Gibson axes Cakewalk /Sonar

[jens]

These are test systems from early 90's.

i.e. 25 years ago and on an operating system that was based on a short-lived architecture.

Up until Windows ME, the MS consumer OS were based on MS DOS.

Windows 1 was released in 1985, and XP in 2001, which basically marks the end of MS DOS. Windows XP however is based on Windows NT, which is a lot more modern and robust architecture and which was first released in 1993. Since then, all version of Windows have been based the same architecture (NT) and there is no reason to assume the end of NT is nigh.

And even disregarding that little detail, 25 years from now on (the latest version of Sonar is about a month old) would be 2043. So yeah, he might not be able to use his copy of Sonar in 2043 anymore - tough shit!

Hence your original statement ("Good luck to the winner, in trying to actually download and activate it") really is nothing more than bloated nonsense.

[sharke]

I've used Sonar since 2012 and was also a beta tester. I've logged thousands upon thousands of hours of time in the program and know it quite intimately, so it was a shock to hear the news last week. However, I quickly saw the bright side (for me at least), which is that it'll probably keep working long enough for me to finish (or salvage) all of my current open projects and ideas, and that it also gives me a chance to start afresh with a new DAW which doesn't have the oddities that Sonar had.

While it is an extremely powerful pro DAW with a great workflow and packed with useful features, there were a lot of very hard to track down bugs which made the program frustrating at times. I'm not talking crashes, just weird stuff like every now and then I would drag a clip to a new location and when it was released it would appear somewhere else, even on another track. The automation side of it was often fiddly, glitchy and annoying. And worst of all, over the last few months it's been hosing the settings on many of my Waves plugins. Imagine loading up a project with upwards of 70 instances of the Q10 EQ only to find them all reset to factory defaults. So many of these issues were impossible to reproduce to a bug recipe, so as a beta tester it was hard to get them fixed. I believe much of Sonar's oddity came from the fact that it's an old program and there's probably some new and legacy code not playing well together. It was always my fantasy that it would get a huge rewrite one day.

As for why Cakewalk was losing money, well to me the answer is obvious and always has been. It never did enough to compete with the likes of Ableton and FL, both of which have cornered a large chunk of the young bedroom producer market. These starry eyed kids with dreams of becoming the next Deadmau5 are the ones driving the sales of new DAW's. Genres of music which can be produced on a laptop with headphones are why so many DAW's are being sold - it's certainly not the studio pros or the old dudes who wait until their kids have left for college before dusting off the guitar they haven't played in 20 years and recording the album they always promised themselves. It's not so much the guitar playing kids who are in bands either. Recording a band is difficult, expensive and requires treated rooms with good acoustics. Throwing together an EDM banger with soft synths and samplers is a totally different story.

These kids are getting into modern electronic music production techniques and they want a DAW which appeals to that workflow. Sonar failed to market or develop itself in that direction. By frequenting the Cakewalk forums you can quickly ascertain how old the Sonar crowd is. Put it like this - at 45, I often felt like one of the younger ones. Not that there's anything wrong with this per se - the Sonar community is one of the friendliest, most helpful communities on the internet and I have some great pals there. But the lack of fresh young faces always troubled me, and I had a feeling this day would come eventually. I did make this point on the forum a few times, but didn't get much in the way of agreement. According to a lot of the older guys, they like Sonar just the way it is and certainly don't want any concessions made to the EDM crowd whom they see as talentless musical frauds who just throw loops together (despite the work and complexity that goes into a good EDM track). But like I always replied, appealing to these kids wouldn't just benefit the kids. It would increase Cakewalk's revenue, make them healthier going forward, and result in an even better, more stable DAW that has more $$$'s available for development.

You could see Cakewalk trying to throw bones to the EDM crowd with some of the content they gave away. But it was never good enough stuff to make anyone switch DAW's or prevent them from buying Ableton like their friends.

I guess this is what happens in the free market. You either do what it takes to appeal to a lot of people, or you work out a way of carving yourself a stable little niche, or you go out of business. I don't blame any of the Cakewalk development team - as an ex-beta tester, I can tell you they were a great bunch of very talented guys who cared immensely about the future of the program and worked around the clock for it. It was management decisions that shaped the future of Sonar, and management decisions which ultimately killed it. Gibson is a POS company and Henry wassname really needs to retire to the old folk's home ASAP. But realistically, Gibson would have never gotten rid of Cakewalk if it had been managed well and was doing enough to fix the problem of its aging user base.

Personally I'm now looking at Bitwig. I know it's a bit of a risk to go with such a young DAW, I mean who knows what'll happen to it. But dammit it just looks like the most innovative, forward thinking DAW on the market and I cannot resist giving it a trial.

[SJ_Digriz]

The one feature from Sonar I will miss is the excellent ARA implementation.

[GreyLion]

The one feature from Sonar I will miss is the excellent ARA implementation.

+1

I'd already moved back to Reaper early this year because I upgraded to a 4K monitor and couldn't see most of the controls on Sonar anymore without squinting. With Reaper, I can resize the Walter fonts and everything is good.

ARA would be awesome to have back, but I doubt that Reaper will ever have it, since I'm sure they'd have to pay licensing fees, and I think that's counter to their ethos.

[ATN69]

These are test systems from early 90's.

i.e. 25 years ago and on an operating system that was based on a short-lived architecture.

Up until Windows ME, the MS consumer OS were based on MS DOS.

Windows 1 was released in 1985, and XP in 2001, which basically marks the end of MS DOS. Windows XP however is based on Windows NT, which is a lot more modern and robust architecture and which was first released in 1993. Since then, all version of Windows have been based the same architecture (NT) and there is no reason to assume the end of NT is nigh.

And even disregarding that little detail, 25 years from now on (the latest version of Sonar is about a month old) would be 2043. So yeah, he might not be able to use his copy of Sonar in 2043 anymore - tough shit!

Hence your original statement ("Good luck to the winner, in trying to actually download and activate it") really is nothing more than bloated nonsense.

I know you are one of those guys here at KVR that love to instigate heated discussions and use words like bloated nonsense, but the problem with all your tough words is that you are assuming that there will not be any problems happening, and that is the flaw in your reasoning. It all comes down to luck then. I for one had problem with software that was just one day old. Age has nothing to do with that ..and the real point is that if shit hits the fan there will not be any Cakewalk support to turn to.

[SparkySpark]

I was gping to post something I thought was interesting...

...but boy what a great post by sharke, so read that instead!

[Stupid American Pig]

I've used Sonar since 2012 and was also a beta tester. I've logged thousands upon thousands of hours of time in the program and know it quite intimately, so it was a shock to hear the news last week. However, I quickly saw the bright side (for me at least), which is that it'll probably keep working long enough for me to finish (or salvage) all of my current open projects and ideas, and that it also gives me a chance to start afresh with a new DAW which doesn't have the oddities that Sonar had.

While it is an extremely powerful pro DAW with a great workflow and packed with useful features, there were a lot of very hard to track down bugs which made the program frustrating at times. I'm not talking crashes, just weird stuff like every now and then I would drag a clip to a new location and when it was released it would appear somewhere else, even on another track. The automation side of it was often fiddly, glitchy and annoying. And worst of all, over the last few months it's been hosing the settings on many of my Waves plugins. Imagine loading up a project with upwards of 70 instances of the Q10 EQ only to find them all reset to factory defaults. So many of these issues were impossible to reproduce to a bug recipe, so as a beta tester it was hard to get them fixed. I believe much of Sonar's oddity came from the fact that it's an old program and there's probably some new and legacy code not playing well together. It was always my fantasy that it would get a huge rewrite one day.

As for why Cakewalk was losing money, well to me the answer is obvious and always has been. It never did enough to compete with the likes of Ableton and FL, both of which have cornered a large chunk of the young bedroom producer market. These starry eyed kids with dreams of becoming the next Deadmau5 are the ones driving the sales of new DAW's. Genres of music which can be produced on a laptop with headphones are why so many DAW's are being sold - it's certainly not the studio pros or the old dudes who wait until their kids have left for college before dusting off the guitar they haven't played in 20 years and recording the album they always promised themselves. It's not so much the guitar playing kids who are in bands either. Recording a band is difficult, expensive and requires treated rooms with good acoustics. Throwing together an EDM banger with soft synths and samplers is a totally different story.

These kids are getting into modern electronic music production techniques and they want a DAW which appeals to that workflow. Sonar failed to market or develop itself in that direction. By frequenting the Cakewalk forums you can quickly ascertain how old the Sonar crowd is. Put it like this - at 45, I often felt like one of the younger ones. Not that there's anything wrong with this per se - the Sonar community is one of the friendliest, most helpful communities on the internet and I have some great pals there. But the lack of fresh young faces always troubled me, and I had a feeling this day would come eventually. I did make this point on the forum a few times, but didn't get much in the way of agreement. According to a lot of the older guys, they like Sonar just the way it is and certainly don't want any concessions made to the EDM crowd whom they see as talentless musical frauds who just throw loops together (despite the work and complexity that goes into a good EDM track). But like I always replied, appealing to these kids wouldn't just benefit the kids. It would increase Cakewalk's revenue, make them healthier going forward, and result in an even better, more stable DAW that has more $$$'s available for development.

You could see Cakewalk trying to throw bones to the EDM crowd with some of the content they gave away. But it was never good enough stuff to make anyone switch DAW's or prevent them from buying Ableton like their friends.

I guess this is what happens in the free market. You either do what it takes to appeal to a lot of people, or you work out a way of carving yourself a stable little niche, or you go out of business. I don't blame any of the Cakewalk development team - as an ex-beta tester, I can tell you they were a great bunch of very talented guys who cared immensely about the future of the program and worked around the clock for it. It was management decisions that shaped the future of Sonar, and management decisions which ultimately killed it. Gibson is a POS company and Henry wassname really needs to retire to the old folk's home ASAP. But realistically, Gibson would have never gotten rid of Cakewalk if it had been managed well and was doing enough to fix the problem of its aging user base.

Personally I'm now looking at Bitwig. I know it's a bit of a risk to go with such a young DAW, I mean who knows what'll happen to it. But dammit it just looks like the most innovative, forward thinking DAW on the market and I cannot resist giving it a trial.

I also beta'ed in the sonar 7, 8, 8.5 days. I also beta tested for Project 5 and Kinetic. I definitely agree with your synopsis. I never could pin down what the exact issue was, but there was always a tipping point where a project got too big and became unstable. It was usually random, and not repeatable, but it was frustrating. Looking back, I feel like if they would have continued developing project 5 it would have possibly been the greenfield re-write of CWPA/Sonar that was needed. I also wonder why cakewalk (or any vendor) would create their own plugin standard. They created Dxi format well after vst was the established protocol. I guess hindsight is 20/20 but they probably should have just supported vst straightaway instead of dxi->dxi wrapper -> native support. There were other quirks like making end users pay 20 bucks for MP3 support. I get that they thought it was a bullshit license fee, but it ended up just feeling petty.

[Resonant- Serpent]

The one feature from Sonar I will miss is the excellent ARA implementation.

+1

I'd already moved back to Reaper early this year because I upgraded to a 4K monitor and couldn't see most of the controls on Sonar anymore without squinting. With Reaper, I can resize the Walter fonts and everything is good.

ARA would be awesome to have back, but I doubt that Reaper will ever have it, since I'm sure they'd have to pay licensing fees, and I think that's counter to their ethos.

ARA announced for Reaper :

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=200297

[GreyLion]

ARA announced for Reaper :

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=200297

Ohellyes! I'm totally delighted to have been wrong on this.

Does this mean that I have to become a total Reaper fanboi now?

I mean, now it's the perfect DAW. And they do have the best t-shirts.

http://pipelineaudio.net/reapermerch-com/

[JerGoertz]

I've used Sonar since 2012 and was also a beta tester. I've logged thousands upon thousands of hours of time in the program and know it quite intimately, so it was a shock to hear the news last week. However, I quickly saw the bright side (for me at least), which is that it'll probably keep working long enough for me to finish (or salvage) all of my current open projects and ideas, and that it also gives me a chance to start afresh with a new DAW which doesn't have the oddities that Sonar had.

While it is an extremely powerful pro DAW with a great workflow and packed with useful features, there were a lot of very hard to track down bugs which made the program frustrating at times. I'm not talking crashes, just weird stuff like every now and then I would drag a clip to a new location and when it was released it would appear somewhere else, even on another track. The automation side of it was often fiddly, glitchy and annoying. And worst of all, over the last few months it's been hosing the settings on many of my Waves plugins. Imagine loading up a project with upwards of 70 instances of the Q10 EQ only to find them all reset to factory defaults. So many of these issues were impossible to reproduce to a bug recipe, so as a beta tester it was hard to get them fixed. I believe much of Sonar's oddity came from the fact that it's an old program and there's probably some new and legacy code not playing well together. It was always my fantasy that it would get a huge rewrite one day.

As for why Cakewalk was losing money, well to me the answer is obvious and always has been. It never did enough to compete with the likes of Ableton and FL, both of which have cornered a large chunk of the young bedroom producer market. These starry eyed kids with dreams of becoming the next Deadmau5 are the ones driving the sales of new DAW's. Genres of music which can be produced on a laptop with headphones are why so many DAW's are being sold - it's certainly not the studio pros or the old dudes who wait until their kids have left for college before dusting off the guitar they haven't played in 20 years and recording the album they always promised themselves. It's not so much the guitar playing kids who are in bands either. Recording a band is difficult, expensive and requires treated rooms with good acoustics. Throwing together an EDM banger with soft synths and samplers is a totally different story.

These kids are getting into modern electronic music production techniques and they want a DAW which appeals to that workflow. Sonar failed to market or develop itself in that direction. By frequenting the Cakewalk forums you can quickly ascertain how old the Sonar crowd is. Put it like this - at 45, I often felt like one of the younger ones. Not that there's anything wrong with this per se - the Sonar community is one of the friendliest, most helpful communities on the internet and I have some great pals there. But the lack of fresh young faces always troubled me, and I had a feeling this day would come eventually. I did make this point on the forum a few times, but didn't get much in the way of agreement. According to a lot of the older guys, they like Sonar just the way it is and certainly don't want any concessions made to the EDM crowd whom they see as talentless musical frauds who just throw loops together (despite the work and complexity that goes into a good EDM track). But like I always replied, appealing to these kids wouldn't just benefit the kids. It would increase Cakewalk's revenue, make them healthier going forward, and result in an even better, more stable DAW that has more $$$'s available for development.

You could see Cakewalk trying to throw bones to the EDM crowd with some of the content they gave away. But it was never good enough stuff to make anyone switch DAW's or prevent them from buying Ableton like their friends.

I guess this is what happens in the free market. You either do what it takes to appeal to a lot of people, or you work out a way of carving yourself a stable little niche, or you go out of business. I don't blame any of the Cakewalk development team - as an ex-beta tester, I can tell you they were a great bunch of very talented guys who cared immensely about the future of the program and worked around the clock for it. It was management decisions that shaped the future of Sonar, and management decisions which ultimately killed it. Gibson is a POS company and Henry wassname really needs to retire to the old folk's home ASAP. But realistically, Gibson would have never gotten rid of Cakewalk if it had been managed well and was doing enough to fix the problem of its aging user base.

Personally I'm now looking at Bitwig. I know it's a bit of a risk to go with such a young DAW, I mean who knows what'll happen to it. But dammit it just looks like the most innovative, forward thinking DAW on the market and I cannot resist giving it a trial.

I also beta'ed in the sonar 7, 8, 8.5 days. I also beta tested for Project 5 and Kinetic. I definitely agree with your synopsis. I never could pin down what the exact issue was, but there was always a tipping point where a project got too big and became unstable. It was usually random, and not repeatable, but it was frustrating. Looking back, I feel like if they would have continued developing project 5 it would have possibly been the greenfield re-write of CWPA/Sonar that was needed. I also wonder why cakewalk (or any vendor) would create their own plugin standard. They created Dxi format well after vst was the established protocol. I guess hindsight is 20/20 but they probably should have just supported vst straightaway instead of dxi->dxi wrapper -> native support. There were other quirks like making end users pay 20 bucks for MP3 support. I get that they thought it was a bullshit license fee, but it ended up just feeling petty.

Interesting you would mention the thing about a "tipping point" of project complexity, past which it would become unstable. I noticed that too; I used Sonar 2, 3, 4, and 7, and it seemed the problem got worse as the versions progressed (tho that could just be because my projects were getting more complicated, heh). Shit like the audio engine constantly dropping out, or even Sonar disappearing in a puff and I'd be left staring at the desktop.

Never had anything like that with any of the other DAWs I've used.

[pc2000]

I've used Sonar since 2012 and was also a beta tester. I've logged thousands upon thousands of hours of time in the program and know it quite intimately, so it was a shock to hear the news last week. However, I quickly saw the bright side (for me at least), which is that it'll probably keep working long enough for me to finish (or salvage) all of my current open projects and ideas, and that it also gives me a chance to start afresh with a new DAW which doesn't have the oddities that Sonar had.

While it is an extremely powerful pro DAW with a great workflow and packed with useful features, there were a lot of very hard to track down bugs which made the program frustrating at times. I'm not talking crashes, just weird stuff like every now and then I would drag a clip to a new location and when it was released it would appear somewhere else, even on another track. The automation side of it was often fiddly, glitchy and annoying. And worst of all, over the last few months it's been hosing the settings on many of my Waves plugins. Imagine loading up a project with upwards of 70 instances of the Q10 EQ only to find them all reset to factory defaults. So many of these issues were impossible to reproduce to a bug recipe, so as a beta tester it was hard to get them fixed. I believe much of Sonar's oddity came from the fact that it's an old program and there's probably some new and legacy code not playing well together. It was always my fantasy that it would get a huge rewrite one day.

As for why Cakewalk was losing money, well to me the answer is obvious and always has been. It never did enough to compete with the likes of Ableton and FL, both of which have cornered a large chunk of the young bedroom producer market. These starry eyed kids with dreams of becoming the next Deadmau5 are the ones driving the sales of new DAW's. Genres of music which can be produced on a laptop with headphones are why so many DAW's are being sold - it's certainly not the studio pros or the old dudes who wait until their kids have left for college before dusting off the guitar they haven't played in 20 years and recording the album they always promised themselves. It's not so much the guitar playing kids who are in bands either. Recording a band is difficult, expensive and requires treated rooms with good acoustics. Throwing together an EDM banger with soft synths and samplers is a totally different story.

These kids are getting into modern electronic music production techniques and they want a DAW which appeals to that workflow. Sonar failed to market or develop itself in that direction. By frequenting the Cakewalk forums you can quickly ascertain how old the Sonar crowd is. Put it like this - at 45, I often felt like one of the younger ones. Not that there's anything wrong with this per se - the Sonar community is one of the friendliest, most helpful communities on the internet and I have some great pals there. But the lack of fresh young faces always troubled me, and I had a feeling this day would come eventually. I did make this point on the forum a few times, but didn't get much in the way of agreement. According to a lot of the older guys, they like Sonar just the way it is and certainly don't want any concessions made to the EDM crowd whom they see as talentless musical frauds who just throw loops together (despite the work and complexity that goes into a good EDM track). But like I always replied, appealing to these kids wouldn't just benefit the kids. It would increase Cakewalk's revenue, make them healthier going forward, and result in an even better, more stable DAW that has more $$$'s available for development.

You could see Cakewalk trying to throw bones to the EDM crowd with some of the content they gave away. But it was never good enough stuff to make anyone switch DAW's or prevent them from buying Ableton like their friends.

I guess this is what happens in the free market. You either do what it takes to appeal to a lot of people, or you work out a way of carving yourself a stable little niche, or you go out of business. I don't blame any of the Cakewalk development team - as an ex-beta tester, I can tell you they were a great bunch of very talented guys who cared immensely about the future of the program and worked around the clock for it. It was management decisions that shaped the future of Sonar, and management decisions which ultimately killed it. Gibson is a POS company and Henry wassname really needs to retire to the old folk's home ASAP. But realistically, Gibson would have never gotten rid of Cakewalk if it had been managed well and was doing enough to fix the problem of its aging user base.

Personally I'm now looking at Bitwig. I know it's a bit of a risk to go with such a young DAW, I mean who knows what'll happen to it. But dammit it just looks like the most innovative, forward thinking DAW on the market and I cannot resist giving it a trial.

You completely nailed a number of issues that hurt sales- as well as the typical age range of Sonar users. I commented on that issue some years ago, when I would bring up certain points about missing features the (elders as I would call them) didn't care about. Features like midi overdub recording was seen as trivial by the bakers- because the elders seen it that way IMO. I went by the forum name kine321. I got into some heated debates where it became obvious that the older, well established users had the ear of the bakers in most cases it seemed.

The younger users were into Kinetic and Project5. Users of these apps were constantly begging for these products to be continued and updated. CW- decided to put all their ducks into Sonar and cut the cord on the younger user base which was a bad decision. They gambled that users would simply switch over to Sonar which really didn't have the same appeal and had major bugs playing well with different audio interfaces. I had to use WDM instead of ASIO in most cases. I barely used Sonar in most scenarios-because of bugs and their refusal to implement midi overdub recording. This lead to me waiting every couple of versions before upgrading eventually. Mostly when the price got so low it was a no-brainer.

CW, had the opportunity to start fresh when they introduced Sonar- Re-imagined. They could've ditched the old code instead of stacking more and more new features onto a decrepit foundation. How could you claim being an industry standard DAW, when you think it's acceptable to only have midi clips stack on top of each other, with only the ability to merge them after the fact. What about quality time & pitch sifting and stretching that's a standard in other DAWs. Rex and Acid files worked great, but Sonar's slicing wasn't that good.

Roland dropped them for a reason, so it was no surprise Gibson did the same. What was the purpose of sending out customer surveys if they weren't actually put to use. Native Instruments decided to start listening to customers by taking a more customer inclusive approach to the development of Maschine, since the bills don't get paid having your head up your own tush. If CW manages to somehow come back, maybe they've learned a real lesson this time. Project6 and other consumer products will be their saving grace!

[ghettosynth]

In case anyone needs new monitors, these are on sale right now at MF. I don't want anyone to miss out, you know?

[Resonant- Serpent]

ARA announced for Reaper :

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=200297

Ohellyes! I'm totally delighted to have been wrong on this.

Does this mean that I have to become a total Reaper fanboi now?

I mean, now it's the perfect DAW. And they do have the best t-shirts.

http://pipelineaudio.net/reapermerch-com/

Thanks for the shirt link!

[Stupid American Pig]

In case anyone needs new monitors, these are on sale right now at MF. I don't want anyone to miss out, you know?

While a Les paul looks great in those colors, I dont think I would like to stare at les paul monitors all day.I would say that is the moment that gibson jumped the shark...(under this ownership)

[SJ_Digriz]

In case anyone needs new monitors, these are on sale right now at MF. I don't want anyone to miss out, you know?

While a Les paul looks great in those colors, I dont think I would like to stare at les paul monitors all day.I would say that is the moment that gibson jumped the shark...(under this ownership)

I think they had one of those Montey Python meetings ..

Idiot 1: Looks like the only thing we make money on is Les Pauls
Idiot 2: Hey, lets just name every product Les Paul!!!!!
Idiot 1: Brilliant, that's lunch then