Bruno de Souza Lino

Name any company which will disclose to you they sell your data.

They do, but I'm more interested in answers about "price" atm. I don't think I can buy a Cakewalk license with values which aren't of the "monetary" kind.

But then how will companies implement their corporate tribalism ways if we do that?

How is Sonar connected to Discord? If all you had to do in order to user Midjourney was have an account at Discord, I'm certain they would be charging a Nitro subscription for it. BandLab has some AI generation tools for song ideas and mastering, but these are not part of or integrated with Cakewalk at the present moment. Although, a well oiled and implemented machine coupled with a human which knows said tool well beats AI every time without fault.

All you gotta do is tape all the Calewalk and Gibson logos;

There's no possible direction going forwards because so far Bandlab doesn't seem to give a straight answer when asked about pricing. As a few people have said, this opens a world of "what if" and its criticism is well deserved every time it happens. Name five features present in the free version of Cakewalk that would make it good seller and differentiate it from any other paid DAW in the current market. While I do find certain aspects of Cakewalk to be things which no DAW have implemented the way it does to be considered good features, I'm talking about features that you'd be hard pressed to find replacements for. As an example, one of the killer features of REAPER is how customizable and flexible it is and you'd be hard pressed to find another DAW which can do what it does the way it does it. Why should I be happy about the prospect of a tool I chose to use being taken from me by a potential subscription model or fair price offering which only fits a small demographic from a specific country which is not mine? Because if everything was fine and swell with Cakewalk, you wouldn't hear from me otherwise. Likewise, but atm Cakewalk is this better DAW, so I can't do much about it.

Personally, whenever a company starts preparing the ground in advance and enters with all this flowery language about vision statements and how much they care about the users of their software, they're gonna pull the rug and are trying to convince me it's not gonna hurt when it happens. I'm not sure when and how they're gonna do it, but it will happen. They can't because of what I mentioned before, especially considering CbB effectively has no killer features which would make sure it will be a seller and it hasn't had that mind share since it went into the whole "rent-to-own" scheme years ago. The most they can hope atm is look at how people react at "the news" and see how they can act in accordance so the least amount of profit loss and damage control is necessary.

You can sort of test Mixbus in an indirect way. Just see if you can grab a copy of Ardour either by compiling it yourself under Windows or using a Linux install or Live distro. The only thing which differentiates Ardour for Mixbus is the proprietary Harrison stuff built into it. Everything else is the same. Even the developers are the same for both versions. Usage wise, if you know how to use ProTools, you'll use Mixbus straight away. EDIT - Scratch the compiling stuff for Windows. Ardour doesn't provide any documentation for it, refuses to do so and all guides you'll find for it are outdated. The challenge is not compiling Ardour itself, but all of its dependencies.

I also noticed how it doesn't scale properly in the banner and it's pixelated.

The simple fact you had to create an account in an unrelated service to have access to it points to that. And the licenses you have to renew every 6 months. Why would a company offering a free product care about keeping track of how many users are downloading it or who are those users otherwise? A company doesn't necessarily have to annoy you with targeted ads to profit off your data. Also, who guarantees they won't now that they have to convince you to buy their shiny brand new product?

You had to offer your data to Bandlab when you created an account to have access to CbB. Who knows what happened with that, but Bandlab profited off that for sure. Probably more than what they will eventually charge you for a Sonar or Sonar Next license. Unless you're talking about FLOSS software, all free and open source software have some kind of price tag attached to it, even if you're not explicitly paying for it.

While their converters are top notch material, RME seems to be the company which makes extremely reliable interfaces with unmatched levels of flexibility. Their Hammerfal HDSPe card still holds the crown for the lowest round trip latency.

2112 might arrive sooner than expected.

The data you gave Bandlab when you registered and created an account to have access to the software is more valuable than any amount of money Bandlab could potentially charge you for a CbB license.

Even if I had TS Max, I'd have to have another drive just for it as just everything that comes with Sampletank is 200+ GB already.

Seeing talks about vector UX and 4k makes me pray you're not gonna make the UI so large that the only way for you to have any space in it is running it on a 4k display. FL Studio has done it and roughly 70% of the interface is occupied by menus and panels and you cannot fit the large windows in your screen if it's below 1080p. And the worst part of it is you can only make the UI bigger.

In other words: "We can't get enough people to invest in expensive plugins after buying our expensive hardware tied to it, so we're forced to see if people will buy our expensive plugins without the expensive hardware." Don't be surprised if they copy the UAD/PA model and their plugins are constantly on sale because no sane mind would buy them otherwise.

In practice, subscription plans for software are a solution for a problem which doesn't exist and introduce more problems than they actually solve. While it could be argued that you're benefiting the users by providing them a price which they can justify paying for, this is the advantage of a payment plan and not a subscription service. Subscription plans are an endless endeavor and eventually, you'll end paying more money on your subscription than the cost of a perpetual license. This is a very big issue with people which have infrequent budgets, like people doing freelance work, as they now have to split a budget they may not have for a tool which they were able to only invest in once and use it for as long as they could run it in their hardware. Also, what happens when a person is in dire straights and can no longer pay for the subscription? Now they lost access to a tool which could help them make money, something which doesn't happen with a perpetual license. Add to that the fact most subscription plans are very easy to enter but almost impossible to get out of, might double charge you for a multitude of reasons, charge you for features you're not interested into and can raise in pricing, which in turn results with it also increasing the pricing of the perpetual license as well. There's also the nature of pricing. Unless you're talking about regional pricing which is compatible for general budgets of people from specific regions of the world, there's no way in hell you're gonna cough up a prince in a single currency which will be fair for everyone looking at it. Doing this right would involve some research and investment which might steer away from improvements which could be invested in the software in question instead. Another issue which will happen is the constant need to update the software in order for customers to feel validated in their choice (they're constantly paying for it after all) and writing away any reliability and stability as a result of that. Plus now users have zero control over which versions of the software they have installed in the machine and one update could potentially stop the world or introduce breaking changes in the workflow or installation for some people which could be hard to trace and solve because now you're dealing with more moving parts.

Suggested specs were also the words the people at TakeTwo used to describe the minimum requirements for KSP2 and you couldn't even run the game properly with a machine better than those.

Not even Blender, which is a 3D modelling app, has minimum requirements that high, even if they're suggestions. That will make sure people shy away from CbB beacuse they might think their machine can't run it.

Personally, the only things from IK which interest me are B3-x, T-Racks, both MODO instruments and Amplitube. Everything else is a bit meh, especially with their stupid "sounds that you paid money for but have to renew every 180 days."

Even 3D modelling apps don't have minimum requirements that high.

Personally, the sort of "we are still discussing pricing/payment options" coupled with asking what bothers people about subscription plans then citing one "advantage" of them is a good indicator that they'll either offer subscription plans for both with a perpetual option, only Next will be subscription based or both will be subscription based with no perpetual license option. Until more information is released about the pricing, I'm expecting the worst, followed by an endless barrage of excuses at to why it was a good thing because there are a lot of advantages in subscription plans...For whoever offers them. I hope I am dead wrong on everything I'm saying but the whole statement, followed by the current lack of transparency makes me think otherwise.

Another concern I'm seeing is...your current system requirements for both are quite high even in comparison to heavy hitters like Ableton Live, Bitwig and FL Studio. Let's hope they're not actually 8-core and 16 GB of RAM minimum.