Noel Borthwick

It's almost always plugins isn't it lol. A plugin should never block the UI that long for seconds at a time or it will block the UI from updating since Windows messages will be backed up. All UI drawing occurs on a single thread so performance issues like this result in choppy UI. if a plugin needs to do an activation check it should be doing it asynchronously.

I was speaking more generally from a software architecture perspective rather than referring to specific features. Sonar is a very rich product but due to it's legacy, maintaining certain areas can be challenging. Next takes a more modern lightweight design approach, thereby making it easier for us to expand on in the future.

In a sense yes. We started from scratch to build a cross platform DAW but with a different focus from SONAR, which is heavily production centric. One way to describe it is that Next’s current focus is more “creation centric” and its designed to be simple and fluid to get your ideas flowing. But yes, the focus for the last few years has been to build shareable features that are cross platform where possible. As you can see Arranger was one such feature. We have a lot of experience building DAW’s so we took design hints from many of the strong architectural features from SONAR such as multi core scalability, background plugin scanning project backwards compatibility, and many more. We also learned to avoid some the pitfalls from SONAR

Yes Next is a desktop application only. It will not run on mobile devices. It will open projects created from the BandLab mobile apps and also be able to export to the users BandLab library to share with the BL ecosystem.

Not at all. Next was designed as a next generation DAW from the ground up. It has some visual theming similarities to unify it to the BandLab ecosystem and it has deep integration with BandLab effects and content. However it is a desktop DAW first.

@John Downing were you able to resolve this? If it still hangs in CbB please capture a dump file and send a link. That may shed light into the cause of the issue.

Also, you can use the BandLab app on your iPad and record or edit a project. Then you can continue the same project in Cakewalk Next or even CbB and continue from there. Next will additionally allow you to open the project with all the BandLab effects intact, since it supports BL plugins natively. I.e you can freely transition back and forth between mobile and desktop platforms during the music production process.

Post an exact screenshot of your error and your about box as well.

Exactly. Free doesn't equate to high engagement. BandLab has more than 70 million users and is obviously free but their user engagement metrics are not close to ours.

Pitch Shift is not a Cakewalk plugin installed by us. It appears to be a Magix direct X plugin. It's probably badly installed on your PC. Try using other plugins other than this one. This is what I see for pitch shift on my PC

Analytics data is anonymized so we can’t see individual usage. However our overall user engagement is very high indeed. Average session times are quite high and we have tons of active users per day.

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

I havent seen this. Which menu are you clicking that results in this slow drawing?

@Morten Saether is working on several video's for Next. We also may do new videos on Sonar.

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 have a trunk full of full licenses ready. Only available on floppy disk ATM.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply and we are def interested in any workflow changes that enable more efficient production. You can check out Next today by signing up for the beta eval. In next there is also track bounce in place. Doing that in Sonar just requires choosing bounce to track with the same destination track but I hear your point about streamlining this. If I add bounce tracks in place to sonar will you buy it? ?

You are right about biases in the industry. It's not just with software, bias permeates the entire music industry! I'm sure you have seen Mac bias where not having a Mac version is deemed inferior or less professional. Hopefully us having a MacOS DAW now (Cakewalk Next) will alleviate that. CbB being free also was an issue with some vendors who don't test with "free daws" ?

Mark with all due respect, you have quoted a bunch of features rather than workflow deficiencies. While some of these might be on our future roadmap, over the last 5 years we have favored stability and workflow improvements as well as refining features we already have, over adding a bunch of half-baked features to compete with other DAW's. Cakewalk is already very feature rich and benefits more from this approach. Look at the improvements to export or tempo management as just a couple of examples. I'd also point out that Cakewalk has several other features that other DAW's lack or are only just catching up to. Every user is going to find something lacking in any given DAW at any time, so its in their best interest to find one that satisfies most of their needs, or use multiple DAW's BTW Bounce render in place is already available in Cakewalk. I'm not sure what you mean by remote control but it's been available for decades. Re: Sampler our new product Cakewalk Next has an integrated sampler. Its cross-platform code, so you may see that in Sonar someday soon.

No, he's not regurgitating "old lines". He's giving you a reasonable explanation of why plugin crashes occur, but you are not prepared to listen to a reasonable explanation. We have no interest in being defensive about crashes and fix any issues in our software promptly as many will attest. (that are actually ours) Read this article which explains why plugin crashes occur and how to diagnose them. 99% of plugin crashes occur because the vendor has not tested them with all the combinations of operations that occur in a DAW. Also many of the smaller vendors tend to test their plugins in their favorite DAW and call it a day. Another common thing I've seen over the years is that some vendors only test in Mac DAW's so completely skip Cakewalk. The advice in the article I posted is the best way to get a resolution, if you must use a plugin that crashes. If you send us the dump we can sometimes pinpoint the crash and follow up with the vendor but most of the time only the vendor can solve it, and it is indeed the vendor's responsibilty to investigate first and contact us later if they actually claim its an issue with the host. Cakewalk has been around more than 30 years and our VST infrastructure is very stable (even Steinberg has commented about this)

I totally remember that!

That feature is only in the new version of Sonar

Right here in Cakewalk. Press that button.

What would the world be without panic. We all need some

Chris, Cakewalk is a division of BandLab Technologies and a corporate decision was made to have us operate independently under our own brand. We are now a multi-product company and have two products Sonar and Next with more to come in the future. Calling the product Cakewalk wouldn't make much sense. Cakewalk by Cakewalk? Lol Also, there were numerous cases in the past where BandLab users were confused with the old branding and thought CbB was the BandLab web DAW (which they have now renamed to BandLab Studio). The new branding will alleviate issues like that.