The end of an era

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Sounddesigner
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Re: The end of an era

Post by Sounddesigner »

Nestor wrote: Wed May 23, 2018 9:39 am
Sounddesigner wrote: Tue May 22, 2018 8:22 pm Presonous seems to be implimenting the best features from other DAWs to make one super DAW.
Exactly :D I've already told you, go for it!


That super DAW strategy makes them harder and harder to resist. Eventually "resistance is futile" and you become borg "assimilated". Everytime I try to rule Studio One out and scratch it off my list of possible choices Presonous then upgrades it in ways that I like and in ways that make it look like the ideal DAW and complete. I'm still going to give Bandlab a chance and see where they go with Sonar, but after Bandlab made Sonar freeware they really didn't inspire a lot of confidence in me and I'm not sure they're going to take good care of Sonar after that major devaluation. Time will tell when it comes to Sonar and I will try and give them a chance after the let down, but also Studio One v4 has earned itself demoing and a place back on my list. I will demo Studio One and if it continue to impress It may force me to buy.


EDITED
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Nestor
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Re: The end of an era

Post by Nestor »

It's very easy too, so that heps. Try it out, it is the best you can do, then judge :wink:
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Re: The end of an era

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It turns out it was not the 'End of a Era' but rather a 'Hiatus'. Cakewalk is about to go Commercial again.

The DAW will nolonger be freeware and the name Cakewalk by Bandlab is being changed back to Cakewalk Sonar. Sonar once again it is.

Bandlab spent the last 5 years mainly getting rid of bugs wich was VERY smart. They say the new Sonar will be the most stable DAW on the Market, that remains to be seen ofcourse, but i love their focus. Sonar had a known bug problem wich needed to be addressed if it is to be a professional and commercial DAW. I hope the new version when released has a new Audio-Engine as i believe that is at the heart of the problems causing drop-outs, horrible low-latency performance, and conflict with some interface drivers.

Cakewalk will be its own independant company again not using the Bandlab name but still owned by Bandlab. There will be 2 new releases comming, 'Cakewalk Next' wich is the smaller less featured DAW, and 'Cakewalk Sonar' the larger more featured DAW.

The announcement- https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php? ... -identity/


ADVERTISEMENT- https://www.cakewalk.com/sonar
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valis
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Re: The end of an era

Post by valis »

Did they ever achieve gapless audio?
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Nestor
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Re: The end of an era

Post by Nestor »

It seems they did in their latest releases
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Re: The end of an era

Post by valis »

Excellent
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yayajohn
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Re: The end of an era

Post by yayajohn »

Good for them! Hope it works out.
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Re: The end of an era

Post by Nestor »

Nobody into Cakewalk in here anyway?
There used to be a few working with it, anybody?
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Re: The end of an era

Post by Sounddesigner »

Yes, there use to be a few people here at Planetz that used Sonar. Sonar userbase was not as big as Protools and i doubt it was as big as Cubase and Logic but Sonar was still a major DAW judging by its popularity and the size of Cakewalk's company in its hey-day. Bandlab claims that since the DAW has been freeware they've seen growth in the userbase so that with older loyal users should allow it to do fine on the Market even if they lost some of their past userbase.

I still use Cakewalk the free version as i slowly migrate to Reason and i will buy the commercial version Sonar to help give the company a chance at survival, and to see if it lives up to the "most stable DAW on the market" claim. If they can keep it stable i'll stick around and keep using it. Sonar was a great DAW with the most intuitive workflow to me. When i try other DAWs it takes too long to do the most basic things and manuals are more needed as the learning curve for most is too steep.

My problem with Sonar is just the bugs. As far as the DAW it was VERY cutting-edge back in the days as it was the first DAW to do a long list of things. Cakewalk's DAW was the fist DAW to host virtual-instruments threw DXI, it was the fist DAW to utilize multi-core computers able to scale a unheard of 36 cores back in the days. It was the first DAW to run on Windows 64bit O/S wich was the future, it was the first DAW with end-to-end 64bit Audio-Engine, and many more firsts that i do not remember but know the list is long. Sonar did not require a dongle and its Step-Sequencer was more full-fledged than other DAW's i tried. It had too much functionality to be freeware. The MIDI routing lacks a little but the Audio Routing is extremely flexible.

More Competition is good for the Market and Cakewalk in the past competed on the cutting-edge. There is so many plugin developers on the Market that it's too difficult to force Subscriptions on most plugins but when there is not a lot of DAWs it can be forced with DAWs.
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Re: The end of an era

Post by Nestor »

Very interesting read about these aspects, I didn't know it was kind of in the first line in such a way in those days.
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Re: The end of an era

Post by valis »

Unfortunately Cakewalk got bit by the same bug that affected my favorite 3D software years before: the MS promises bug.

Quick story about Softimage 3D in the 90's, it was the primary tool of choice for Hollywood and many post production studios, had a great workflow (so much so that Lightwave 3D emulated it's UI workflow) and was years ahead of the competition with their Eddie compositor (nuke/fusion/etc came along years later doing the same node based compositing and camera tracking process) and then they decided to take on Avid with Softimage|DS (Digital Studio) which was their own take on an NLE (nonlinear editor) with some compositing and 2.5D (Flame/Inferno competitor) workflow enhancements.

The main thing that Softimage|SD had was a modern under the hood codec and workflow that allowed in realtime what Avid's NLE had to do by 'rendering' the output, you could make changes to edits and see them in realtime. For 1998 this was pretty amazing, and worked beyond SD (720p etc) resolutions.

Microsoft came along and promised to make their NT software the 'next generation' of graphical powerhouses by leveraging much of the codec enhancements DS brought to the table, or so it seemed. In reality the MS involvement derailed Softimage|DS''s release enough that they missed their chance to enter the market by over 2 years, and what MS really did was poke around under the hood and take everything they learned from the Softimage team and build a 'clean room' style (passing notes from one team to another 'ala IBM clone job done by Compaq) to create the DirectShow and DirectVideo underpinnings for Direcftmedia.

IE, MS leveraged Softimage's advances to build what they could not in an attempt to compete with Apple and the Quicktime forbebears to ProRes, because of course MS had just bailed out Apple and was worried now about gains against them in the professional market.

Well if memory serves, Cakewalk had EXACTLY this problem with MS's involvement in creating everything from the first DirectX plugins (Cakewalk was the first to offer these because they worked with MS On development) as well as 'advances' like KS (kernel-streaming) audio drivers and more. Cakewalk, and Sonar as a flagship later, came out of the gate again and again with advanced tech and Microsoft "support" to push this tech, rather than focusing on the problems in the software itself. I was a cakewalk user and migrated to Logic 4.x at that time because it was already falling behind, even though it was one of the first Windows DAWs to even offer virtual instrument tracks (aside from Cubase 4.x).

When Cubase 5 gave way to Nuendo derived SX, and Logic moved through the 5.x era, Magix Samplitude gained object based audio and other DAWs came online, Sonar was still struggling with people who wanted to loop portions of their composition without audible glitches: gapless audio.

Glad to know they finally solved it, and I hope and trust the company has learned what happens when you give too much control over your vision and technology away to the wrong people.
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Re: The end of an era

Post by asktoby »

Cakewalk is my main DAW at the moment. I find it to be generally very good, but the GUI does get a little laggy on larger projects.
e.g. Opening the quantize dialogue takes a couple of seconds.
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Re: The end of an era

Post by Bud Weiser »

System requirements want "8-core processor".
I don´t have,- so it´s not for me.
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Re: The end of an era

Post by Nestor »

valis wrote: Fri Sep 22, 2023 9:18 pm the MS promises bug.
Yeah, they also said, many, many years ago, that they were considering building a windows dedicated OS for DAW purpose only, it has never happened, unfortunately. I can only imagine how cool it would be to have a win10 dedicated OS for MIDI and AUDIO, very light and totally debloated for a start. I guess it could be about 1gb max, extremely fast, efficient and bug free. Nothing happened. They are much more interested in world control than anything else.
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Re: The end of an era

Post by astroman »

Microsoft and „debloated“ is a contradiction per se, let alone the fundamentals of Win10.
They‘re only in it for the money :D
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Re: The end of an era

Post by Nestor »

astroman wrote: Wed Sep 27, 2023 1:55 am Microsoft and „debloated“ is a contradiction per se
:lol: what ca we do...
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