Making Lemonade....
or SONARade as the case may be.
Some users have expressed hope that SONAR will be rescued by some 3rd party.
Highly unlikely. @azlow : re [
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3697509 ]
Your points represent a realistic assessment on the topic of resurrecting SONAR in something like it's current form. SONAR has been my preferred DAW for some time, but ime (which includes sw dev, startups, multi-nationals, m&a, IP, p&l, blah, blah, blah) there is no way this will ever happen.
HOWEVER, I'm wondering if there is a way to harness the passion, expertise and leverage within the SONAR user base to focus on an existing platform to get the features that made SONAR a preferred choice.
First,
the LEMONS, to address the potential straws being mentioned:
MS : Read no further than [
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3696861 ] from gcurrie with 7 years @MS in the now defunct Multimedia Division. His comments are hardly exclusive to MS, but do nothing to alter the fact that SONAR would be completely insignificant within their current power structure. They are focused on much bigger mistakes (ok, stakes) such as the acquisition of Nokia to become a player in mobile (a $7.5B -writeoff- !!) and shutting down the Groove Music store in favor of Spotify. MS revenues for 2016 were $85.3B with $20.2B in operating income. CW was what?, $10M? a few years back, which represents something like 0.0000001 % of their revenue, declining and unprofitable. I highly doubt MS has an internal Hercules willing to bet their career on championing the acquisition and continuation of any DAW.
An existing HW company : If Tascam didn't pick it up, -why- would any other company do so? SONAR is WIN only, eliminating a large % of the TAM. It will not happen.
Angel investor : I can't imagine anyone would consider investing in a compromised product for a crowded and declining market. Have yet to see any rich hobbyists step up to the plate. Perhaps someone could make the suggestion to Paul Allen, former MS and a collector, sometimes guitar player once the NFL season is over. (Oops. Just realized that will never happen given the SuperBowl loss against the NE Patriots.)
Employee buyout : The passion for SONAR was evident in the CW team in spite of the management/strategy issues. They did a great job under challenging conditions, but I doubt their commitment was sufficiently rewarded to afford the luxury of making such an offer, even -if- Gibson would consider it (and that's a mighty big if).
Open Source : Even if Gibson decided to make the source available (another mighty big if), the logistics and costs are very real as azlow has rightly noted. [
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3697509 ] It would take considerable effort for anyone other than the curren devs to come up to speed with product status let alone a strategy and plan for prioritizing and maintaining anything.
I know of only one case where a major software product was successfully resurrected by a fan-based development team. But, there is one and it continues to be viable, even improving over at least a couple of years.
....
The LEMONADE...? 0. Local authorization file crack (to eliminate any server dependencies). At the moment, we have the word of the CTO whose integrity is without question. Unfortunately, he does not own the servers that I know of. There are some legal channels to explore if (when) they get shutdown [
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3696038 ] but that will take some time even if it is successful. A crack, illegal as it will be, would be much quicker.
1. Develop stand alone VSTs of CW locked products. (I.e. Adaptive Limiter, ProChannel modules, etc.). The dev effort would be smaller scale and possibly reasonable enough to consider. Of course, completely dependent on access being granted by Gibson.
But perhaps an initiative to improve the competitiveness of an existing DAW?
2. Mod another DAW. Reaper is the only possibility that I know of. The founder might be open to some initiative given his history and demonstrated focus. Being private, solvent and independent are attractive long run fundamentals that would make any investment worth the effort for both sides. (I was going to say win-win, but of course it needs to be win/mac ...)
@robert_e_bone, @Savij, @panup, @bitflipper @scook all sound like they have dev experience. What say you?
3. Spend a lot of time on DAW forums. I assume some have feature logging/voting features. Hearing dev is slower that what we have been used to. Feature / use case descriptions should be easy.
Also posted here.
[
http://sonarmods.com/sona...ex.php/board,20.0.html ]