Lord Tim

^^ this. We really need a FAQ about this so it doesn't come up every 3 minutes and we spend 4 pages going over it once again. ? Please... let's not dwell on this (again), but to set the record straight before it starts to spiral off, the facts are these: Gibson owned the Cakewalk company. Gibson closed down the Cakewalk company. Any deals or debts or business you had with the Cakewalk company died when Gibson shut it down, including those ill-fated Lifetime Deals. Bandlab bought the plans to make the SONAR DAW, and all of the rights to use the name, images, etc. That's it. They didn't inherit any financial debts or assets from the Cakewalk company; that is dead and gone. It's a new company that just bought the plans to make the software. Despite the names being similar, and it being functionally similar, and the staff that was fired by Gibson being re-hired by Bandlab to continue work on this DAW, it is not the product sold to you by the Cakewalk company that was shut down by Gibson. It's a new product made with the plans purchased from Gibson. They opted to make this previously paid product free for 5 years, basically giving everyone who had the rug pulled out from them by Gibson with no notice a lifeline. Additionally, despite not getting anything from it, Bandlab hosts our old paid Cakewalk products on their servers, and allows the previously locked add-ons to be used with their current DAW. Not a bad deal for those of us burned by Gibson's decision, I think. It's now once again transitioning into a paid product, owned by Bandlab. Despite the similar name, this is not SONAR by Cakewalk, Inc. and has nothing to do with those previous offers from Gibson. This has been repeated quite a few times on the forum now as I said, and it always ends up as a multi-page disaster area. Please let this die here. This thread was about the number of users CbB has, so let's get back onto track if we can.

Please let's not get stuck in the same loop as the other recent threads, guys. They've all been fairly well played out by now.

Backing that up, someone mentioned in a thread a while back that he was following along with a course by composer Guy Michelmore (he has amazing YouTube videos and runs an online composition school) and they ran into a big roadblock with SMPTE and timecode that forced this user to have to work in Cubase. For compositional tools, mixing, etc. CbB was well up to the task, but those other details really are a roadblock for some specific professional work. You *can* work around them as a few of us on here do, but if you've been given a specific tech specification from a company and it falls outside of this window, you just simply don't fit into their workflow and you either find software that fits or lose the job. Like I said earlier, this sounds like it's a pretty big job for another day, but I'd love to see this get some attention.

I mean if you were just mixing audio - even if it was music - Resolve could certainly do the job, mind you, so I don't think you were too far off base with what you said anyway

You could also argue people who sell each version of an outright purchase "hide behind" the next version coming out and development stopping on a previous version too. That argument is flawed because development can't be stalled on a single release or you'll never get any new development to compete against other software in the same product space, and there's no way to possibly know if every bug is fixed. The Bakers are very transparent compared to a lot of companies where they'll mention that a bug discovered was something that existed in SONAR X3 and carried on unnoticed until now. Should they then go back 14 years and fix that bug in X3, which they no longer sell or pull income from? Will they stay in business if they keep having to do that? There is a VAST amount of quality control that goes into any software this complex. Internal testing, automated testing, beta testing and even public Early Access testing. The idea that every bug can be caught even with literally thousands of eyes on it is still not realistic. @heath row is also correct too, quite a lot of EULAs mention licenses can be revoked. Nobody ever reads them of course. The FUD loop cycle is starting again, with the same replies reiterating what's already been said multiple times in this thread, and then the same concerns brought up again. I think we're done here. I do want to thank everyone for being mostly civil despite the heated topic, and I think it's fair everyone has concerns and opinions - it's all valid, but ultimately nothing can be answered for now, and the speculation is fairly pointless. Going to lock this one. Cheers, all.

8 is a weird number for hats anyway, honestly, I'm not sure I'd ever seen that before. Everything else seems close enough to General MIDI standard. This is probably likely because your module is interpreting everything from a Continuous Controller rather than MIDI notes like a lot of synths expect, but 8 is still an odd choice. I'd be inclined to change Hi-Hat Open to 46 and Hi-Hat Closed to 42 just to get them similar to GM standard (and probably change Hi-Hat Pedal to 44, and Hi-Hat Splash to maybe 46 as well unless there's a specific mapping for the softsynth that exposes a Splash). The full list is here: https://pjb.com.au/muscript/gm.html

You could do this by setting the track output to an Aux track and putting your effects on the Aux track, but setting up sends on your source audio track. It still requires 2 tracks, but at least you don't have to duplicate the audio or any work you do on it. So you'd do it like this: On your source audio track, set the Output of that track to go to a New Aux track. On your source audio track, insert a Send to your hardware outputs that feed your analogue effects On the Aux track, load in all of your plugins that you want to your FX Bin. Set the Output of your Aux track to wherever you want the mix to go next (eg: Master bus) And then if you want your analogue effects to come back in as well, you'd need to set up a track with its Input set to the analogue effects output, and enable Input Echo to listen to that in realtime (which I probably wouldn't recommend because of latency sync) If you want to get a little more fancy with playing back live analogue effects and have this in time, you'd want to use the External Insert plugin and set these tracks up a little differently. Here's the signal path: http://static.cakewalk.com/documentation/SONAR/EN/images/Mixing.07.1.png So all of the sends come after the FX Bin, which means this can't be done currently on a single track. The best thing is that after you have this set up once, there's no reason you couldn't save this as a Track Template and drop it in whenever you need to do this kind of routing. It'd be about as quick as just inserting a single track in the end.

Resolve doesn't do a lot of of MIDI and soft synths and routing that CbB allows you to do, unfortunately, so if you're serious about scoring to picture (as opposed to mixing to picture, which Resolve is more than capable of doing a professional job) then you'd need a dedicated DAW of some kind. There are a few shortcomings with video in CbB at the moment that I've brought up with the devs and it's on their radar, but I doubt we'll see anything like that soon since the focus is on rolling out the final CbB and bringing the first Sonar online with the new UI, which is a massive job in itself. Hopefully we see some love in that area in the future though. But yes, until then, Andres and Jimbo have excellent advice. It can certainly be done (I mixed short film about 2 or 3 weeks back, in fact) but you have to deal with the workarounds.

This whole thread is pretty much a dumpster fire, honestly, now I read back through it. The answer is in the thread from one of the developers: Let's put this to rest. Locking now.

^^ this is good advice!

Just to be pedantic, none of us own any software anyway. We're given a license to use it (EULA) but that's all. Those license terms are agreed upon when we install it. We *are* starting to dip into a {FUD/explanation/understanding} (repeat) loop now though, and I think we're starting to get close to this thread running its course. I'm not too sure what else there is to say about this until there's any official announcement.

It's certainly possible to do this with CbB - I've done it. But you definitely need to prep your video first to have it start where you need it to - so at least a rough idea of where it starts and preferably a quick roughed-in edit, then import that video into CbB to do all of the audio work, and then export your mix and import that into your NLE. No DAW is really set up for much video editing (other than something like Vegas which started life as a DAW, but scoring in it would be pretty painful IMO) so definitely do all your video work in the right app for the job. So yeah, either do your audio mix first and import that into your NLE and cut the video to your mix, or get the video prepped so it starts where you want it to first before dropping it into CbB and that'll get the job done. But even then, you'll want to export your mix and finish it in an NLE just because of the more robust video render codecs, etc.

No, this is still as it was since the Media Foundation Engine was introduced, unfortunately. By the sounds of it, it's not an easy fix and would need a fair overhaul with how it's currently implemented. Hopefully they get onto that sometime after Sonar is properly underway.

If you're using any modern video format (which is usually the best idea) then unfortunately you can't due to how the video engine works by default, using the Media Foundation Engine. You can change to the older original Directshow video rendering engine which will give you the ability to move a video around, but you'll lose support for h.264 MP4, etc. Info on how to change engines is here: https://gaga.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=SONAR&language=3&help=Playback.46.html This is one area that Cakewalk really could use some work. My only real suggestion is to edit the video first in a video editor to get the timing where you want it before you import it in. Not great, but it'll get you over the line.

This might still be an issue if it's gain related, even with a proper interface (although that will save you a LOT of headaches just by having one). I'd recommend giving this series a good look over to get up to speed super fast: Particularly part 25 for mixing audio, but there's a lot of useful info with how audio interfaces work, etc.

OK, you're confusing a couple of things first of all which is one of the things tripping you up. First of all, scanning for VSTs will scan for, well, VSTs. Those are like small applications that extend the functionality of Cakewalk, usually .DLL or .VST3 files. Actual audio files aren't VSTs and won't be scanned as such, although some VSTs (like samplers, etc.) can load those files into their program. So as you found out, dragging them into Cakewalk (or using File > Import Audio) is how you get audio in. Next. if you don't have a proper soundcard with ASIO drivers, usually one of the flavours of WASAPI is the way to go. WASAPI Shared is the "safest" of these 2 flavours where it can co-exist with other applications on your system a little better but this is at the expense of audio latency and performance. If you're not playing live synths or streaming audio through effects live, then this isn't a big deal. WASAPI Exclusive will give you the best performance, but other applications may hijack the driver and lock Cakewalk out, so you have to have a fairly well set up system. Neither one of these will work well if your system isn't set up well for audio, or if the Buffer slider is set too low in Cakewalk's audio preferences. If something else is interfering with your audio stream somewhere, you'll get distortion, clicks, pops, etc. The reason most other audio apps play things on your system OK is because it uses the most simple version of the Windows audio drivers which aren't really acceptable for DAW use. It's hard to recommend what to do if you keep this set up because it could be all kinds of things that's causing the issue. The best recommendation is definitely to grab yourself a good audio interface with ASIO drivers, such as the Focusrite Scarlet Solo or 2i2. They cost less than a boring night out in the city and basically will sidestep all of those problems once you install their ASIO drivers. But just going back to the compressed/distorted thing for a second, that doesn't sound like it's an audio interface thing by the way you're describing it. It sounds more like a gain structure thing where stuff is set up too loud. Are you able to share a screenshot of your main window with all of the tracks open so we can see the volume controls and gain controls of the tracks you've imported?

Hopefully we also get that long awaited Cakewalk Commodore 64 version I've been wanting since 1985 too! (PS: Don't tell Greg Hendershott about this, he doesn't release the first Cakewalk until 1987, so I figure I can get a head-start on it all)

I'm not trying to argue with you or convince you of anything, so no need to feel defensive about my question there. This was more me offering the other perspective on this for anyone looking through the thread and going "hey hold on, this is terrible" so they can make their own balanced view of it. My point is I'm not seeing a real lot of difference personally between a yearly version you have to buy outright that gets updates for that version, and then when the next version comes out, you choose if you want to buy that if you want to upgrade and get updates for that new version, etc and it not being a subscription, versus buying 12 months at a time for the Gibson model and getting exactly the same thing, other than the wording and the option for someone to pay it off if they want rather than just paying a lump sum. For an example, it's no different to having SONAR 8.5.3 and you've decided not to move to X1. You find a bug in 8.5.3 but you won't get any updates on that because development has finished and is only active in X1, so in effect again it's the same thing - only the current version is getting updates and if you want to benefit from ongoing development, you need to buy the upgrade to the new product. X2 gets released and now X1 doesn't get any ongoing work, and so on. Sonar 2023 gets released and we get fixes and features for it. Sonar 2024 gets released and 2023 doesn't see any more work, etc. because the focus is on Sonar 2024. Development moves on. Again, everyone has a personal choice to make once this comes out - each person needs to weigh this up and make a choice, I'm just explaining things so people in general reading this aren't misunderstanding how this idea worked (if this does become the model). But let's not focus on the word "subscription" and more read into what the actual details are, because this thing wasn't ever a subscription as we're used to seeing now with a lot of apps, it was "rent-to-own" rather than "pay us or next month you won't have an app anymore, lol"

Just doing a hypothetical: If Sonar was released each year with a new version costing (pulling a random figure out of the air here) $200, and that $200 would get you each new version (eg: Sonar 2023, Sonar 2024, etc.) plus any updates to that version, does that sound like something that would work for you? So in other words, you buy a version of Sonar and you get updates for the life of that version until you buy the next version, and the cycle repeats. That's kind of what the old Gibson model was in a lot of ways: (Explaining to anyone unfamiliar to it) It was "membership" which basically was a rent-to-own model which basically went like this - you could either buy a yearly membership which got you 12 months worth of use of the app + any updates and once that 12 months ends, the program doesn't expire on you like a regular subscription would do, but you just don't get any more updates to it, more or less like buying a yearly version outright. But this also had the addition of not having to pay that $200 lump sum if you don't want, but spreading those payments over a year instead, and so long as you kept up the payments for that year, at the end you got a program that didn't stop working like a regular subscription would do. So buying a yearly upgrade of an app outright is really not a lot different to getting that kind of 12-months in advance membership, but just with the added advantage if someone doesn't have the money up front, they have a payment plan option to help make owning the software easier. Now, to be clear, I have no idea if this is what the model will be going forward - again, none of us know this until there's an official announcement, me included - but if it's something like this then it's kind of got all of the benefits of an outright purchase with the flexibility of a subscription but without any of the "hello we're Adobe!" downsides.

Nested folders are in the latest version, and have been since last year sometime. What is your version number?

Yeah, that was rubbish. Pretty much zero notice at all. Still annoyed about this 5 years later ?

It's possible you've switched over to Audio Transients in the track Edit Filter at some point (easy to do by mistake) and it's generated Transient Markers on your track, even if you never touched them using Audiosnap. Bundles are pretty old and crappy tech, I have to say. There's a lot of limitations due to that and I personally don't trust them all that much myself. And yeah, add in any new features like Transient Markers or audio stretching and they don't like that at all. I prefer to do a regular Save As to a new directory with Copy All Audio checked, and then zip that new directory. You end up with more or less the same thing - all active project audio only, all in one file - but smaller sizes because of it being compressed, and more robust CRC checks, etc. If something goes wrong, there's still a good chance to rescue at least some of your files in there, as opposed to a CWB where it's more likely you'll be suddenly digging for your backups because it's irretrievably dead.

So basically what they're saying is that nobody is going to go "lol CbB doesn't work anymore from today and there's no app you can move to, surprise!!" at you. It sounds like CbB will give everyone a pretty decent lead time while they decide if they want to move to Sonar or not, and if the choice is "not" then they won't wake up one day with no time to sign off on old projects or migrate them to other DAWs or whatever. Nobody knows what's happening with price or what the new product line is going to look like yet, so it's fair there's trepidation about it, but my gut is telling me that after the dust settles, going forward Sonar will make the most sense, at least for those of us invested in this ecosystem.

@AB7777 Initially it looks like there won't be any theme editor at all due to the change in technology to display the GUI (changing from bitmaps to vectors), but going forward I think this will open the door to a lot of easier customisation. The problem with bitmaps is that they have a pre-defined size, and that's it. Shrink or grow them and they look like garbage, or you have to bake in different resolution versions and set up breakpoints for when they swap out at different resolutions, etc. - a real pain. That also means that if something gets shifted around, parts of the UI can break. We saw that when a couple of things were added into the Inspector last year and it broke a heap of custom themes that were dependent on those bitmaps being exactly the correct size. Vectors can be dynamically changed on the fly to fit in to any updates. That all said, I have no idea what's going to become available to use for any custom themes in the future. It was mentioned that this functionality would be returned at some stage, but won't be there from the start. I'd be very surprised if there wasn't at least a light and dark theme on launch though, and being vectors, it shouldn't be a crazy amount of work for the devs to say "hey make all of this #cc33d5 colour" rather than going "ah crap, now I have to edit 385 images."

Yeah, we got an absolute belting yesterday from spammers- I was on there for most of the day doing cleanup behind the scenes. The forum software was hiding a good lot of the threads from public view, thankfully, and outright blocking others, so it wouldn't surprise me if the reason we were getting so many 500/502/504 errors was the sheer number of attempts at getting in the door. I think the spam filters could probably be tweaked a little though (something mods don't have access to, unfortunately - that's admins only) because it'll get tripped up on things like airlines, a group of numbers similar to phone numbers, etc. I'll likely need to unblock my own post here for even mentioning that, actually. It's definitely helping things but there's collateral damage along the way, unfortunately. I'll bring it up with the team and see if anyone has any good suggestions, but I'd say this is the best of a bunch of crappy options at the moment. EDIT: Lolz, yep - had to approve my post due to filtered words ?