This never worked with Gibson, Roland or original owners,but....
Cakewalk needs an integrated sampler to compete. Not having one is basically ignoring huge chunk of Hip-Hop, Pop, EDM and even some modern rock acts. To be perfectly clear, one can create any genre in any DAW. Whether that creation is practical and intuitive is another thing altogether. Even with Cakewalk being free, it is a hard sell to youth because the hoops I have to jump through to demo modern pop and Hip-Hop are too much.
The people of this forum represent Cakewalks faithful, traditional user base which was not enough to keep cakewalk competitive. Repeating mistakes of past will likely see similar results. The foundation of cakewalk is solid, but needs a major overhaul when it comes to modern music production. Someone like Anderton can come up with clever solutions, but most DAWs have these things implemented out of the box. I can recreate over half of current top 40 songs using FL Studio, Logic, Ableton, Reason, Bitwig and Studio One out the box with no major workarounds. I can’t do that with Cakewalk or even SPLAT. The process requires major third party assistance. I have used Geist paired with Sonar but even that has limitations and again, requires additional purchase without being truly integrated. I have little experience with Ableton and over 20 years with Cakewalk and it was easier for me to show a kid what he wanted to do with the former.
I’m not talking full Kontakt or other advanced product. FL Studio has the simplest integrated sampler with little deep editing ability beyond pitch and envelope but it is effective and super quick. Sample One and Simpler are nowhere near the level of EXS24 but just work. The fact that Sonar has a step Sequencer gives it a foot in the door but falls far short without useful sampler. For now I literally cannot give product away.