Noel Borthwick

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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.

>>"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

For the record. I connected to Michael's PC via teamviewer and resolved it. ActController was crashing on startup for some reason (likely the act data got messed up when he had the Nanocontrol) I found the crash by launching Cakewalk inside windebug which showed the crash site. Then I renamed his actcontroller dll and Cakewalk immediately started up. After that I removed it from preferences control surfaces, renamed the dll back and added it back to surfaces. Its working fine for him now. Windebug is the best tool to troubleshoot issues like this when the app is not launching or poofing because it will always show the reason for the exit.

@OddSox The file was not available when I tried to get it. We look at dump files in Visual studio directly since we have the symbols. Windebug also works. However. without symbols you won't see very much .