Sonoma dropping Drumcore 4 and Riffworks

[Greg]

Thank you for your interest in Sonoma Wire Works products. We appreciate all of our customers and the past and present Sonoma team. We've enjoyed creating products that so many musicians have found to be helpful. After much consideration, and for many reasons, we are announcing:

1. July 31, 2022, RiffWorks, DrumCore 4 and iOS apps will no longer be sold to end-users by Sonoma.
2. After October 31, 2022, Sonoma will no longer offer support for our products.

While we are looking for a new home for RiffWorks and DrumCore, and have found some potential interest, there is no available information or guarantees for the future of these products.

 

[Brian Walton]

Sad news, been using them since Drum Core 3 (at least 8 years).  They still have my favorite kit (Billy Martin) out of every Drum Program I have (AD2, MDrummer, Superior Drummer 2, EZ Drummer with expansion sets, MODO Drum 1.5 all kits).

 

I still think they should have done a number of things to stay relevant.  One of which would be to make downloading "loop" audio files optional.  Tons of wasted HD space for someone that just wanted all the basic kits and the midi to go along with them.   Second would be to drop the price pretty dramatically.  

Customer service seemed responsive enough but actual software development never seem to make much progress.  

 

Maybe Bandlab could buy them for $20 and keep it alive.  😇

[Vernon Barnes]

I was a Kitcore user and liked it a lot back in the day. Some of the kits still stand up today but after Sonama dropped Kitcore and brought out the 64bit Drumcore I never got multi-out working in either Cakewalk or Studio One and I am not much of an audio loop person, so it's mostly gathering dust on my hard drive.

It could have been great with the right development but I think it's too far behind now.

[Brian Walton]

3 hours ago, Vernon Barnes said:

I was a Kitcore user and liked it a lot back in the day. Some of the kits still stand up today but after Sonama dropped Kitcore and brought out the 64bit Drumcore I never got multi-out working in either Cakewalk or Studio One and I am not much of an audio loop person, so it's mostly gathering dust on my hard drive.

It could have been great with the right development but I think it's too far behind now.

Not that it really matters now but DrumCore 4 had this problem for a while.

An update in bandlab in 2020 seemed to fix it.  I haven't tested it again in more recent versions to be sure it didn't break again.

 

 

"Bandlab has updated Cakewalk to v 2020.06 update 2, and Aux Outputs now work. They are recognized as separate tracks when inserting Drumcore as Split Instrument Tracks or when creating tracks and assigning them later.

 

This may be related to this item in their list of bug fixes in 2020.06 update 2:

Extra Synth Instances inserted when adding all synth audio outputs for Split Instrument Track."

[Bajan Blue]

7 hours ago, Vernon Barnes said:

I was a Kitcore user and liked it a lot back in the day. Some of the kits still stand up today but after Sonama dropped Kitcore and brought out the 64bit Drumcore I never got multi-out working in either Cakewalk or Studio One and I am not much of an audio loop person, so it's mostly gathering dust on my hard drive.

It could have been great with the right development but I think it's too far behind now.

What Brian said - it was my first proper drum package

i never did bother with upgrading as they never seemed on the right path and the products had been surpassed by many other products - out of sentimentality I just fired up Kitcore and it severely crashed my machine!!! time to delete permanently i think - what's they Queen Song - Another One Bites the Dust - it really is a shame as that early version of Kitcore was very good.

Nigel