How many users does CbB have?

[Noel Borthwick]

10 hours ago, Craig Anderton said:

Old reputations, deserved or not, die hard in this industry.  People talk about Studio One being "the new kid on the block," but it's 10 years old.  Some folks might think of Cakewalk as the company that made MIDI sequencers and then added audio. The "professional DAW" thing probably stems partly from guilt-by-association with Windows, which had a reputation (undeserved) of being inferior to the Mac. Also, Pro Tools got a head start in big studios because of the prevalence of the Mac, and Digidesign being the first company to really take digital tapeless recording seriously. But also, as a rule, cross-platform programs are prioritized for support, because that doubles your potential market. 

I suspect Cakewalk will continue to pick up users, to the point where people learning it won't even know that a program called "Sonar" existed

Indeed while its not unique to us, its particularly bad in our industry because many folks have a herd mentality to follow by recommendation rather than by exploring needs. We have had our share of problems in the past so some flak is deserved, but I still see quotes of completely out of date information from decades ago that has long since been addressed. Products with a legacy as old as Cakewalk are bound to have baggage that a newer program won’t have (although the new program will also have bugs, just different) 

The “professional” tag is downright snobbery perpetrated by biases, whether it be Mac vs PC or other factors that equate cost vs value. We’ve even had people who said we weren’t professional because for the longest time there was no copy protection. The free aspect is also a factor since free can be associated mistakenly with unsupported freeware.

The bottom line is user base demographics have been changing. Its not all about how many esoteric features you have anymore but how usable and inviting the product is and new users today have different expectations now than they did 10 years ago.

[bitflipper]

20 hours ago, slartabartfast said:

I wonder if developers have decided (erroneously) that people who use a free DAW will not pay gigantic prices for their plugins.

Erroneous indeed. Even adding up a half-dozen paid SONAR upgrades, my investment in the DAW has been a drop in the bucket compared to plugins and virtual instruments. And all that's a small amount compared to speakers, interfaces, multiple displays, microphones, acoustic treatments and  musical instruments. A free DAW is like a drug dealer offering the first taste for free.

[pwal³]

On 3/7/2021 at 5:12 PM, Noel Borthwick said:

Cakewalk has also grown by many orders of magnitude of course, but not close to that ballpark. Were adding deeper BandLab integration however so we will continue to grow as more people learn about Cakewalk.

you forgot a number

[Byron Dickens]

1 hour ago, bitflipper said:

A free DAW is like a drug dealer offering the first taste for free.

😄

[InstrEd]

1 hour ago, bitflipper said:

Erroneous indeed. Even adding up a half-dozen paid SONAR upgrades, my investment in the DAW has been a drop in the bucket compared to plugins and virtual instruments. And all that's a small amount compared to speakers, interfaces, multiple displays, microphones, acoustic treatments and  musical instruments. A free DAW is like a drug dealer offering the first taste for free.

I only have a small stash of hardware and when I started to add it up, you are so right Dave. 

Do you have any samples/first taste that you would like to share with the rest of us

[Craig Anderton]

Also remember that control surfaces generally don't sell all that well. Note that PreSonus went out of their way to make the ATOM controllers do out-of-the-box integration with Ableton Live, whose users are probably more oriented toward that type of controller. Maybe PreSonus would have made a beats-oriented controller that worked ONLY with Studio One, but it makes a lot more sense to have a controller that works with a program where most users are accustomed to using a controller.  With Cakewalk, another obstacle might be the response to the VS-700, which wasn't very successful.

I think the best shot for Cakewalk is when MIDI 2.0 becomes common. Then there could be a Cakewalk Profile for controllers, so any 2.0 controller could query it and adapt itself accordingly - an advantage of MIDI 2.0 having bi-directional communication among devices.

[bitflipper]

It was with some sadness that last week I finally contributed my VS-700 T-shirt to the rag pile.

At least it was put to one last musical purpose: cleaning up after my granddaughter, who'd just finished spray-painting her guitar as well as the patio table she'd used as a workspace.

[Craig Anderton]

On 3/8/2021 at 7:40 AM, Noel Borthwick said:

Indeed while its not unique to us, its particularly bad in our industry because many folks have a herd mentality to follow by recommendation rather than by exploring needs.

You even see that in instructional videos - "Use these five super-duper pro compressor settings for voice!" Which of course, have very little to do with YOUR voice. I can see someone using Pro Tools if their main gig is transferring audio/video files among multiple studios, but just about any other program is better as a songwriting or compositional tool. So people who follow the herd likely won't end up with what they really need. 

I think Cakewalk's biggest strength is that it does a lot of things well, so you can go deep if you want, or just hang out on the surface.

On 3/8/2021 at 7:40 AM, Noel Borthwick said:

The “professional” tag is downright snobbery perpetrated by biases, whether it be Mac vs PC or other factors that equate cost vs value.

The definition of "professional" means "relating to or connected with a profession." If any people use Cakewalk to make money on any level, then it's professional software. Case closed. 

[bitflipper]

1 hour ago, Craig Anderton said:

...The definition of "professional" means "relating to or connected with a profession." If any people use Cakewalk to make money on any level, then it's professional software. Case closed. 

Exactly. "Professional" does not directly imply that you are necessarily good at something, just because someone was willing to pay you to do it.

I have been a professional musician, a professional hardware engineer, a professional software engineer, and a professional teacher. In each of those roles, I knew plenty of associates - also professionals - who were flat-out sh*t at their jobs. There were others that I knelt at their feet beseeching them to bestow upon me even a little of their vast knowledge and experience. 

On the other hand, there's such a thing as the passionate amateur, someone compelled to learn everything they can about the subject of their passion. Such people aren't constrained by the narrow needs of a specific job assignment, but are free to branch out into any related field that piques their interest. I am happy to call myself an amateur mixer, and would be considerably less happy if I had to do it as a (shudder) job. 

[pwal³]

5 minutes ago, bitflipper said:

"Professional"

yep, it means you use it for a profession, but it ("professional" or "pro") has been hijacked by marketing, sigh...

[marc williams]

Looking for that "number", could it be hidden in the "user updates" for a more current or active representation?

 

[twelvetone]

4 hours ago, pwalpwal said:

yep, it means you use it for a profession, but it ("professional" or "pro") has been hijacked by marketing, sigh...

Like "ProChannel"...

https://www.cakewalk.com/Products/SONAR/Buy-Now/SONAR-Professional

Edited March 9, 2021 by twelvetone

[Starship Krupa]

On 3/6/2021 at 5:12 PM, John Vere said:

I don't think this is close to being possible.

In order to know, they'd have to have some mechanism(s) where each installed copy carried a unique identifier that would allow them to keep track of whether the downloaded and installed copy is continuing to be used and was ever updated. Hmm.

Oh wait, they do.

At its most crude, all BandLab need do is take note of how many updates and re-validations they get to find out how many people have continued using it past a certain time. If it phones home with every program launch like (I think) Native Instruments and Waves products, they have even better data.

[Craig Anderton]

1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said:

In order to know, they'd have to have some mechanism(s) where each installed copy carried a unique identifier that would allow them to keep track of whether the downloaded and installed copy is continuing to be used and was ever updated. Hmm.

FWIW, all companies are loathe to give out any kind of sales or user figures. I know this because even if I plan to write a book about a specific product, and need to know how many people have it so I can decide if there's enough of a market to make writing a book worthwhile, it's like pulling teeth to get any kind of sales data, if I can get it at all.

The problem is that if the numbers are low, they don't want to be embarrassed. If the numbers are high, they don't want some other company saying  "Hey!! Maybe we should be doing that!!" Companies often like to be under the radar when something's successful. And they don't want anyone to know if it's not.

[martsave martin s]

i remember the old Sonar forum at the bottom of the page it was writed how many registred  users on the (forum)..

[Starship Krupa]

20 hours ago, Craig Anderton said:

If the numbers are high, they don't want some other company saying  "Hey!! Maybe we should be doing that!!"

Witness all the DAW's that were poised to eat Pro Tools' lunch once they left it out on the counter. 😄

I have to hand it to the software companies that have managed to hang on to their industry leader status for decades. Who, after all, speaks today of WordStar, WordPerfect, VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, dBASE? I know you remember them. Most of those names were at one time market leaders to the point where their names were synonymous with the function of the software.

[John Vere]

As I said in my update I'm bumping this old thread and then I liked a bunch of you so you can read what you were thinking 2 years ago.  

[mettelus]

I do like the "2 years later..." tag above the exhumation! The semi-hidden, necro-thread alert.

Cakewalk remains in a very unique position in that people who have onboarded with CbB (i.e., no access to a prior product) will "eventually" be put into a position where their work can be held hostage based on current pathing.

These threads have become interesting to me more from there psychological perspective; specifically who is chiming in, what they are saying, and what is their motivations.

[Steve Moddelmog]

On 3/9/2021 at 12:05 PM, pwalpwal said:

yep, it means you use it for a profession, but it ("professional" or "pro") has been hijacked by marketing, sigh...

So true. Not on the subject of making music, but years ago Gillette or Schick or some razor-maker attached the term "Pro-shave" to one of their products.  I remember thinking, wow, I'm pretty good at shaving - maybe I could go pro.

[Noel Borthwick]

3 hours ago, mettelus said:

I do like the "2 years later..." tag above the exhumation! The semi-hidden, necro-thread alert.

Cakewalk remains in a very unique position in that people who have onboarded with CbB (i.e., no access to a prior product) will "eventually" be put into a position where their work can be held hostage based on current pathing.

These threads have become interesting to me more from there psychological perspective; specifically who is chiming in, what they are saying, and what is their motivations.

The cynicism in this forum never fails to amaze me. Why on earth would we or any sane company in our field want to hold users' data hostage? 
You do realize that we are one of the only DAW's whose project files can be opened in pretty much any prior version of the app? Would we do that if we wanted to hostage projects?
If someone really needed to, they could open their projects in any prior product like SONAR 8.5 and get most of the data out. We also plan to have free versions of all our apps so if users needed, they could use the free limited versions if they never owned a Cakewalk product ever.
The bigger question to ask is why anyone who cared about their music in any capacity would not want to pay a reasonable fee to support the development of a product they use.