Cakewalk is “dead”?

[v1o]

Not all production software is there to make profit. There's that fully featured video editor, DaVinci Resolve, it's totally free with no strings attached.


To a lesser extent there is Cockos Reaper, it is sold for only a nominal amount of money, so is more less free. The guy that makes Reaper is an early internet multi millionaire, for him developing Reaper was more a passion project.

[chk071]

Not all production software is there to make profit. There's that fully featured video editor, DaVinci Resolve, it's totally free with no strings attached.

You're aware though that there's a payware version, and that the free version is sort of a lite version, which is feature limited?

And Reaper is a commercial product, which you have to pay for. Either $60, when your revenue from your work with Reaper doesn't exceed $20.000, or $225 if it does.

TBH, I really don't know what we're arguing about. As long as there's currency in our societies, people need to make money. Bandlab Technologies is a company like any other. If their boss really wanted to give Cakewalk as a present to users, he wouldn't do it under the Bandlab label.

[Danilo Villanova]

Whatever monetization strategy they have planned for this thing appears to be long term. The Asian way.

[THE INTRANCER]

Cakewalk by Bandlab, feels more like an all round more accessible, logical, and complete package than Reaper to get into hence why there was so much buzz about it when it was released for free. With two years dedicated to fixing bugs with little else to speak of in terms of features added when you compare it to another DAW like Studio One (where most of it's users jumped to I think when Presonus threw out a lifeboat ring), I'd expect it to be much improved since then...

Didn't like the login app for it though and you can't update it without the app I believe and there's an issue where it wants to phone home after a set period of time. I don't know if this is caused by the assistant login app of the program itself though. I remember being able to run the program without the login app.. but in any case I deleted the whole thing from my computer after two weeks. It ended up being a mess of graphical glitches and ultimately a corrupted mess. The GUI feels like a combination of being really dated and new, in a similar way Cubase has been for a long time.

DAWs are like cars of various sizes on a carriage way where they are developed at different speeds. There's no free lunch... whatever road you take... but given the choice at where we're at with DAWs and where user experience is important at this time, I would certainly set the satnav to Cakewalk By Bandlab if the conditions I highlighted above are not the road hazards which can't be got around. Taking the B road and going off to Renoise land, is another possibility in terms of cheap music software.

[jinotsuh]

I jumped ship in September 2015, I didn't have to wait until Cakewalk went under and got sold (again) I jumped well before that. I'll personally never go back to Cakewalk, after being with it from Pro Audio 9 until part way through the Platinum era, I know very well what it is like and what the company is like unlike a lot of the blind fanbois. The only thing Cakewalk has for me is the Deals sub forum at the Cakewalk forums.

As for it being free, well it failed to be commercially successful under 2 previous owners, loosing money year after year for both of them, Roland and Gibson, so there's not much of a choice left really other than being free. Even then a LOT of former long time users jumped ship when Cakewalk went under and have never returned, even when it was resurrected and offered for free, that alone speaks volumes. Once they got away from Cakewalk/SONAR, they realized what things are really like eleswhere, and what they had been putting up with all those years with Cakewalk/SONAR. It's a bit like getting out of a bad relationship, you don't really realize or understand how bad things are, and how better things could be until you get out and get some time and space between you.

If it was really free, there wouldn't be any need for the Bandlab Assistant and signing up, and having to reauthorize every 6 months or drop into 'Demo' mode (get that? Demo mode in a FREE product ), you would just download, install, done . . . there is a price to pay.

Most of Bandlabs purchases, aren't exactly top tier stuff, most are Companies which were either dead or dying, just like Cakewalk, there's not really anything worth much there. Have a look at the guitars and amps for example, absolute crap, check them out, not exactly going to compete with Gibson, Fender, Ibanez, PRS, Surr, Marshall, Mesa etc etc etc , and check out their audio interfaces, those Link Audio (I think) things really going to take on RME, MOTU, Focusrite etc etc

[JoseC.]

Regardless of that, if you buy someone's IP, it's to make money with it. What else? Even if it's just for PR reasons, you want to make money with it. And, I don't think they just do this for PR reasons. They want people to join their service, otherwise, they wouldn't let people download their client, and join Bandlab in order to download Cakewalk.

Totally normal business stuff, nothing bad about it.

s


I am not saying that your theory has anything bad about it. What I said is that you have no actual idea about what the Bandlab business plan is, and of course neither do I. You just seem to be a little more prone to be affected by the Dunning Kruger effect.

[robotmonkey]

The GUI feels like a combination of being really dated and new, in a similar way Cubase has been for a long time.

That's why I can't stand Cubase at all. It's 1990's legacy is just so much showing in its interface. And the same goes for Cakewalk. Some of the stuff there still has interface elements from the 1990's.

But at least Cakewalk is now free and it is a very fully featured and solid DAW so definitely worth checking out if you need free.

[enroe]

Regardless of that, if you buy someone's IP, it's to make money with it. What else? Even if it's just for PR reasons, you want to make money with it. And, I don't think they just do this for PR reasons. They want people to join their service, otherwise, they wouldn't let people download their client, and join Bandlab in order to download Cakewalk.

There's something else that you probably don't even have on your screen:
Here and also here! The idea is just: Everybody should have access
to the tools of our civilization, regardless of her or his social status.
It is the perhaps somewhat idealistic idea of "freedom".

I don't know where exactly "Cakewalk" is positioned - maybe somewhere
between the competitively monetized world and the free world.

[Erisian]

Bandlab have a store and make money that way so it seems to be no problem to give away Cakewalk. That is how I would want to do things if I had a business - try to help out people on low incomes while making money from other products.

[Aloysius]

people are starting to sound like contestants in a miss world competition

[v1o]

You're aware though that there's a payware version, and that the free version is sort of a lite version, which is feature limited?

It's not a lite version like Live Intro/8 track. Davinci Resolve is actually a full version, allowing you to do professional work without restrictions. DaVinci Resolve Studio is the same as the basic version plus additional tools. As an analogy Davinci Resolve would like the standard version of Ableton and Resolve Studio would be like Ableton Live Suite.

And Reaper is a commercial product, which you have to pay for. Either $60, when your revenue from your work with Reaper doesn't exceed $20.000, or $225 if it does.

TBH, I really don't know what we're arguing about. As long as there's currency in our societies, people need to make money. Bandlab Technologies is a company like any other. If their boss really wanted to give Cakewalk as a present to users, he wouldn't do it under the Bandlab label.

We all know Reaper has a very generous demo. Some people use it for years before paying.

Bandlab have many different businesses. They even own popular music stores. So they can afford to finance Cakewalk using profits from other areas of the business. Both Gibson and Roland couldn't find ways to make Cakewalk profitable after many years. I think Bandlab probably came to the same conclusion, that there's no money to be made selling it as a product, so they use it as a vanity tool to promote their brand.

[Erisian]

people are starting to sound like contestants in a miss world competition

[pixel85]

If it was really free, there wouldn't be any need for the Bandlab Assistant and signing up, and having to reauthorize every 6 months or drop into 'Demo' mode (get that? Demo mode in a FREE product ), you would just download, install, done . . . there is a price to pay.

Oh yes, spending 2 minutes to make an account and DL assistant app is a HUGE price to pay. How they even dare, damn bast***s!?
Man, you sound so cheap, like those people who don't leave the shop until they got back their one cent change even if a cashier would have to go to the other shop because he wouldn't have it in the cash register.

[excuse me please]

people are starting to sound like contestants in a miss world competition

That is what self-isolation does to us.

[Obsolete462444]

The GUI feels like a combination of being really dated and new, in a similar way Cubase has been for a long time.

That's why I can't stand Cubase at all. It's 1990's legacy is just so much showing in its interface. And the same goes for Cakewalk. Some of the stuff there still has interface elements from the 1990's.

But at least Cakewalk is now free and it is a very fully featured and solid DAW so definitely worth checking out if you need free.

Yes, Cubase goes back right to the early 1990s. But unlike Cakewalk, Cubase has been a prime DAW for most of it years. The issue with Cakewalk is that it attempts to be a solution for the same problems, that are already being solved by Cubase, Logic and Studio One (or ProTools) - namely linear audio and MIDI sequencing + mixing.

And Cakewalk's solution to the problem is in many ways less well-thought out and coherent than the pedantically German designed Cubase, Logic (former Emagic) or Studio One (ex-Steinberg guys). It's like comparing a General Motors car to a German engineered Audi, Mercedes or BMW.

Cubase is admittedly getting old (or rather old-fashioned) now in the way it does things and especially with S1 as a competitor, Steinberg has to stay innovative, in order to not be left behind. Many users do already favor S1 over Cubase in terms of the user experience, even though S1 does not yet have the full feature set of Cubase. I don't know whether Cubase will be able to keep up the pace without completely starting with a fresh code base, but Logic had the exact same problem and somehow managed to remain a top DAW (less competition on Mac though).