To those worried about the bleed of users towards the end of the Gibson/Sonar era, have some faith in this free version. Here I am and I'm pleased so far, at least on a sample size of one, its working for me. Having had my $4K+ mac boosted out of my house by a burglar I've had to leave the Logic Pro nest for the first time in a long time, played with the Sonar demo and then blammo Heres Cakewalk. Sold. Granted I'm kinda missing Logics supurb built in instrument library (Theres really nothing in its class, and I've spent a bloody mortgage over the decades on DAWs)
That said, Bandlab should perhaps spend a bit of time reviewing a bit of the UIX. She's a powerful beastie, but some stuff could perhaps do with being a bit more...... discoverable. Figuring out how to route midi took me a good hour of head scratching and forum reading before I finally found the option to make visible the channel/bank/patch selections. I think having some fresh eyes, coupled with an Agile dev cycle to straighten out some of the crustier aspects of the UI and workflow could really sell people looking for a cheaper alternative to Cubase or Protools and beyond and if the thing remains free, Reaper and the cheapo daws are in serious trouble.
Also Bandlab, whoever makes that Rhodes plugin in the Sonar demo, buy them. That thing is beautiful.
Oh and wtf is up with the Video support? That..... needs work. Bloody thing throws up all over itself with anything using the rarer but important to industry codecs (red/etc).
But yeah, I think theres a future here, as long as Sonar gets some work on its UIX, and a few niggles (Video!!!!) its a very capable piece of software.
Oh and while I'm wish listing, I'd love to see some work done on the score view. I'm often scoring for shorts and radio plays and stuff, and Sonars score view really needs some work, particularly if theres some way to set up articulations and mapping them to the triggers(etc) of our ROMplers of choice.