Lord Tim

To clarify, the version of Cakewalk by Bandlab that's currently in Early Access will be the final version of Cakewalk by Bandlab. After this version is released, there will be no more updates to it since development will be moving to the new Sonar product. Sonar will essentially be Cakewalk by Bandlab with extra features, bug fixes, ongoing development, and a new scalable interface, so it will be 100% backwards compatible and familiar to people who use Cakewalk by Bandlab. In fact, as far as I'm led to understand, except for the look of the controls themselves (being changed over to vector graphics), everything will be exactly where they are in Cakewalk by Bandlab now, so it's really like an upgraded version with ongoing development. There was talk by one of the devs in a recent thread that there may be a free version of the products going forward, but nothing was elaborated on with that, and we won't know until there's an official announcement about it. Despite the Cakewalk dev team being small, Bandlab itself is a big company so anything said - likely even by the devs at this point - is subject to change by the time things are announced, although I'm sure whatever they're able to tell us is all in good faith with what they know and how much the CEO has allowed them to say at this point. Bottom line is Cakewalk by Bandlab's final release will be out very soon, and won't be going away in the near future so people will have plenty of time to make up their minds about what they want to do when the new product announcement happens. Let's be patient.

Just to add, it was mentioned in a recent thread there would be a free version of one or more of the upcoming apps as well, so this all may be stress for nothing. Feature for feature, there's really no other free apps out there with the feature set that CbB (and Sonar upcoming) has. If you don't need all of Sonar's features then sure... some of these other apps may work for you, but there's a reason most of us have chosen CbB as their primary DAW, be it feature set, legacy projects, preferred workflow, etc. so going to another free DAW for the sake of it being also free makes little sense, IMO. Ultimately we don't know what the future plans are yet (as was discussed to death in another thread that got locked because it devolved into the same questions over and over, which currently there are no answers for), so the best advice is what has been mentioned so far: Let's wait and see. If the price of the paid apps works for you, or the feature set of the free versions of the apps works for you, then top stuff! Keep using Cakewalk. If not, then you have a decision to make. That's really about it.

You have Ripple Edit on. https://legacy.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Arranging.33.html Look for the button at the top right of the track view and make sure it's not activated.

I've found VocalSync can be a little twitchy in some projects. It'll usually play correctly, but on every 3rd or 4th run through, the sync will be wildly off. Like any Region FX, I always bounce down immediately after I'm done with the process so I know what I've done is committed to a WAV that's just not going to change on me thanks to latency or some random mix variable during export.

This is the Early Access release of Cakewalk by Bandlab. I'd assume there's an NDA in place where people couldn't talk about beta software publicly on the forum anyway.

Actually this is a very important point that we tend to gloss over a bit in the forum because our advice is usually Cakewalk specific - other programs may not give you the options that Cakewalk does when it comes to drivers, so you may be forced to leave this stuff installed for their sake. Good call! But yeah, even a budget interface like a Focusrite Scarlet Solo will give you proper ASIO drivers and much better performance overall than any onboard sound chips.

ASIO4ALL and the FL ASIO driver aren't real drivers at all, they make native Windows WDM drivers appear as ASIO drivers. The Realtek HD one is actually a broken driver that will cause major issues, and Cakewalk actually will warn you not to use it. ASIO only allows you to use one driver at at time, and it must be selected for both input and output. With that said, the above replies are correct - uninstall these unnecessary "drivers" and if don't have a proper audio interface with manufacturer supplied ASIO drivers (and not virtual wrapper drivers like shown) then use WASAPI and choose Realtek. WASAPI Shared will give you the safest performance but will introduce a minimum 10ms latency. WASAPI Exclusive will give you better latency performance but other things on your system can interfere with your playback. A proper audio interface will solve all of these problems.

The irony of using technology to post on the internet about lack of belief in technology isn't lost on me here... ?

Actually that's a good question and I did ask a dev that. The pre-CbB version of the application was SONAR, intended to be stylised in all caps. Going forward, the upcoming releases are Cakewalk Sonar and Cakewalk Next, so no specific capitlisation there.

Ok, I'd try an update first to the last public release of 2022.11 and see if that helps. If not, try updating your Redistributes: If that doesn't work, report back and we can help you capture a crash dump to send in to support to see where this is going wrong.

Just as a sanity check, we should have a scroll back through a few past EA release threads too - this one doesn't seem much more or less problematic than prior ones, so if you're on CbB 2022.11 and it feels OK, the EA for that also had the same ups and downs as this one does for some users. It'll all get worked out.

Sonar will be its own install alongside CbB, and will be paid right from the get-go as far as I understand it, whereas CbB will at least continue to work until the activation lapses on it (this is how I'm understanding it anyway, I'm sure the Bakers will clearly explain the deal once Sonar is released), so it makes sense for this last round of fixes for CbB for those who haven't made up their mind about staying with Cakewalk going forward. But yeah, if you're planning to stick with Cakewalk and shift over to Sonar, there probably isn't a great deal of reasons to make sure CbB is updated.

It's kind of just academic at the end of the day, though, when you really think about it. Yes, comparing the wording of the marketing for CbB when it was released 5+ years ago to which edition of SONAR was definitely valid for providing context back then. As CbB was free, it was almost kind of irrelevant back then too, other than to highlight that a lot of the stuff you did get with the top-tier product line was baked into the free version, 3rd party plugins notwithstanding. Was the marketing correct? We could debate that either way. The pricing structure and how software is being delivered has changed a lot in the last half a decade, with most going to a subscription "pay to keep using it or else" model either entirely or predominantly. Software that can be purchased outright now has had to have its price massively adjusted for this new environment, so there's not really an apples to apples comparison for SONAR Platinum in 2017 to whatever version of SONAR there would be if Gibson was selling it now (then again, Gibson being Gibson, who knows what dumb crap they would have done?) I think the correct lens to look at this through now is "does it suit my needs" and "how does it compare to other DAWs at this price point (once we know what that is)." If you're looking at feature-to-feature of what matters to you and comparing it to, say, Studio One, then there's your direct value comparison, rather than referring back to marketing from 5+ years ago, to form a conclusion about any inferred price or value. Ultimately people are going to decide if it fits or not once it's out. If the price point is comparable to Cubase (for example) then why Sonar over Cubase? Does the workflow suit? Is learning a whole new DAW worth the time investment elsewhere? Are you worried about 30+ years worth of backwards compatibility for Cakewalk products for your projects? Even if something costs less, those are pretty major concerns to take into account with which software you want to make your primary DAW. (And as said many times, there's no reason why people can't use multiple DAWs anyway) The comparison shouldn't be marketing from 5+ years ago, it should be against the competition and the value of how the workflow matters to you. That all said, I do understand what you're getting at with learning about where it stands in history and not wanting to share misinformation. That's valid, but I still think that doesn't have a lot of real-world bearing on the product going forward, personally.

If you can get an exact recipe of steps (start a new thread for that) and can show what's clearly happening and then getting your CWP over to the Bakers, that'd be a big help in trying to fix it. It doesn't sound like a widespread thing, but that doesn't mean it's not a legitimate bug that's being exposed by something that's happening inside your project.

You have been given all of the answers that can be given. Continually beating on it will not reveal anything new at this point in time. We are descending into getting stuck in a loop, and the beginning of thumbs down and FUD replies and reactions. Time to lock.

Nobody knows or is publicly allowed to say what is going on yet. The CEO isn't posting in this thread, nor is he under any obligation to come here and post. You're hearing from the CTO and dev team, who are saying they don't know/can't say yet what the price is. That's basically the entire story. Until we get an official announcement, that's pretty much the answer. Once Sonar and Next are properly launched with their pricing details, then everyone can decide if it's a good fit for them or not. Until then, all we can do is sit tight and wait. This thread is starting to run its course, I think.

No, this isn't quite accurate. What Jon is talking about is a new format that exports kind of a "translation" file format that Next can open and vice versa, not a regular saved .CWP project file. Next doesn't have the feature set that Cakewalk (well, Sonar) has so it needs one of these conversion files to be able to turn it into a format Next can import. For direct saving of CWP projects to be reopened in Cakewalk, this is a straight 1:1 save/open. If you look at your project folder when stuff is being saved, it will quickly make a temp file where it's all checked and then saved as your CWP project file, just to make sure nothing is corrupt before it commits it to disk. Any issues in a project will almost certainly be in the project from working in the project itself (for whatever reason - bad plugin data, something gotten into a bad state, etc) but the load and save is something Noel has specifically mentioned over the years as a thing he's refined to be very robust.

^^ Yeah, this is important. There's a preferences value you can set in recent versions of Cakewalk that will force crashes to be reported (in most cases anyway) so it'll generate a crash dump that you can get over to the Dev team to find out what's causing this. Keybindings are often slow to open their settings but I don't think I've ever seen it crash at all, so this is interesting.

But just to be clear, this was a product from a different time so we shouldn't infer that this is what the product line or actual prices will be either. John is just using that as an example.

See Jon's post here: This is a company, so the price needs to go through a lot of hands before they can comment on it. There's a difference between knowing and being allowed to say anything before you get the go-ahead from HQ.

Jon kind of gave a fairly definitive answer there to some stuff though: So yeah, as I mentioned earlier, we just have to sit tight for now and wait for the announcements.

And if indeed it is a crash - do you get a popup saying it's crashed and it's made a minidump?

At the risk of this turning into the fiasco that the new product announcement thread was, I think that was a solid model. You could buy a year outright and you get to keep that version, just like how buying a new version of any other software outright is, but you also had the option of paying that off over 12 months too, so for people who didn't have $X to spend on software outright, it became a more affordable monthly thing - rent to own, basically. And unlike subscriptions that basically stops the moment you stopped paying (like pretty much all of them), after you've grabbed that 12 months it keeps working... There's not a lot of downsides to that model! Dunno what you guys have planned for the new model yet (clearly you can't talk about it yet) but if it's similar to that, it works for me.

Noel mentioned this in a different thread. I would say the reason a lot of this stuff wasn't mentioned is because the details were/are being locked in at HQ and there's only so much the Bakers are able to say at this point. But from what we've seen posted by staff on the forum, there will be different bundles of products at different price points, a free option of something, and it was suggested in an early post that we would be able to pay off Sonar in a Rent-to-own thing over 12 months, like the old paid SONAR was. I'm not staff and not privy to any inside information here, just as a disclaimer, but this is what I'm gathering from forum posts. I'd also strongly suggest that any or all of what I'm saying here is subject to change, so until we hear an official announcement, we should sit tight and not buy into any of the FUD.

Shoot a message over to support@cakewalk.com and they should be able to sort you out.