Introducing Cakewalk Next and our new brand identity

[Bapu]

7 hours ago, Sal Sorice said:

Think I said this already, but just to reiterate - many thanks to Jesse, Noel, Mark and all the Staff for staying engaged and providing as much input/details as they can. Don't think you'll find that much direct / hands on involvement from many software companies.

I will say that Ben from Harrison (Mixbus) does an almost equally good job too.

[Skyline_UK]

15 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Quick grouping handles most of the commonly used operations like changing track or plugin parameters over multiple selected tracks.
I see your request however.

I would love to see a 'repeat last action' function!    

[Larioso]

12 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

At some point we also intend to replace CAL with a modern scripting language.

..or if possible keep CAL too.

Extend even with a toolbar to quickly execute a particular script, on currently selected track and time span.

My entire drum practice is built on CAL, seing how off I am on each kit piece in ticks and ms, as well as overall worst case.

Many ways to use CAL, I mean. I like getting numbers on how I am doing.

 

But if you manage to keep new Sonar completely separated on install from old Sonar, no shared folders, no shared plugin scan, I can use Sonar Artist 2015 still for drums, I guess.

 

I had some issues uninstalling CbB, on the current Sonar install.

Edited June 13, 2023 by Larioso

[Quinellipe Zorn]

On 6/10/2023 at 3:21 PM, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

Off the top of my head ....

1. Proper sampler / sample based workflow

2. Chord track

3. Easier hardware integration for control surfaces etc

4. Negative offset

5. Bar zero

6. Spatial Audio Ready

7. Remote Control

8. Varispeed

9. Retrospective Midi Record

10. Scale constrain

11. MPE Supprt

12. Bounce/Renderin Place

13. Loudness Metering

14. Updated Browser

15. Scratch Pads

Thanks!

[Quinellipe Zorn]

On 6/10/2023 at 5:37 AM, Keni said:

Do you believe that if Disney does something with Star Wars that the public doesn't like, that George Lucas would be held responsible?

???

Even aside from that I wasn't discussing what I, you, or any particular individual thinks, as it is about what might be reasonable expectations for Bandlab to face among some segment of their user base, however unfairly, I don't understand the relationship of this to the discussion at hand as we were talking about whether Bandlab should expect, fairly or not, people to hold them responsible to make things right with Cakewalk's history, abiding by the things that were "good" and fixing the things that were "bad" (e.g. accounting for Gibson's lifetime offers somehow).  What you seem to be discussing is whether Gibson would be held responsible for something that Bandlab does with Cakewalk, which seems out of the blue to me.  But if you want to know, for whatever reason, I doubt it very much.  Although I'm quite sure people are holding Disney responsible, probably rarely fairly but mostly unfairly, to "fix" as well as "honor" George Lucas' legacy with Star Wars.  That said, I don't know anything about Star Wars under Disney, about George Lucas outside of Star Wars and some wild rumors about his personal life, nor about Star Wars beside seeing 2 of the chronologically first released 3 (was never a fan, saw the first one as a kid and didn't care for it, saw the 3rd one with friends because it was with friends) and reading smatterings of the mythos around Star Wars, though not enough to remember exactly what a Sith is or how the Paladins or whatever separated from them, etc..  For the record, as you asked me.

On topic, I believe that Bandlab should expect that, fairly or not, a lot of people will hold them accountable to make good on the good and bad of Gibson's past.  Now, that doesn't mean they should just do what people want.  It just means they shouldn't be surprised about, e.g., people demanding consideration for their lifetime subscriptions.  So long as they can see a valid business direction which continues to turn a profit and/or, given contemporary expectations, grow their user base, what they do is yet another matter.  Whether I or any "right-thinking" person should or will hold Bandlab responsible is irrelevant; I don't, but, as said, I think they have to know - just as seen on this thread - people will, fairly or not (actually both I've seen, from my own opinion;  personally I think the fair thing they should do is give some sort of benefit to lifetime subscribers, some upgrade/crossgrade opportunity at a discount, or maybe, if their finances seem to make sense, some small discount eternally; I don't think it's fair or reasonable to hold Bandlab to lifetime subscriptions, especially considering that the business practice, even besides being inherently questionable, was undertaken by a failed company, so hardly seems reasonable to expect a successor company to repeat the same practices).

[Johnbee58]

There's only one thing I have to say on this.  I will NOT pay MONTHLY to do the same thing I've been doing all these years I've been using Cakewalk (Sonar X3 or by Bandlab).  It has to be one price and done or it's quittin' time for me.

Nuff said.

😀John B

[Keni]

1 hour ago, Quinellipe Zorn said:

???

Even aside from that I wasn't discussing what I, you, or any particular individual thinks, as it is about what might be reasonable expectations for Bandlab to face among some segment of their user base, however unfairly, I don't understand the relationship of this to the discussion at hand as we were talking about whether Bandlab should expect, fairly or not, people to hold them responsible to make things right with Cakewalk's history, abiding by the things that were "good" and fixing the things that were "bad" (e.g. accounting for Gibson's lifetime offers somehow).  What you seem to be discussing is whether Gibson would be held responsible for something that Bandlab does with Cakewalk, which seems out of the blue to me.  But if you want to know, for whatever reason, I doubt it very much.  Although I'm quite sure people are holding Disney responsible, probably rarely fairly but mostly unfairly, to "fix" as well as "honor" George Lucas' legacy with Star Wars.  That said, I don't know anything about Star Wars under Disney, about George Lucas outside of Star Wars and some wild rumors about his personal life, nor about Star Wars beside seeing 2 of the chronologically first released 3 (was never a fan, saw the first one as a kid and didn't care for it, saw the 3rd one with friends because it was with friends) and reading smatterings of the mythos around Star Wars, though not enough to remember exactly what a Sith is or how the Paladins or whatever separated from them, etc..  For the record, as you asked me.

On topic, I believe that Bandlab should expect that, fairly or not, a lot of people will hold them accountable to make good on the good and bad of Gibson's past.  Now, that doesn't mean they should just do what people want.  It just means they shouldn't be surprised about, e.g., people demanding consideration for their lifetime subscriptions.  So long as they can see a valid business direction which continues to turn a profit and/or, given contemporary expectations, grow their user base, what they do is yet another matter.  Whether I or any "right-thinking" person should or will hold Bandlab responsible is irrelevant; I don't, but, as said, I think they have to know - just as seen on this thread - people will, fairly or not (actually both I've seen, from my own opinion;  personally I think the fair thing they should do is give some sort of benefit to lifetime subscribers, some upgrade/crossgrade opportunity at a discount, or maybe, if their finances seem to make sense, some small discount eternally; I don't think it's fair or reasonable to hold Bandlab to lifetime subscriptions, especially considering that the business practice, even besides being inherently questionable, was undertaken by a failed company, so hardly seems reasonable to expect a successor company to repeat the same practices).

To be fair, I feel you took what I said a bit differently than I intended.

I was stating that Cakewalk sold lifetime in good faith. The parent company shut them down. Not a decision of their own.

Company gone... all obligations terminated.

New day! Someone (Bandlab) bought the remaining properties and began making decisions of what they wish to do with it. Their' decision? Share it with the world for free and pay out of pocket to continue it’s development.

 Years ago by ...

Now, Bandlab  has decided to begin marketing new products. Yes they are based in the code they bought and continue the line.

Now while it would be a very nice gesture for them to create various deals to thank their' continuing followers, they are under no obligation either legally or morally.

Socially? Yes. It will be nice as they have shown themselves (Meng, Noel, Jesse, Morten, and all the other Bakers) to be caring, and giving repeatedly. So I’m guessing they will offer more than reasonable accommodations...

[Quinellipe Zorn]

25 minutes ago, Keni said:

To be fair, I feel you took what I said a bit differently than I intended.

I was stating that Cakewalk sold lifetime in good faith. The parent company shut them down. Not a decision of their own.

Company gone... all obligations terminated.

New day! Someone (Bandlab) bought the remaining properties and began making decisions of what they wish to do with it. Their' decision? Share it with the world for free and pay out of pocket to continue it’s development.

 Years ago by ...

Now, Bandlab  has decided to begin marketing new products. Yes they are based in the code they bought and continue the line.

Now while it would be a very nice gesture for them to create various deals to thank their' continuing followers, they are under no obligation either legally or morally.

Socially? Yes. It will be nice as they have shown themselves (Meng, Noel, Jesse, Morten, and all the other Bakers) to be caring, and giving repeatedly. So I’m guessing they will offer more than reasonable accommodations...

I think we're way off track...

All I can say is I was asking the question, I asked, I wasn't trying to make a point:  do you think Cakewalk's user will parse it as finely as you did in the particular post way back when?

PS - I think this was specifically re "lifetime" subscribers, not just "Cakewalk's users," rather, IIRC, but the lack of quote-in-quote makes it harder to go back, though I seem to recall that was the particular matter and subgroup at hand.

 

Edited June 13, 2023 by Quinellipe Zorn

[Keni]

41 minutes ago, Quinellipe Zorn said:

I think we're way off track...

All I can say is I was asking the question, I asked, I wasn't trying to make a point:  do you think Cakewalk's user will parse it as finely as you did in the particular post way back when?

PS - I think this was specifically re "lifetime" subscribers, not just "Cakewalk's users," rather, IIRC, but the lack of quote-in-quote makes it harder to go back, though I seem to recall that was the particular matter and subgroup at hand.

 

It may seem so to some, but I see it on track.

You made many points... we all do or there would be no discussion.

Lifetime subscriptions died when the company Cakewalk died...

Any concessions that Cakewalk (subsidiary of Bandlab Industries) might decide to grant anyone are purely out of the kindness of their' heart. They have no legal or moral obligations. Social obligations? Maybe.

I bought lifetime without  blinking to support them as well as acquire for myself and would do so again if such a situation ever arises. Even if the new company offered it now! 🙂

...yet I don’t even remotely consider any such obligation by these people.

Edited June 13, 2023 by Keni

[michaelhanson]

42 minutes ago, Keni said:

It may seem so to some, but I see it on track.

You made many points... we all do or there would be no discussion.

Lifetime subscriptions died when the company Cakewalk died...

Any concessions that Cakewalk (subsidiary of Bandlab Industries) might decide to grant anyone are purely out of the kindness of their' heart. They have no legal or moral obligations. Social obligations? Maybe.

I bought lifetime without  blinking to support them as well as acquire for myself and would do so again if such a situation ever arises. Even if the new company offered it now! 🙂

...yet I don’t even remotely consider any such obligation by these people.

The Lifetime subscription topic was debated heavily back when it was introduced.  It might have surpassed the 33 pages currently posted here.  All of the same worries and comments were made about the "what if's".  Both sides of the debate were well represented and most knew that it was a gamble.  

For the price of admission, it was worth the gamble for me.  

However, it turned out to be...exactly what the nay say'ers predicted.   I have forgiven, but that doesn't mean its forgotten.  

[Johnbee58]

Let this be a lesson to all.  Gibson screwed all of you who bought into the "Lifetime License" lie.  What should you learn from that?  How about don't trust anybody who takes your money promising you anything "free for a lifetime".  Now you must hope that out of the goodness of their hearts Bandlab will compensate you for that.  They don't have to because you made that deal with the Gibson crooks.  They took your money and ran.  Something always smelled fishy to me with that deal. Glad I didn't fall for it.

😀John B

[Alan Tubbs]

Anyone who bought into Gibson’s eternal updates - did you really believe they would support SONAR until judgement day?  I figured that out in HS when other guys from the football team were selling gym memberships for life.  It is an important lesson to learn “that which is too good to be true” usually isn’t.  Even in HS it didn’t take too much thinking to figure out lifetime couldn’t work.  Hopefully any user who believed Gibson learned a lesson that could save them a lot more in the future.  yes, it still sucks but don’t burn your Gibson guitars in protest.

as far as CbB, it is pretty funny users are upset that they might have to pay for a world-class DAW after 5 free years.  Yea, I know that sucks too.  Everybody loves free but that doesn’t provide much upkeeping.  If you want your DAW to keep current you are going to have to pay something at some point.

I don’t think BandLab owes any of us anything but I will be disappointed if they don’t make a generous deal for old users and the free users that they’ve built their product with.  But not free.  Since Cakewalk (jeez, what is the proper name for the EASY and Sonar company?) is still formulating pricing, I can just ask for them to be gentle but ignore all the threats of users leaving.  If users can’t support Sonar or EASY let them find a better DAW cheaper (and let us know).

as a P5 lover I have a hope EASY is similar to it, but Mac abled too.  And provide the missing link between Mac world and the PC Sonar.  That would be worth paying for.

[GreenLight]

17 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Agreed that these should be native functions. At some point we also intend to replace CAL with a modern scripting language. We're a small team and as you might imaging juggling two full DAW's has been a challenge the last few years

It's certainly not dead!

In a recent thread about Cakewalk workflow & usability tips, @Promidi shared information about his very extensive usage of CALs. And if I remember correctly, I think it was @Heinz Hupfer who had some impressive CAL workflows as well.

Update: But I agree with @Mark Morgon-Shaw's earlier comment that several of those smart CAL features could/should be part of the standard MIDI tools.

Edited June 13, 2023 by GreenLight
Added

[Lord Tim]

4 hours ago, Johnbee58 said:

There's only one thing I have to say on this.  I will NOT pay MONTHLY to do the same thing I've been doing all these years I've been using Cakewalk (Sonar X3 or by Bandlab).  It has to be one price and done or it's quittin' time for me.

 

Would you, however, pay for a new version every year, like we used to do back before any talk of memberships or subscriptions?

[Keni]

13 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

Would you, however, pay for a new version every year, like we used to do back before any talk of memberships or subscriptions?

Without Hesitation!

[Greg Wynn]

11 hours ago, Bapu said:

I will say that Ben from Harrison (Mixbus) does an almost equally good job too.

Cliff from Fractal is like this too. 

[Lord Tim]

24 minutes ago, Keni said:

Without Hesitation!

For anyone not in the loop or doesn't remember it properly, the Gibson model worked like this (if I'm recalling correctly!):

They offered Memberships. Basically subscriptions under a different name if you want to be pedantic about it all.

These were different to regular subscriptions though. In a regular subscription, if you stopped paying at any time, you lost the use of your software, no matter how long you've been paying for it.

The Gibson model, however, came in a couple of different flavours:

Rent-to-Own: This is a traditional subscription model for the first 12 months. You stop paying, it goes back to demo mode. However - and this is the big difference - if you kept paying for 12 months, the software essentially becomes a fully paid item. If you stop your subscription at that point, no - you didn't get any new program updates - but the program doesn't fall back into demo mode either.  You can continue to pay your subscription from that point onwards to keep getting updates.

Buy 12 months in advance: If you pay up front for those first 12 months, you more or less buy the software. Then you can continue to pay monthly or yearly after that.

 

Now I mentioned this earlier in this massive thread, but let's compare that to a traditional "buy outright" model. Just plucking figures out of the air here, so don't take any prices as correct at all.

Buy outright: You pay $200 (or whatever price) to outright buy a version of a DAW. Typically the lifecycle of that daw is about a year. In that year you'll get updates. But when the next version of the app comes out, you no longer get any updates to your version, and you have to upgrade to the new version to get updates going forward.

Gibson model: You pay $200 for a year's membership and get SONAR (or CbB or Sonar, etc.) outright to use. This includes 12 months of updates. After that 12 months is up, instead of being forced to buy another version, you can choose to buy another year of updates (ie: like a new version upgrade) or you can pay monthly. Or... instead of having to fork out the $200 up front to buy this software outright, pay $20/month for that first year to get the same benefits but you're paying it off over time rather than that initial lump sum.

 

It's kind of semantics at this point. You're kind of getting the same thing as an outright versioned software purchase, but with the additional benefit of being able to pay in increments if you want.

I have no idea if this is what they plan to do going forward with Sonar and Next, mind you, but if it's similar to this model, it's win-win as far as a paid product goes.

FWIW, I'm no fan of Gibson on any level, and what they did still gets my back up when I think about it. But this was one of the better things they did.

Edited June 13, 2023 by Lord Tim
Clearly I need to renew my spellchecker subscription 😒

[Keni]

4 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

For anyone not in the loop or doesn't remember it properly, the Gibson model worked like this (if I'm recalling correctly!):

They offered Memberships. Basically subscriptions under a different name if you want to be pedantic about it all.

These were different to regular subscriptions though. In a regular subscription, if you stopped paying at any time, you lost the use of your software, no matter how long you've been paying for it.

The Gibson model, however, came in a couple of different flavours:

Rent-to-Own: This is a traditional subscription model for the first 12 months. You stop paying, it goes back to demo mode. However - and this is the big difference - if you kept paying for 12 months, the software essentially becomes a fully paid item. If you stop your subscription at that point, no - you didn't get any new program updates - but the program doesn't fall back into demo mode either.  You can continue to pay your subscription from that point onwards to keep getting updates.

Buy 12 months in advance: If you pay up front for those first 12 months, you more or less buy the software. Then you can continue to pay monthly or yearly after that.

 

Now I mentioned this earlier in this massive thread, but let's compare that to a traditional "buy outright" model. Just plucking figures out of the air here, so don't take any prices as correct at all.

Buy outright: You pay $200 (or whatever price) to outright buy a version of a DAW. Typically the lifecycle of that daw is about a year. In that year you'll get updates. But when the next version of the app comes out, you no longer get any updates to your version, and you have to upgrade to the new version to get updates going forward.

Gibson model: You pay $200 for a year's membership and get SONAR (or CbB or Sonar, etc.) outright to use. This includes 12 months of updates. After that 12 months is up, instead of being forced to buy another version, you can choose to buy another year of updates (ie: like a new version upgrade) or you can pay monthly. Or... instead of having to fork out the $200 up front to buy this software outright, pay $20/month for that first year to get the same benefits but you're paying it off over time rather than that initial lump sum.

 

It's kind of semantics at this point. You're kind of getting the same thing as an outright versioned software purchase, but with the additional benefit of being able to pay in increments of you want.

I have no idea if this is what they plan to do going forward with Sonar and Next, mind you, but if it's similar to this model, it's win-win as far as a paid product goes.

Yes!

 

I thought this a very reasonable take on the situation. I hope That the new Cakewalk designs something along this approach as I think it is a very fair deal!

 

 

[Johnbee58]

44 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

Would you, however, pay for a new version every year, like we used to do back before any talk of memberships or subscriptions?

I didn't pay for a new version every year.  I  bought x3 studio in 2014 and stayed with that until CbB was offered. I'll pay a fair price to do what I have been doing.  I don't need a lot of fancy bells and whistles.  I have and use most of my own plugins.  I don't use any of the Cakewalk instruments.  Not knocking them.  I just have no need for them.  I  made do with what I  had and did without what I couldn't afford because I didn't have a ton of money to spend.  I  still don't.

😀JOHN B

 

Edited June 13, 2023 by Johnbee58

[Lord Tim]

2 minutes ago, Johnbee58 said:

I didn't pay for a new version every year.  I  bought x3 studio in 2014 and stayed with that until CbB was offered. I'll pay a fair price to do what I have been doing.  I don't need a lot of fancy bells and whistles.  I have and use most of my own plugins.  I don't use any of the Cakewalk instruments.  Not knocking them.  I just have no need for them.

OK, that's fair

But let me ask you this, did you get any updates past X3? Like, did you get any of the stuff that came in with SONAR Platinum?

This is no different to buying Sonar 2024 outright for that year (and getting those 12 months of updates) and staying on it. Then in 2027 you think "you know, that new feature actually looks pretty good, I'll grab that!" and you buy Sonar 2027 and associated updates.  It's pretty much exactly what you did with X3.