Noel Borthwick

16 minutes ago, backwoods said:

noel I cant access my legacy cakewalk account to retrieve old products. foprgotten password and reset emails arent hitting my account. any ideas?

backwoods I suggest you contact BandLab support. I don't really have access to all that data. If you have a migrated SSO account they may be able to help you. Old unmigrated accounts are a different story.

9 minutes ago, scook said:

When is the ETA for the Next beta

Next beta has been active for several months in internal beta. We're now opening it up for limited public access. People who signed up should gradually get invites.
We need to load balance it so we aren't overwhelmed initially...

1 hour ago, Alan Tubbs said:

Next - I’m not sure what it is.  A step up from the free Bandlab software? Maybe pay.  Hopefully you can use it on the Mac so cakewalk can have an in there.

Next is a completely new DAW designed from the ground up by us over the last five years. It was developed to be cross platform and works equally well on Mac and PC with full AU and VST support.
The focus so far has been on creation centric features as opposed to the more production centric features that Sonar has.
For example, it has very intuitive lyrics entry and song arrangements, a built in sampler and pad controller which is quite powerful, allowing you to set up sampler or instrument pads. 
While Next might look visually similar to the online web based BandLab Studio that's only because we followed branding guidelines. It has full integration with the BandLab ecosystem with integrated browsing of BandLab loops as well as upload and download to the BandLab library. The product itself is quite deep and includes many of the bells and whistles Cakewalk users have come to expect, like multiprocessor support, background plugin scanning and flexible routing. Routing is very simplified and elegant in Next and can all be done via track folders (unlike Sonar). There are many more exciting features coming in future roadmaps. I'm sure in the upcoming weeks Jesse will post more information about Next.

In the interim, interested users are welcome to request beta access if you want hands-on experience with the application.

7 minutes ago, chris.r said:

My single question would be, can you still drive your car or keep using your appliance in case the maker decide to close? (not wishing you any of it)  

Cakewalk as a company closed in 2018. My question to you is can you still use SONAR Platinum today? If the answer is yes, then you have your answer for the future.
Most ethical companies handle terminating events like that gracefully and we are no exception. When Cakewalk was shut down, we had escrow plans to unlock licenses for users permanently if it came to that. We never needed to, since BandLab acquired the software and keeps the license servers running even though we make no profit off of it. 

2 hours ago, Terry Kelley said:

I said want. And it's not impossible but certainly unlikely. And if I disconnect from the internet Windows will continue to work even if it never connects again. The fact that companies do it now doesn't mean it's desirable.

Get ready, your heated seats, remote start and entertainment system in your car will be subscription.

Want.

My car is already subscription (OnStar). If I want remote access to it or to check stats, I have to pay $15 a month
I got a few years of free access when I bought it. Actual appliances have already gone this way. 
The classic 90's software model of paying for a specific version has changed many years ago whether we like it or not. As I mentioned in another thread, back in the day we had a hybrid model where you could do either pay as you go or buy that years version outright. It worked pretty well and satisfied most users needs.
While we haven't baked the final details I think Cakewalk's offering will be a pretty compelling value even compared to other DAW's. Obviously not free...

3 hours ago, ancjava said:

Can staff confirm if the new Sonar will require more resources than CbB or if the PC that run CbB smoothly (in my case 4 core CPU and 16 GB of RAM) should be enough to get the same performance out of new Sonar?

If it runs on cbb today there is a very good chance it will be fine. The main difference would be the new vector based UI but we don't expect that to require more resources. In fact it could take less since the overall footprint of the app will be smaller.

4 hours ago, GroverKen said:

I’ve been a user (and serial upgrader) of Cakewalk since the Windows 3.0 version and would ask one thing - please don’t lose the backwards compatibility. Last week I resurrected a project from February 1999 when I saved everything as .bun files. Lo and behold, the latest version unpacked everything successfully and I could continue from where I had left off all those years ago. My workflow may have changed and there might now many more “toys” to play with but it worked. Impressive!

Won't happen. It's the same base codebase so no functionally changes. It will be 100% compatible with earlier projects

15 minutes ago, sjoens said:

Nice. Does this mean things like Control Bar Modules and Console View elements won't be able to be "refaced" in any way... like making a flat surface shaded or more 3D? 

Yes, you do give up some abilities with removal of bitmaps. But the benefits greatly outweigh this IMHO.

Just now, Sal Sorice said:

Hopefully the 'upgrade' will play nice with all our 3rd party plugins/instruments. I'd hate to have to reinstall/reauthorize tons of stuff.

Zero changes to compatibility or program function. It will install side by side to Cbb and load all your plugins without needing to even rescan.

Theme editor is highly bitmap based so it won't work as is. There are no longer images to replace. 
The advantage is color changes are now much simpler with vectors.

1 hour ago, Misha said:

Noel, 

Thank you for your reply!

Subscription is definitely something I am not interested in. While I own many great software titles, none are subscription.  I like to own my software. Personal preference. And for that matter most of musicians I know will not touch "subscription" model. 

"For those afraid of the software deactivating, there are models that allow you to purchase an annual (non-expiring) license. "

Noel, pretty please, small clarification.

"Annual" means no expiry / no deactivation after one year,   just no further free updates after the year, right?

P.S. I do believe in supporting good software that I like very much, and I am certain team will come up with reasonable non-subscription competitive  pricing. Just subscription in not my thing. "Waves" surely proved very recently that subscription only is not what their customers wanted

 

>>"Annual" means no expiry / no deactivation after one year,   just no further free updates after the year, right?

Exactly. We were one of the few companies offering this model even in the SONAR days. How it works is you either pay for 12 consecutive monthly subs OR you purchase a one year subscription upfront. In both scenarios the last months version is permanently unlocked for you and you own it.  This is essentially no different than buying an annual version of the software outright. Many people who dislike subscription are unaware that we always did this.

Also, an advantage of monthly subscription was that once you crossed the 12 month boundary you could continue consecutive monthly subs for however long as you want and you would always own the last version you paid for.

All subs are not bad and are actually better for some people who prefer paying in smaller increments. So definitely read the fine print.

Disclaimer: To be clear I'm not saying that this is going to be our model. We're still very much working out the details here. I was quoting how it was done in the SONAR days and saying not all subscription schemes are the same. 

53 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

I would like see CbB remain available as a way to check out some of the features in CS, as a fully-functioning demo.

Sonar itself will run as demo for a 15 day trial period.

@Sal Sorice this is not intentional. It's likely due to some domain changes with the new website. I'll notify the back end team.
Can you access your products from your account page on the legacy website?

EDIT: It turns out that Command Center is relying on the old cakewalk website which is actually now legacy.cakewalk.com. Unfortunately the only way to restore it to working is to update the command center app itself since the URL's are built into the code. That might take awhile to do since that hasn't been changed in many years. In the interim please use the account management at https://legacy.cakewalk.com/My-Account to update your old software if you need to get to it.

50 minutes ago, Misha said:

"I’m pleased to see new life being breathed by the bakers."

+1

My main concern is that whatever they do, they will let existing users keep current version, without "deactivating" it ever, even if buck stops now with development for last version.  Mainly  for backup purposes of existing projects.  That surely will give me initiative to upgrade to paid (non-subscription) version and I am certain quite a few users will understand what I am saying.  So those of us who have projects from 5-10-15-20+ years ago, have a peace of mind, knowing they will still be able to open their older projects 10 years from now and have them same way they left them.   I still have Sonar X1 (in original box)  Couple of years ago, for fun I tested it, opening projects from Cakewalk by Bandlab...  With some plugin hiccups they did  

---

Jesse, Thank you for your answer.  This was/is my concern since early days of Bandlab. 

We're still hashing out the details of pricing/payment models. What bothers you most about subscription? It's essentially a pay as you go lease model and is beneficial for those who can't justify putting down a lumpsum of cash at one time...
For those afraid of the software deactivating, there are models that allow you to purchase an annual (non-expiring) license. This is what we did in the SONAR days. An annual license is no different from buying the software outright.
 

10 minutes ago, JohnnyV said:

Sound like Sonar will not really be Sonar but a brand new DAW.  Not sure I need that myself.  

Sonar is built from the identical codebase of CbB so no change there. What's new at least to start with is some new features and a massive revamp of the UI to make it DPI aware so it can run on higher resolution monitors without pixelation. Note that this doesn't change the UX in anyway other than new vector-based graphics and a crisper look. It will be supported and added to in the future unlike CbB which will not get all the latest developments that have gone in since the start of this year.

3 hours ago, TerraSin said:

Any chance for a bundle deal? I work with both electronic music and traditional and I think I could use the tools from both for projects unless you're planning on putting the features from Next into Sonar as well, of course.

Pricing details are still being baked but it will most likely be a bundle.

2 hours ago, LittleStudios said:

My guess is Next will be web browser based, you know, running through Chrome or Firefox or whatever web browser you use.  This way they can reach more people.  I think Sonar will be the version that runs as it's own application installed on your machine.  Next will be free and Sonar will be paid. 

 

No Next is a full desktop based cross platform app that integrates with BandLab. The web browser based daw is BandLab studio that already exists.

1 hour ago, estolad said:

I wasn't expecting Cakewalk to be free forever, but hopefully not subscription only.

Will there be another Cakewalk by Bandlab release or is the next release Cakewalk Sonar? Is there a rough time estimate for the release?

There will be another final CbB release with bug fixes. We're wrapping up the details on that...

Why can't you just click Quit in the plugin message? It appears to be asking for user input there.
If you skip the project should continue loading but the plugin will be not active which shouldn't affect anything. You can then delete the plugin from the project.

On 5/6/2023 at 10:12 AM, Greg Wynn said:

All I was looking for was confirmation that there would be continued dev work - that’s it.

I didn’t ask anything about a roadmap, timetables or any feature details so I’m a bit confused as to why the thread was closed.

There will definitely be more dev work. If anything, it's the ongoing work that has resulted in in this taking longer than our usual releases, and due to various reasons, some out of our control, schedules keep changing. Hopefully in the next few weeks you folks will at least learn more about why it's been taking longer. It's definitely not that we've been idling here

One thing we've been attempting to work on (won't be in the immediate CbB update since work is still underway) among other big things is a big UI refresh to modernize the look of the application and support high resolution displays better, which is a huge undertaking that touches all the user interface.  And this is only the tip of the iceberg but I digress. 

On 4/5/2023 at 4:37 AM, pulsewalk said:

I rather don't send out my complete projects. The best would be if they could release a tool that could run such a check on the users computer and save the info in a text file or whatever form it should be saved, which the user could send back to the DEV's. Also, this log file shall not contain any musical information etc., as there's sometimes quite rigid copyright issues and what not.

@pulsewalk If you have a problem that is project specific as it certainly appears to be in your case, the only hope to resolve the issue is to send us the project file. In many cases we don’t even require the audio data to identify problems so you could try sending just the cwp file first. Cakewalk does not share user data with anyone so copyright should not be an issue here.

On 4/10/2023 at 1:55 AM, Starship Krupa said:

It’s unfortunate that you had those issues, but it is unusual (obviously not unheard-of). The SONAR-to-Cakewalk migration is designed to go as seamlessly as any other SONAR update and usually does.

I have literally never heard of this issue. There is no “migration” unless you are loading really old projects from the 90’s with the wrk file format! Products from the X series all load natively since the project files are backwards compatible. You mention LUA scripts - that is not specific to Cakewalk perhaps some third party wrapper is throwing those errors.

Were you using the 32 bit version of X3? VST’s that loaded in prior versions should definitely load as long as they have been scanned in CbB. Check your scan paths.

Some notes.

Make sure performance module is set to audio engine performance rather than system load otherwise its showing performance of the system as a whole not Cakewalk.
The measurement of engine performance is an “estimate” so don’t read too much into the metering. There is no perfect way for an app to measure core performance at the app level in Windows. Its intended for troubleshooting only. The bottom line is whether you actually hear glitches.
The app is at the mercy of the windows scheduler so we cannot control which core gets the most cycles. Especially with some of the modern big/little core CPU’s as well as hyperthreading this is not deterministic anymore.

Also one of the cores gets assigned to user interface. The audio engine can get assigned to the same core being used by the UI by windows so its not abnormal at all to see more load on one core. Load balancing is not a perfect science so I wouldnt get too hung up on seeing perfect distribution of workloads. Depending on how your project is set up and the plugins its normal to see variances.

On 2/21/2023 at 7:48 AM, Dagg M. said:

Another thing that slightly bothers me is a 'christmas tree' busy look of the DAW that doesn't look very professional,

You definitely want to check out workspaces since this allows you to hide as much of the user interface as necessary. This is a unique customization feature in cakewalk that other daws do not have.

You likely have the default set to the advanced workspace, that literally shows all of the UI. Try setting it to basic or mixing, or create your own workspace to your taste to show just what you need.