Bandlab Cakewak vs Cubase

[starise]

A big turnoff is that the official main forum never acknowledges that Sonar has a problem. Its almost always put down to user input. And then all sorts of workarounds are suggested which really should not exist in a modern daw. Having said that, I have had a bundle of fun with it over the last few months. Its a "fun" daw in ways that other serious daws are not.

I'm sorry you have felt that way. I'm on the forum often. I see lots of people with questions. Many questions are related to hardware/software and we always try to eliminate anything it could be which in many cases is a configuration or setting issue between the software and hardware. Sometimes there is a bug. This is very occasional. I think this says something about the stability of the program. More often than not the user finds the issue and continues to make music.Keep in mind also that only the people having problems show up. The others are successfully using the software.

My thoughts on Cakewalk as freeware-
Cakewalk is NOT free no more than Facebook is really free. Meng bought Cakewalk for an undisclosed amount of money. Meng retained talented coders from Cakewalk. He is investing in a new forum. There have been regular meetings with talent from Boston and Meng in Singapore. Updates are still happening at least once a month.

Buying companies, flying talent back and forth. Paying the developers salaries, maintaining the servers, plotting a business plan and investing in it. None of that is free or without much effort to maintain. Cakewalk represents years of work and investment.

Thankfully the product is free to you, but nothing else about it is really free.

There are other plans in the works for revenue that are undisclosed. Offering additional plugins like the Adaptive Limiter, Rapture or ZT3A+2_64 synth might be a way he decides to leverage CbB. There is talk of hardware in the future. Since Meng owns a bunch of audio/recording related companies and has an interest in Rolling Stone Magazine there are lots of potential things he is capable of doing.

Free in this case does not mean the product is somehow less capable. I understand this might be the preception of a few. The perception would be very wrong. As I already mentioned before there are recording studios running CbB with 100+ tracks stable. I just finished a classical compo loaded up with Kontakt libraries. Not one hiccup.

[zzz00m]

A big turnoff is that the official main forum never acknowledges that Sonar has a problem. Its almost always put down to user input. And then all sorts of workarounds are suggested which really should not exist in a modern daw. Having said that, I have had a bundle of fun with it over the last few months. Its a "fun" daw in ways that other serious daws are not.

I'm sorry you have felt that way. I'm on the forum often. I see lots of people with questions. Many questions are related to hardware/software and we always try to eliminate anything it could be which in many cases is a configuration or setting issue between the software and hardware. Sometimes there is a bug. This is very occasional. I think this says something about the stability of the program. More often than not the user finds the issue and continues to make music.Keep in mind also that only the people having problems show up. The others are successfully using the software.

My thoughts on Cakewalk as freeware-
Cakewalk is NOT free no more than Facebook is really free. Meng bought Cakewalk for an undisclosed amount of money. Meng retained talented coders from Cakewalk. He is investing in a new forum. There have been regular meetings with talent from Boston and Meng in Singapore. Updates are still happening at least once a month.

Buying companies, flying talent back and forth. Paying the developers salaries, maintaining the servers, plotting a business plan and investing in it. None of that is free or without much effort to maintain. Cakewalk represents years of work and investment.

Thankfully the product is free to you, but nothing else about it is really free.

There are other plans in the works for revenue that are undisclosed. Offering additional plugins like the Adaptive Limiter, Rapture or ZT3A+2_64 synth might be a way he decides to leverage CbB. There is talk of hardware in the future. Since Meng owns a bunch of audio/recording related companies and has an interest in Rolling Stone Magazine there are lots of potential things he is capable of doing.

Free in this case does not mean the product is somehow less capable. I understand this might be the preception of a few. The perception would be very wrong. As I already mentioned before there are recording studios running CbB with 100+ tracks stable. I just finished a classical compo loaded up with Kontakt libraries. Not one hiccup.

Well said! +1

[dellboy]

Free in this case does not mean the product is somehow less capable. I understand this might be the preception of a few. The perception would be very wrong. As I already mentioned before there are recording studios running CbB with 100+ tracks stable. I just finished a classical compo loaded up with Kontakt libraries. Not one hiccup.

I already said that I have not personally found any bugs.

The main reproducible problem is not a bug but the very badly written and ancient midi input device that pops up in the taskbar. Midi input and control surface support is awful compared with other daws. For instance, I have two midi keyboards plugged in. One 88 key piano and a Novation controller. It is hit and miss if they work. In Ableton Live and other daws,they just work - always. Not Sonar, it pretty much always requires messing around unplugging USB ports and deleting hidden devices to get them up and running.

It is a known problem going back years,and has been reported by numerous people on the forum.

[dellboy]

A big turnoff is that the official main forum never acknowledges that Sonar has a problem. Its almost always put down to user input...

Give your example, please.

It serves no one on the forum to ignore or "fail to acknowledge" reproducible bugs. Of course, if the problem appears to be system-specific (not experienced by anyone else), then all they can do is offer workarounds. I've never seen the forum at large not acknowledge a known problem.

Midi keyboard input is the most basic of basic requirements.

On all modern daws the input just works. In Sonar it is very intermittent. I do not belong to the forum, but I have just checked it and found this current topic............

"Midi Keyboard working intermittently in Sonar Platinum Producer".

The workaround touted is check your cable, turn on USB Power Management, (whatever that is ?), delete hidden devices etc.

None of this should be required, midi input should just work and be rock solid every time on a modern daw, - period.

[rlared]

Agreed I have noticed that Cakewalk has more issues with MIDI inputs than other DAWs. I used to have random connectivity issues but not so much recently. However there was the recent NI Komplete Kontrol issue that was just resolved with a Windows update. Also I have a Matrixbrute and if I set up MIDI out Cakewalk to it, it was setting local control to "off" on the Matrixbrute. Finally solved it by switching the MIDI driver mode in Cakewalk.

Regardless, these are both issues that happened in Cakewalk but not Studio One or Reaper.

Also audio interface is more tempramental. I had to uninstall the Steinberg low latency generic Asio driver because Cakewalk was trying to open it over and over. And also even though Cakewalk is set to 48KHZ / 24 bit which my system uses, it starts in 44.1 khz / 16 but and then changes only after i open preferences. Again, no problems in other DAWs.

So I have to agree that there are more random annoying problems in Cakewalk regarding hardware still to this day.

[lfm]

I don't think Cakewalk is difficult to grasp. I mean you have an extensive online manual. If you hover over the things you don't understand you can select to view a description and function of it right in the GUI. So if you hover over the plugin delay compensation it will tell you what it is. In addition there is a nice helpful forum. Something I hear that Cubase doesn't have.

Yes, the one thing Cubase miss to feel all Pro and up there with ProTools - context sensitive help - offline as well.

In Sonar you have that since decades back. Protools too. You rather easy find your way in Sonar from where you are.

In Cubase it's still start pdf manual, fill in the search field to possibly find the right word that Cubase name something. And since Adobe complicated things and removed the search field where it always was since decades with Acrobat Reader I switched to Foxit Reader instead. And with Foxit Reader every document open where you last closed it - so much better in that sense too. Adobe always open very first page.

Cubase manual has become improved the last years, so feel they are getting closer to lower threshold to grasp it all. But climbed all hurdles with Cubase by now and just love Cubase Pro.

[JoseC.]

A big turnoff is that the official main forum never acknowledges that Sonar has a problem. Its almost always put down to user input...

Give your example, please.

It serves no one on the forum to ignore or "fail to acknowledge" reproducible bugs. Of course, if the problem appears to be system-specific (not experienced by anyone else), then all they can do is offer workarounds. I've never seen the forum at large not acknowledge a known problem.

Midi keyboard input is the most basic of basic requirements.

On all modern daws the input just works. In Sonar it is very intermittent. I do not belong to the forum, but I have just checked it and found this current topic............

"Midi Keyboard working intermittently in Sonar Platinum Producer".

The workaround touted is check your cable, turn on USB Power Management, (whatever that is ?), delete hidden devices etc.

None of this should be required, midi input should just work and be rock solid every time on a modern daw, - period.

I suggest that you make the same search in every DAW forum. I haven't done it myself, but I bet that you will find someone with USB problems in everyone of them. The "workarounds" that you mention are not such, just standard troubleshooting procedures.

Midi input in Sonar has been always rock solid in all my systems. I have an ancient MOTU eight channel USB interface that has gone from Windows XP to Vista to 8.1 to Windows 10 without a hiccup, the midi ports in my USB audio interface, plus several USB devices and a couple wireless apps in an iPad. Ah, and some virtual midi cables. That is about sixteen midi ports in Cakewalk. Everything just works, as it should be. This seems to be the same with most people, and now it is free to try.

[dellboy]

I suggest that you make the same search in every DAW forum. I haven't done it myself, but I bet that you will find someone with USB problems in everyone of them. The "workarounds" that you mention are not such, just standard troubleshooting procedures.

I run Reaper, Ableton Live, Traction Waveform, EnergyXT, with zero problems. I can plug as much hardware into those as I have available and it just works. I have also demoed just about every DAW on the planet and I never have any problems. It is a major problem with Sonars antiquated handling of hardware and nothing to do with my setup.

And your reply is typical of what you see in the forum - denial. So called "standard troubleshooting procedures" were common 20 years ago and went with the territory. But all the major players kicked them into the long grass years ago.

Having said that, I love Sonar and have used it pretty much exclusively for the best part of this year.

[JoseC.]

I don't deny your problems. I deny blanket statements. My experience is worth exactly the same as yours.

[wetdentist]

overall, i am happy with CbB, but over the course of the eleven years that i'd been using Sonar/CbB . . . sure there have been a few issues. for the past couple months, Maschine stopped working in CbB & i was getting nervous no one was trying to fix it. i said something on the forum the other day about it & the main developer, Noel Borthwick, wrote me a detailed explanation of what had happened & provided me with a link to a Windows Update that FIXED IT. turns out it was a Microsoft problem & not a Cakewalk or Native Instruments problem. deep down, in all honesty, i was hoping that it was an NI problem so that i could complain at them for something besides the behemoth of a bait-and-switch they pulled just as they were announcing their Maschine Jam (which i fell for).

[VELLTONE MUSIC]

Bandlab Cakewalk seems very cpu friendly to me for fully equiped DAW.
Haven't test it with many tracks but for my usual 5-6 demo lines works fine.
I still feel comfortable with my Cubase LE,it's cool,but these guys always try to take more money from you
- why LE update is paid,doesn't seems very user friendly to pay for every update,it's not 'professional' daw but limited edition it could be free also Cubase do not recognize 32bit vst anymore - Bandlab Cakewalk 64bit do.
For sure not gonna spend more time and money with LE10,go to next level or Bandlab.
Did somebody try 2 compare automation of these two - Cubase even on LE stage is amazing ,need to explore ckwk deeper for such stuff.

[Zexila]

I don't like bezier curves in Cakewalk, they seems to have few positions only, you can't bend it in steps, it's just few fixed positions, quite disappointing.

I was excited about Cakewalk and forced myself to like it, you can even see my comments in one of the threads here, but more and more I got into bare essentials for my workflow, more and more I realized it's not for me, same was with Cubase, I started getting interested in it again when they finally got bezier curves in 9.5, before that that was major deal breaker, same now with Cakewalk.

[chk071]

I don't like bezier curves in Cakewalk, they seems to have few positions only, you can't bend it in steps, it's just few fixed positions, quite disappointing.

Unfortunately, same applies to Studio One.

[Zexila]

I don't like bezier curves in Cakewalk, they seems to have few positions only, you can't bend it in steps, it's just few fixed positions, quite disappointing.

Unfortunately, same applies to Studio One.

Bummer, I do quite a lot of filtering and volume automation and it's really essential for me to get curves right and quick, but I suppose it's not big deal to most and the developers of some DAW's.

[chk071]

Yeah. Not sure where the problem is to make them work seamlessly. IMO, they should implement it the right way, or not implement it at all.

Not angry about it, just wondering.