os...

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