Cakewalk by Bandlab gets ARA 2 support

[dellboy]

I love that Cakewalk is free, but I don't really like the workflow with all the ancient Windows menu stuff going on there. Hopefully they will improve the GUI there.

Personally, I think too much is made of cluttered menus. Cubase is cluttered, Reaper is cluttered, but they are powerful DAWs. Sonar is less cluttered than either of those two, and after using it for a few months I found it very easy to use and navigate. I think that in a 30 year old DAW it is too hard and too expensive in man hours to recode all that stuff.

[chk071]

Ok. Well, whatever his motives, finally people have a good free host. Anything else which was available before didn't really cut it.

[jens]

I love that Cakewalk is free, but I don't really like the workflow with all the ancient Windows menu stuff going on there. Hopefully they will improve the GUI there.

Personally, I think too much is made of cluttered menus. Cubase is cluttered, Reaper is cluttered, but they are powerful DAWs. Sonar is less cluttered than either of those two, and after using it for a few months I found it very easy to use and navigate. I think that in a 30 year old DAW it is too hard and too expensive in man hours to recode all that stuff.

There seems to be a great misunderstanding - Sonar's Skylight interface is as cluttered or un-cluttered as you want it (that's Skylight's main point basically). You have (easy) access to extensive control over what and what is not currently shown on the screen and setting up and switching between different screensets could not be easier.

For this reason the menus are barely required or in the way.

[flugel45]

So what's the deal with Cakewalk by Bandlab? Can you buy some addons, or features which enhance the basic, free version?

The "basic, free version" is not cut down or limited in any way. In fact, you can think of it as exactly like the previous version, Cakewalk's flagship Sonar, only without the extra bundled VSTs.

Bottom line -- no, there are no "addons" or "feature enhancements" (unless you mean adding your own VSTs, which of course is up to the user).

[christianmusicmaker]

There seems to be a great misunderstanding - Sonar's Skylight interface is as cluttered or un-cluttered as you want it (that's Skylight's main point basically). You have (easy) access to extensive control over what and what is not currently shown on the screen and setting up and switching between different screensets could not be easier.

For this reason the menus are barely required or in the way.

Yes. It is very flexible.

[v1o]

They should at least charge for support.