msmcleod
Now BandLab has taken over, but with a much smaller development crew. These guys are having to:
- Work on new Cakewalk features and bugs
- Support all the issues people are having
- Finish off the new forum....
The last item, at least, is something that I doubt that the Cakewalk devs have much to do with. BandLab was already a social media site with its own web developers before it acquired Cakewalk.
Actually, I don't even know what a Chord Track is, and my biggest issue is trying to get up to speed in this amazing feature-deep DAW, so aside from my own pet enhancement of having an FX menu item for
Replace Effect like we do for
Replace Synth,
my fondest wish is for a new forum to go live.
I've found that one of the best ways to learn about a DAW is to skim a forum where a lot of new users are trying to figure out how to get basic tasks done and I think by fluke I somehow wound up as the lone "new user" on here because I happened to snag the CA-2A freebie back in 2016, so my CakeGib registration was still good. Although I did briefly run SONAR back in the early oughts.
Everyone who's on here now other than me is either a die-hard who stayed with the program after it got Gibsonized or the occasional embittered dark soul who dumped it and seems to have stuck around to troll those who held out.
Much as I have enjoyed the "you naive fools, they are up to something no good and I demand
transparency before I will expose my AOL address book to their data mining" posts, I would love for you loyal die-hards to be able to share your vast knowledge of Cakewalk with a crop of enthusiastic new users.
I find that it's good for both parties. When I've done it in the past, it has inspired me as the veteran user to rediscover features of the program that I had neglected or forgotten about, and the new users' enthusiasm is infectious.
I'm incredibly psyched to have this amazing program to use, it's like Xmas morning every time I run the thing. Clicking on that little arrow to to pop out the ProChannel gives me a dopamine hit, I swear! Bang, switch on the Console, tweak the Compressor, maybe switch to the CA-2A, pop out the EQ, we're off to the freakin' races!
That's why when someone comes in with one of these "it's been 90 whole days, where are all of the new features they promised us?" posts I troll them a bit. BandLab are nothing but heroes in my book. So far (respect being something that is rightly earned and maintained).
C'mon people, the DAW once given up for dead is now freed from the financial constraint of having to have big new whiz-bang features to generate revenue every time there's a trade show. That is a GIFT. It allows the programmers to quash bugs, which, believe it or not, is something programmers
love doing. Nobody likes having their mistakes out on display for all to see. It's like having a big vocal plosive in the middle of an otherwise great mix.
And they're still slipping in some cool usability features. Those "little things" that people use every day are things that show they care about the existing user base. The note length buttons in the Piano Roll? I'd say that it is brilliant, but it's not, really, it's something that should just have already been there, and the fact that it wasn't was unfortunate. That they took the time and effort to put it (back?) in is brilliant.
(disclosure: I am a decades-long veteran of the commercial software industry)