Hello from BandLab [Updated 21/3/2018]

Hello everyone :-)

I hope you don't mind me jumping in and writing a note to everyone here. The positive messages (with many questions of course!) have been really kind and I believe I speak for everyone on the BandLab team in saying thank you.  This community is really incredible and we're honoured to be here and to be part of building the future of Cakewalk and SONAR. 
 
We're now in the process of transition and migration of data, trademarks, build processes and other fun administrative things that are necessary when deals like this happen - but it's important for you all to know that we feel that the people in the community (especially the lifetime fans and users of the product) are the reason this incredible product has been around for more than 30 years and will live on many more into the future, so I'll try and stop in personally as much as I can to say hello and make sure questions are answered about the transition where possible.
 
An important thing we strongly believe in is to be as open and transparent as we are able to be - once the product roadmap and more information on our plans are ready within the new establishment, you guys will be the first to know. We'll keep updating the Announcement FAQ as often as we have something to update, but I quickly wanted to address a key concern I saw in and amongst the threads so far and immediately reassure everyone that even though the suite of Cakewalk & SONAR products is now within a new company, our steadfast goal is that former SONAR owners (of all versions) will not need to spend any money to cross-over/cross-grade to the future flagship product. 
 
As you can imagine, there is some complexity in this, and I am currently personally working through all of the agreements that have a $ per unit or % dollar amount and negotiating to remove them on the go-forward to ensure this is possible. We only have 2 left to go - they are specific replaceable bits of code and are a nice to have, but hopefully this moves quickly. If it's not something that can be achieved, we'll replace them with either our own technology or work with other partners who want to be part of future releases.

This may be TMI, but I thought it may be valuable for you guys to have some insight on what's already going on outside of changing passwords and rebuilding tables. 
 
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In other news, I'm also very happy to let you guys know that Noel Borthwick and Ben Staton will be joining our engineering team and we're actively looking for talent to expand our team further (PM if interested!).

I was very fortunate to get to know Noel through the process, and as our conversations developed I was very pleased to find someone whose experience and personal vision on the world of music creation matched the aggressive one that our team has here at BandLab Technologies. It didn't hurt either that he promised to teach me jazz guitar...  
 
With Ben, his passion for the project and personal story of joining Cakewalk from having started off as being a superfan really resonated with us and I'm very much looking foward to working with him too. We strongly believe that the best products come from thinking solely about what one would want as a user/consumer - it's a huge advantage to be one yourself.
 
There's a lot more we'll be able to share soon, and reading through all the posts here and around the web - I've seen nothing but love (famous last words ) for Cakewalk, SONAR and the community that has supported it over the years through good times and bad.

I think I'd better not say anymore, we'd rather under-promise and over-deliver, than over-promise and let you guys down.  I hope you'll give our team a chance to earn your respect and for us to make great music together for many years to come.

With sincere regards,
 
Meng
 
p.s I will take responsibility for mistakenly coding in "Hello, Bakers"!!  It won't happen again... 
 
---- UPDATE 3/3/2018 ----
 
Just wanted to drop everybody a note for the start of the weekend. Thank you again for the words of encouragement and support, it means a lot to the team and gets everyone excited! A lot of progress has been made this week and I'm looking forward to being able to share details with all of you officially in the coming weeks :-)
 
In the past week, a lot of things have now been finalized and I'm excited to say that this will allow us to get the first iteration of our the new flagship product into circulation much sooner than expected. What I can confirm today (and apologies to those who are big fans of it) is that it won't be called SONAR.
 
For the time being, we can all refer to it as TDDFKAS (The Desktop DAW Formerly Known As SONAR)  until we have a proper announcement about it.
 
Though I am a big fan of the name, I mentioned in my first note that there are some issues with continuing to use the name SONAR. For those who want to know why - apart from the problems with SEO, the complexity in the way the IP was transacted (not taking on the ongoing company) means that it could be altogether too confusing to have SONAR as the name for people who had done business with the previous company as well as in parallel with the legacy site which we would like to keep up for reference.
 
The plus side of this, however, is that the new installation will not affect your older versions of SPLAT (not the new name haha).
 
We've already got a firm timeline in mind internally already and are prepping our press releases & announcements which will be within the next 4-6 weeks, if not sooner. Can't wait to share with you all (especially existing SONAR users) what lies ahead for our beloved DAW - in case you've missed my posts around the place, it will absolutely be a desktop application so please don't worry about it becoming (cloud/web)-only. 

Have a great weekend!
Meng
 
---- UPDATE 21/3/2018 ----
 
Hi everyone!
 
Thank you all for the insights & feedback you’ve shared in the past month.  I know you’ve been waiting patiently for more news on TDFKAS and the rest of the Cakewalk products. We’re now very very close to announcing our product plans - we're ahead of schedule and you’ll hear it from me here first - so watch this space.
 
Before that happens though, as part of the preparation for product relaunch we’ll be sending everyone who previously registered a Cakewalk account a request to sign up for a BandLab account. It’s free, it’s secure and it doesn’t mean you are obliged to use BandLab's social music platform features (although there are plenty of good collaboration options and other features in there  - you can read more about them here).
 
Signing up for a new legacy Cakewalk account is no longer available and for those who have accounts, the reason for this is that we will be tagging your Cakewalk ID to your new BandLab account as we migrate databases and wind down the legacy server. Starting very soon, your BandLab account will be what you use to authenticate and activate TDFKAS and replaces the old Cakewalk account. As part of feature development, it will also bring more features and services to your Cakewalk experience in the future should you choose to use them.

We decided to do it this way (opt-in) instead of auto-creating an account for everyone because we didn't want to force a new user account on anyone - we apologise that it's a little bit extra work but we hope that you understand! It's important to note that in order to ensure you get the right upgrade or crossgrades in future, you'll need to sign up for BandLab with the same email you used for your Cakewalk products.
 
For the thousands of you who have already signed up for BandLab with the same email address as your Cakewalk account - you won’t need to do anything! We’ve already automated the tagging of your Cakewalk ID to your new BandLab account.
 
Also, we had some questions in earlier forum threads about BandLab’s Terms of Use, particularly around ownership, licensing and copyright.

For avoidance of doubt: Nothing you share on BandLab belongs to us - we take no ownership of your creation. Our T&Cs regarding BandLab getting a license to use content purely allow BandLab as a service to actually function - i.e. we need a license for BandLab as a service to play back your own song to you, or anyone else you share it with. Based on feedback in this forum we have clarified these points in layman's terms in our Terms of Use - so thanks to those who took the time to read our terms and give us feedback - we are always open to your comments and finding ways that we can do better...
 
I’m sorry that I can’t share any more information about what we're baking with TDFKAS just yet… we’re so close, and we can’t wait to reveal the full picture very soon! I have a sneaking suspicion you guys will be really pleased with the news.  Thank you again for all your support thus far - it really means the world to us and we hope we won't disappoint.
 
Best,
Meng

Hello, welcome and congratulations. It's good to hear that the Cakewalk and Sonar names will continue. I was going to mention the "Hello, Bakers" cock-up, but seems that's now fixed :)

Welcome. Thanks for sharing this info, and for so promptly engaging with our community. 

Thank you Meng, that's great news! Just signed up on BandLab & invited my band members
Regards. Thomas

Thanks for the quality update, meng.  This is a wonderful and welcome development to see. 

Thank you for this post, Meng - Sonar is simply the best DAW available and I am immensely excited to have you at the helm. 
Welcome !
 

Welcome Meng looking forward to what BandLab brings to the cake.

meng
Quick note as it was asked about in another thread - the reason why I am not using the word SONAR when referring to the new flagship product is not because it's planned to be a different product, it's just that we're doing the legal/brand work to make sure calling it that would be the right thing to do and wouldn't cause any confusion in the market given the circumstances over the last couple of months. You can take it to mean "future version of SONAR, or whatever it might be called". 

Thank you, meng! If feels a little funny to Welcome the owner to the show... but, Welcome!

SONAR as a product has transitioned owners before, so keeping the name is not unprecedented. Of course that was when the company Cakewalk transitioned with it, so it was always Cakewalk SONAR and then a by line with the owning company name.

I look forward to seeing how you take SONAR into the future and hope for the best success. Of course, as the customer, I like the idea that I should not have to pay more money to use what I already have. There were hints of really cool stuff in the December update that never happened, and it'd be nice to see what that would have been, but I'm going to echo the call for emphasis on stability, though I shy away from calling for that to be the only priority.

This is an exciting day for most of use longtime fans and users of Cakewalk and SONAR (and the various other products). I started with a command line based MS-DOS version - Cakewalk 2.0 (as shown in my profile picture), 28 years ago. While I did not purchase every upgrade during that time, I've purchased several and expect, despite purchasing Lifetime updates for SONAR Platinum, that I will again.

Meng,
 
Thanks for taking up the company and keeping it alive!
 
Many of us purchased lifetime subscriptions for Cakewalk. Will that be honored?
 
Thank you,
 
Kevin Keough
 
Cakewalk user from day one.

wwlcome

Thank you Meng. You tuned what looked to some like a dead end into a new beginning! Kudos to you!