John Vere

I just read in another thread we are informed that the nag screen will be removed soon. This implies full access to Cakewalk forever But we will see.

I rarely have seen a nag screen myself. I think you see it if your offline? All I ever see is a toast every day telling me I’m Activated. Seems to only be an issue for a few. The Cakewalk people are not going to suddenly kill Cakewalk with out plenty of warning. Relax. I am predicting they are slowly making stuff ready and things will change for the better as time goes by. It’s a small team and this is a major changeover. As far as Splat goes there’s plenty of bugs but not everyone has a workflow that might reveal them. And personally I use a lot of the features that were added to CbB and don’t wish to go back 10 years in time. It’s totally unnecessary to do that. And don’t forget. There’s nothing stopping Bandlab from shutting down activation for Splat. Sonar is the real answer and the best solution and I'm willing to bide my time until it's for sale. Possibly by then it will have a Theme editor!

Apple storage is weird. Have you ever lent a Thumb drive to a buddy who uses a Mac? It will come back with 3 new folders added. My guess is you can safely delete the asset files. They will still be on the cloud server anyways.

Am I missing something? Why would you want to use Splat when you can use CbB? It seems we will still have Cakewalk for possibly a few more years. It is miles above Splat in enhancements and bug fixes and they are both the identical version.

As Jonathan has said that would be way more trouble than it would be worth. Sonar X3 was considered the first of the X series to be stable. I wouldn’t even want to go back to Splat. And why worry? We are now informed that there’s no plan to end Cakewalk.

Nobody is stealing, it’s just a bad contract! Sign here boys and we’ll look after everything for you!

I was thinking about how I better remember to cancel my Bandlab Backstage pass in a few weeks. As I said it’s a bit more than $20 for me in Canadian funds. It's Summer and I won't be in the studio much. It's live gigging season. Then I realized that I’ve now spent $100 on Sonar! I don’t own it and when I end my membership it will cease to function. So 5 months $100. Ya I could have taken the bait on the discount offer and had 12 months for about $160 Can. But I was one of the fools who believed we would be able to purchase it by now. But it really drives home the fact that subscribing is the stupidest way to use software for me. $100! poof- gone and nothing to show.

Luna doesn’t support ARA. So way off my list. And I feel it might be a good Daw for people who choose to buy in to their whole system of audio interfaces and plug ins. That is it’s strong point for sure but that’s possible why they made it free( for now?)

Here we all are 1 year later and it’s been a huge distraction for many. Notice there’s rarely a thread started asking an actual question about USING Sonar. Most of them are dug up from the dungeon. Views of all my how to use Cakewalk Tutorials have dropped right off the map. Very little interest in Next too. I guess that statement about CbB is actually the best news of all! It seems they might have changed their mind about killing it completely and it will now kept as a sort of free demo for Sonar. The key words that were not included in past statements is that it will still receive a updates. This implies a longer lifespan than I originally expected. Good news. I wouldn’t get my hopes up that they would remove the activation. Edit: Instead of speculating I asked and was told the 30 day cycle will still happen but without the big splash screen, just a polite toast. It is a small price to pay for using a free Daw as powerful as Cakewalk. Please don't anybody complain about this. Be happy! Cakewalk will still be available and free. This is the best news in a whole year!

I’m hoping they will eventually offer that we can transfer all our legacy products over to the new Cakewalk Product Manager. I got a reply back in the fall where a staff member said I wasn’t too far off base in that regard. Then they can kill the old server. You must admit they have been very good about all the old Gibson accounts and they even spent time and money on the CCC last fall and updated it. I have a feeling that this is purely the Cakewalk development team looking after the long time loyal supporters and nothing to do with Bandlab. It’s been said over and over to not to bother and come here and complain about the Membership deal. I doubt if our wonderful dedicated developers would have chosen that. I bet they do care to loose even just one of us, but they have little or no power over the money part of this.

This is all covered in my video. But you need the full installer that was last released in November 2023. All Sonar and CbB installers after that do not include the TTS-1.

There’s no CbB in my Products Manager. Just Next. If you never delete your Download folder all your CbB installers should still be there. Before I empty my download folder I always copy it to a backup drive and date it. If you want the TTS-1 you will need the CbB installer from last November. It will then ask you to update which is fine ( sort of)

Each is a totally separate install. There are some shared folders that are not removed during a plain uninstall using the Windows App list. You have to physically remove the shared folders. I even did a Clean uninstall of both CbB and Sonar as instructed by staff because it seemed Sonar was crashing due to corruption. I then re installed just Sonar and everything was working fine including all my goodies from my legacy products. I still haveSonar 8.5, x3 installed. I always install them first when re building. Then I run CCC and install my goodies. I don’t bother with Splat as CbB has all that stuff.

I can’t afford a Toyota or a Honda. I have a Hyundai.

Exactly! I don’t like blowing $20 a month on Sonar just to have to suffer a terrible GUI. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be first in line to buy it but I’m just fine using CbB and Mixcraft until Sonar becomes available for purchase.

Ya, I gotta do this as well in about 3 weeks. Membership is $20 Canadian so that’s $240 a year which to me is too much. I’d rather pay $400 for a one time deal I would then get at least 4 years out of. I’ve never been a renter.

Sorry. I first save them as midi file and export all the audio as stems. I then just drag and drop the midi file into Mixcraft and that creates the most important part of most of my projects. I have to replace the synths which takes a few minutes and then I drag and drop the audio stems into the project. It is sounding pretty close in only about 10- 15 minutes. All that is left is adding my effects.

@Jeff Bowman Its easy to back up CWP projects so projects can be opened in any Daw. I split this into two parts

Waveform is free. Luna is Free. But they don't support Ara. Ara is critical to my workflow. Cakewalk by Bandlab might keep working for a long time yet as well. I bought Mixcraft on sale for $150 Can and it has Ara. I've been able to open my Cakewalk projects with no issues at all.

You nailed it! This forum is only really a handful of users and if you scoured every post over the last year you might round up 50 people who stated clearly they are against subscriptions. I would imagine now they have posted this in a more public manner that the Bandlab Membership will grow in leaps and bounds. If they lose 50- 100- 500 people that's peanuts in the big picture. Heck they probably lost hundreds of people already. I guess I'm going to put Sonar aside for now with the hopes they will sell it someday. My Monthly fee was just updated last week so I have Sonar for a few more weeks. I had earmarked June as my last month anyway. It's $20.30 Canadian which is way to much for my music budget. I will continue my task of saving all my projects as Midi and Stem files. My originals are already safe from harm and everything else is not important. I write a new song it will be with Mixcraft. Someone ( Misha? ) mentioned they thought it would take hundreds of hours to learn a new Daw. I would say yes if it's overly complicated like Cakewalk. But I'm finding I'm using Mixcraft and rarely having to read the manual.

This is totally different than before and the download link is even included in the banner. But- IMPORTANT_ this doesn't actually tell us there will NEVER be a perpetual licence so we are still left hanging.

Put a spectrum analyzer on your master bus to determine the frequency. If it’s 60 cycles ( North America) It could be USB related. I had trouble like this a long time ago and was directed to try a better quality USB cable and that solved my issue. There are USB cables that have a ferrite choke on them. It could also be a USB ground loop issue.

As said in another thread (!10 of them?) What is your plan B? If you follow my You Tube channel you will see I’ve be sharing ideas about what you can do while growing old waiting for any solid answers about Sonar. Plan B for me is 1- I have already purchased a backup DAW. Mixcraft. I also have Cubase 7. Mixbus 7 , ProTools first and Waveform. 2-I’m in the process of backing up all my CWP files as a midi files and stems. I have successfully opened these in various other DAWs with out much missing. It’s time consuming but easy . 3-I have Sonar X3 which is the last version you can trust will activate with out the internet involved. Splat requires activation using CCC. This would allow me to still open projects I somehow failed to transfer using #2. 4- I own 2 Digital 8 track recorders and lots of midi hardware . Cause you know what gang? We represent possibly a hugely insignificant user base that in in big picture won’t matter what we decide to do to Bandlab. They probably have 2 million people paying the Membership fees and so from their perspective Sonar is a huge success already. The dozen people here threatening them is sort of laughable. We just need to make our own personal choices and see what happens and not get screwed by it all by having a plan B! I’ve stopped worrying and thinking about it now I have my plan B working smoothly.

For me both Sonar and Next can hang up after a crash. I’ve never had a hang up otherwise. I was testing the new CXF export interchange format so found a few new ways to crash them! Defiantly having a frozen synth would crash Sonar. And Next doesn’t really know what to do about midi tracks. It only uses instrument tracks. But we have been told that the biggest reason Sonar/ Cakewalk will hang is that a certain plug in is not shut down or I think they call it flushing. Hmm, flushing, isn’t that used for S—-

It is sort of a audio fact that everything sounds better when loud. The wall of sound will mask a million imperfections. It’s like a lot of big concerts I go to these days and it’s massive db of low end. The punters think that this is good sound. I stand there going I can’t hear the keyboard, the hi hat, the BU vocals etc. Other than live concerts nobody listens to music at that level at home or while wandering about with ear buds on. So absolutely you need your mix to sound great at all levels and starting at the very lowest level will get you there faster. I rarely mix at anything over 80-90 db.