About that cakewalk email that should be in your inboxes right now

[chk071]

AND PLEASE...Z3ta+ version 3!

My only wish for that would be an improved sound engine (or rather oscillators), better filters, and maybe some more waveshaping options... otherwise it would really be the bomb, feature wise. Real gem there, but, IMO, more recent synths definitely have the edge, sound wise. If Cakewalk would work on that, they'd have a real winner there, i'm very sure about that.

viewtopic.php?p=6506398

Knew there was a trhead about this already (and that i even posted in it...).

[aMUSEd]

That said, I understand Cakewalk promised a SONAR Mac Alpha, so we packaged up and delivered the SONAR Mac Prototype and announced that this was the end of the line for SONAR Mac.

A prototype is not an alpha.

[Jace-BeOS]

That said, I understand Cakewalk promised a SONAR Mac Alpha, so we packaged up and delivered the SONAR Mac Prototype and announced that this was the end of the line for SONAR Mac.

A prototype is not an alpha.

Meaning a prototype isn't anything but a proof of concept, whereas an alpha is an early build of an actual product on a roadmap to commercial release?

[jinotsuh]

Spin, Spin and more Spin is all you'll get from Cakewalk, it's just how it is. Why do you think they mysteriously removed all the info and mention about the Mac version/Mac alpha from the web site and forum a month or 2 ago? (Luckily you can still search out a bit of info, promotional stuff, interviews and such on the subject that is out of their control) They knew what was going on then, they knew what was going on months ago when they missed the fall deadline for the release of the alpha, the ensuing time was purely to give them time hatching the 'Prototype' plan and getting it in play, the hoodwink, the get out of jail free card from the negativity that would follow had they released nothing. The whole thing reeks of spin and coverup and attempted deception. But the 'Prototype' of Home Studio running on Codeweavers , does not a Mac Alpha make , I shake my head when I think about that, Personally I wouldn't have the audacity to even try that particular bait and switch, I would be to embarrassed even contemplating it .

[aMUSEd]

That said, I understand Cakewalk promised a SONAR Mac Alpha, so we packaged up and delivered the SONAR Mac Prototype and announced that this was the end of the line for SONAR Mac.

A prototype is not an alpha.

Meaning a prototype isn't anything but a proof of concept, whereas an alpha is an early build of an actual product on a roadmap to commercial release?

Yes, I guess in this case it was more to 'test the waters' commercially as it's not even proving the concept of a Mac port because it isn't one. An alpha on the other hand is testing the actual product in development under relatively real world conditions. This 'prototype' was never really going anywhere developmentally and there's nothing even to test as the majority of problems a wrapped version would face would be very different from those of a proper Mac build so bugs identified would be pretty meaningless. An alpha on the other hand would be the first viable stage of an actual Mac product, usable enough for testing purposes but with feature set still in progress.

[Alex Westner]

Spin, Spin and more Spin is all you'll get from Cakewalk, it's just how it is. Why do you think they mysteriously removed all the info and mention about the Mac version/Mac alpha from the web site and forum a month or 2 ago? (Luckily you can still search out a bit of info, promotional stuff, interviews and such on the subject that is out of their control) They knew what was going on then, they knew what was going on months ago when they missed the fall deadline for the release of the alpha, the ensuing time was purely to give them time hatching the 'Prototype' plan and getting it in play, the hoodwink, the get out of jail free card from the negativity that would follow had they released nothing. The whole thing reeks of spin and coverup and attempted deception. But the 'Prototype' of Home Studio running on Codeweavers , does not a Mac Alpha make , I shake my head when I think about that, Personally I wouldn't have the audacity to even try that particular bait and switch, I would be to embarrassed even contemplating it .

Wow, you give us way too much credit. "Spin, coverup and attempted deception?" We're just a simple software company trying our best.

I have done no spin, and have only told everyone the truth. I have also taken responsibility and accountability for not being transparent and communicating with customers sooner. Cakewalk in the past may have been guilty of this, but I don't run like that.

I'll be even more transparent. I doubt you'll get as much honesty from other manufacturers.

The Mac Alpha was announced last summer. The work went slower than expected. I joined the company in November and attempted to kill the project altogether once I learned:

• how the product was being built
• how little a SONAR Mac would actually help our business
• how a SONAR Mac done right would slow us down and hurt out Windows product and our current customers

So, my challenge was to reverse the internal and external momentum created, while getting my head around how we work with Gibson on approval for such decisions.

After some internal back-and-forth, while delivering a new SONAR Home Studio release, and leading several rounds of deep strategy work on a number of other new initiatives for Cakewalk, we decided we needed to follow up on our SONAR Mac promise as best as we could, and be clear that we would not continue investing in SONAR on the Mac.

Once the decision was made in January, it still took much longer than we had hoped and expected to finish the work we had started towards producing a releasable SONAR Mac Prototype.

And that's where we are today.

Many customers are disappointed.
Some are angry.
Many are relieved we're not continuing with the Mac.

I'm also not happy about how all of this transpired, and I feel terrible about disappointing customers. Cakewalk made more promises than it could keep. We are aware of it, we own it, and we're taking steps to behave better.

We now have clear strategies and goals that we've been executing on, we've started up a couple of new initiatives unrelated to SONAR that we hope you'll appreciate, and we're working on improving our customer support.

I can't change the past, but I can help bring about a better future.

[pwal]

thanks for the input alex, it seems like you've been brought in to sort things out, here's hoping you do!

[deastman]

Alex,

I appreciate this level of honesty and transparency. Thank you.

I also suspect that when most people think of a software company such as Calewalk, they imagine some enormous monolithic corporation. I'm sure your actual development team is far smaller than many would expect.

My main personal experience has been with the team at Adobe who develop After Effects. Despite Adobe being a pretty large company, the AE team is approximately ten developers, ten QA testers, and a few management and marketing people. That is the team which drives 90% of the motion graphics industry.

So again, thank you for these direct and frank answers to what is happening at Cakewalk. I hope you are able to put this chapter behind you and redouble your work on Sonar and "other initiatives".

[1wob2many]

Alex, I wouldn't waste your time trying to reply to jinotsuh. There is nothing to be gained.

I think that anybody who reads any thread at KVR related to Cakewalk knows that it won't be long before jinotsuh comes along spouting bile and garbage, pursuing some sad little agenda. He/she is not looking for an adult discussion.

[Mystic]

Alex, good stuff and I'm glad you're hitting this stuff head on and being more up front with people about the state of Sonar.

The things I really feel need more improvement are:

Customer Service. I know you guys are working on it but it seems you've been working on it for almost a year.

Educational Material. Being that Sonar isn't seen as one of the "big boys" by the companies that make educational products, it's really up to you guys to do your own. Groove3 helps a bit but they can't keep up to date with all the new features coming out every month and their courses can sometimes be lackluster when it comes to depth. The CakeTV is a great thing to have but they don't really go into depth and more show a brief overview. Cake really needs to bring someone in who is skilled in teaching and push out some good in-depth videos and documents on Sonar and keep them up to date with every release.

I also think that Cakewalk needs to take a hard look at its shortcomings compared to other DAWs and implement a lot of the features that make other DAWs so good without making excuses. Features have been brought up in the past and people have made excuses "well that's great but Sonar can also do them by *insert 400 step process here*". I'm glad some of that has improved the past two years but there are still things that need to be worked on. Also, this doesn't apply to me but I know some others have BEGGED Cakewalk for over a decade now: you need proper notation. It's been overlooked for long enough now that I believe that no one at Cakewalk knows how to read sheet music.

I also noticed that the "Coming Soon" section on the website is now gone. Last time I looked at it, Ripple Editing was the last thing on it. It would be good to know what you guys have baking as there was a long list when you first for started with this monthly update system.

[Jace-BeOS]

That said, I understand Cakewalk promised a SONAR Mac Alpha, so we packaged up and delivered the SONAR Mac Prototype and announced that this was the end of the line for SONAR Mac.

A prototype is not an alpha.

Meaning a prototype isn't anything but a proof of concept, whereas an alpha is an early build of an actual product on a roadmap to commercial release?

Yes, I guess in this case it was more to 'test the waters' commercially as it's not even proving the concept of a Mac port because it isn't one. An alpha on the other hand is testing the actual product in development under relatively real world conditions. This 'prototype' was never really going anywhere developmentally and there's nothing even to test as the majority of problems a wrapped version would face would be very different from those of a proper Mac build so bugs identified would be pretty meaningless. An alpha on the other hand would be the first viable stage of an actual Mac product, usable enough for testing purposes but with feature set still in progress.

Well said. It's a self-inflicted injury. There's no way a WINE-hacked prototype could've done better than waste time/money. It's like Gibson management said "We want your division to make us more profit by selling Sonar in the Mac market" ...and one of Cakewalk's programmers responded with some rather neat malicious compliance to prove why they shouldn't do it.

Maybe the developers are just that unfamiliar with WINE. If you only use Windows, it's unlikely you'd have had reason to experience WINE... until some boss demands a cheap software "port" and you quickly discover the limitations of WINE while struggling to do your job. Hell, maybe it's a manager who heard the obscure buzz about WINE and figured it was an inexpensive solution... like how everything computerized these days is supposed to run on Linux because it's "free"...

[Resonant- Serpent]

Edited : It doesn't matter...

[Jace-BeOS]

The Mac Alpha was announced last summer. The work went slower than expected. I joined the company in November and attempted to kill the project altogether once I learned:

• how the product was being built

Who thought that was a good idea, anyway? And why? Was it the same people responsible for using a 3rd-party VST-to-DX wrapper instead of building native VST support into Sonar? ("full VST integration" was a bulleted feature, repeatedly, and the end result was pretty shameful, repeatedly -- the last straw was discovering VSTs were catalogued via registry GUIDs, causing nightmares when plugins went "missing" from minor changes to the VST DLL, etc...).

All the talk about rewriting Sonar on Windows... any rewriting should be cutting the WinAPI out as much as possible and building a platform-independent framework. Is that even happening? That could be an investment for the future, if done right. No one knows if Windows and Mac OS (or, ha ha, Linux) will be the "forever operating systems".

Adobe, for all their faults, have done an excellent job of platform agnosticism on their original products (not so much their acquisitions and filler products). If all i did on a computer was Photoshop, platforms wouldn't matter much. Look to them for inspiration.

Do NOT look to Carrara 3D (or ZBrush or Blender) for inspiration. They have the same ideology of custom GUI/frameworks, but such fundamentally awful GUI designs that the product is utterly alien to all users regardless of which OS they're familiar with (plus buggy code that works almout equally horribly on BOTH platforms... but just a bit worse on Mac OS, because of having only one "Mac port guy").

[*]how little a SONAR Mac would actually help our business
[*]how a SONAR Mac done right would slow us down and hurt out Windows product and our current customers [/list]

Is this why Cakewalk's Mac software synths have suffered so much: Fear that spending time on Mac product (doing it right) would hurt the Windows product?

I wonder how it might've helped the business to do the Mac products right. Even leaving Sonar and Windows behind, Cakewalk softsynths might've kept me a paying Cakewalk customer, had the Mac versions (or me as a customer) been treated with any respect. But then, I've had issues with how the Windows products were handled in the first place, so maybe core competencies and attention to detail are Cakewalk culture issues(?).

But we don't like talking about the past (because who care's about how things got to where they are today?) -- We have to focus only on what Cakewalk will become now that you're helping steer the ship... something your predecessors/peers said before you. I recommend that you cut out all "forward-looking statements" and just do the thing. Under-promise and over-deliver. Apologies are nice, but eventually the people your company has let down don't even want to hear those any more.

[jinotsuh]

Now you can be like the Cakewalk faithful and just believe everything Cakewalk spews out, but here are some facts, look at the following video, uploaded by Cakewalk by the way, stop it at around the 16/17 second mark and tell me what it says in the title bar? It says SONAR Platinum, this video of course is a Cakewalk video showing SONAR (Platinum) running on a Mac, of course you don't need to read the title bar to know it is Platinum and not Home Studio, because it's as plain as day what it is if you know anything about Platinum and Home Studio, but for the blind faithful it should put it beyond doubt 'SONAR Platinum". So for them to say that this Home studio version is indeed what they have been working on all along, is an absolute load of crap, just more in the long line of spin from a company trying to cover it's ass.

https://youtu.be/PCmnsai1ENg

There is plenty more info available around that they have no control over deleting or editing, that shows what they have been spewing out is nothing but spin, pure ass covering, and tells the real story from the start and what was planned and in motion. The spin they are coming out with after the SONAR4Mac EPIC FAIL, is just trying to pull the wool over peoples eyes, granted with blind faithful sheep it doesn't take much, but . . .

[Jace-BeOS]

I never saw that video before. I had just thought the declaration was a quiet, non-marketed one. I was wrong. They made a bit of a big deal out of this.