jclampitt
I get what you are saying ch.huey, but honestly, this is what we get for using software requiring this type of online activation. This right here is the problem with that way of doing things. If the company goes under or your internet goes out you're F****d and that's the end of it. We are lucky that the ability to activate and use Sonar didn't end back in November. And we are even more lucky that Bandlab bought Sonar and it's not completely dead at this point. But still, it just goes to show it's a bad idea to buy and depend any software that doesn't come on a disc with everything required to activate it offline. At least if you expect to be able to open a project and work on it in 10 years. Bandlab has done an amazingly generous thing by making this software free, instead of just letting it die, or charging us for the new version. I guess my point is live and learn, and don't pay for software that doesn't come on a disc with an activation key if you plan on using it indefinitely. It sucks but it is what it is.

I don't disagree with you, but before I jumped on board, I emailed customer service at Cakewalk over this very issue. To quote verbatim from the email, "To clarify when you pay upfront you do get a product that is permanently unlocked with 12 months of rolling updates." I opted in for lifetime, and I had every impression that once I paid for it, I'd always have access, even if the company goes under. This was further bolstered by the idea, which I think Noel said (?), if no one would buy Cakewalk in any way, and the promise of an unlock key so no one is stranded.
 
I'm not stupid, so I know quoting from a company that doesn't exist holds no water. What they told me then is not binding to Bandlab. It is the agnosticism of whether or not this 'product that is permanently unlocked' will actually be unlocked by the new company that runs the activation servers is the most salient question. It's a mixed message so far - the servers are being moved, and will stay online. Past that, it's uncertain.
 
To be clear - I am not whining about what should be, asking for a refund or any of that nonsense. I am willing to wait to find out as I don't anticipate the servers going offline any time soon, and I am grateful for what Bandlab has done. But I am running Firewire soundcards that have been discontinued, will stop having new drivers soon, and intend on upgrading to Thunderbolt in the somewhat nearish future. That means new motherboard, and a new installation of SPlat for legacy projects.
 
I have no idea if I will be able to open legacy projects in SPlat, as the 'product that is permanently unlocked' which was THE biggest selling point when I bought it for me, future access, will or will not be something that happens. If not, how I archive is going to have to change.
 
I might or might not like the answer, I can accept that part, and I'm willing to be patient, but I am just trying to point out that CbB is not Sonar Platinum, so future access to the software might not matter for most purposes, but it does matter for some. For anyone trying to put projects to bed and open them, it is a practical concern.
 
I consider anything that's happened since the company shutdown last year a gift, to be clear, and I am grateful for Bandlab. But it's not unreasonable to ask if the gift has batteries included, because if not, you have to go out and get them yourselves, while still being grateful for the gift, to put it that way.
 
Bandlab has honored many of the commitments of Cakewalk beyond what it legally has had to do - I just don't know how far they will continue, and before I spend a lot of time bouncing every single track to the most basic generic Cakewalk compatible version possible after setting up elaborate tracks, I'd just like to know if it needs to be done that way. Again, whether or not I like the answer, at some point there will need to be one and I will have to adjust me methods to conform to what is, not what I wish it were.
 

bitflipper
 
If you had problems loading a SONAR 6 project in Platinum, it was almost certainly because you were missing some third-party plugins that had been used in the original project.

The jump from 32 bit to 64 bit in Platinum was a problem in and of itself with some plugins. I still don't understand why some plugins that were stock with Sonar 6 show up as missing when it seems like there are equivalent ones, and it looks like some DX plugins were used in Sonar 6 native and 3rd party that, had I known I'd be opening it up in a program that doesn't support DX plugins to begin with even if I had them, I'd have printed them. I'm learning from my mistakes, of which there are many, which is why I'm concerned about future access to the program.
 
It wasted a lot of time trying to approximate certain sounds from the previous two track masters, but I did it ... with stuff in Sonar Platinum that I don't know if I'll have access to. A lot of work I might lose, and as much as I am for bouncing EVERYTHING down to just audio, that takes time to do. If it's not necessary I don't need to do it and won't, but if it is I have to figure out how to fit 8 hours more into each day before the plug gets pulled on Splat.
 
I'm not trying to complain, just point out a small pragmatic concern that I have which will impact that thing no one can refund - time. I understand there may be reasons (piracy that deters people from the free version? I know how much I don't know that is going on with all this) that Bandlab may not want to at some point do this. I will adjust, but knowing what to adjust to is a reasonable request, and one I'm not demanding now, just trying to point out that it will at some point need to be resolved and there is reason to be concerned with Sonar Platinum after transitioning over to Bandlab. If you can't ever install Splat and its plugins, you can't then "leave them installed for some of the included plugins you may have got as part of your paid membership."

 

 

Thanks, Noel! Good to know, and hope you keep long-term compatibility like that!

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
As bitflipper mentions. we support all prior versions of the software dating all the way back to the 90's. You can even save projects in the new version and reopen it in versions going back 10 years and it will work. New features will be stripped obviously.
How projects sound could change to some extent due to a variety of factors, plugins, etc in some circumstances but its rare. Plugin's are the most common element that makes compatibility hard. The best way to preserve projects for long term hibernation is to additionally freeze the tracks and render final stems into the project as a backup. Then save the file and archive it. I've found that to be more than enough to recover even really old projects.

This is very true, and what features exactly will be stripped from Splat to CbB, I don't know 100%. I might be fretting over nothing. It's just an uncertainty.
 
You're absolutely correct about preserving them by freezing the tracks and to render final stems. If this were only my concern with my final mix, I'd not worry too much about this. But when I'm going back into a project that I had 8 different mixes of, all of which are substantially different from the final mix but one, which includes unused guitar parts, unused bass parts, unused horn sections, unused vocals (etc), that I may decide to use at some point on a completely different project sped up and mutilated, that means 8 different CWB files to freeze the tracks and render final stems to. I don't know what I might want to do with it in the future. I do know now I'm finding old files *.wav that have effects printed to them that I wish weren't there. I have no idea where the original project files were or what random cheap/free DAW I used to create it or when, so there's no going back. I'd like to avoid that problem.
 
Right now on my plate, that's 71 final mixes in Splat, and you add in the unused mixes at a conservative 3 per final mix, I'm going to be freezing audio in at least 213 projects to save as bundles that are able to be opened with effects printed, without them printed and so on. I can think of a variety of ways to speed this up, but I don't know if that's necessary.
 
Or I could just focus on the final mix, and trust that the less important stuff will be opened by an unlocked future version of Sonar Platinum that I can open. If not, I go into each project and decide if each different .cwp file is worth archiving, and how much is worth archiving while I sit at my computer and do it.
 
I'm not complaining - just trying to realistically plan and I put a lot of projects into Sonar Platinum. Bad luck. I just want to make the best of a bad situation, which is difficult without knowing how fully bad it may be. I'm beyond glad Cakewalk by Bandlab will grow and continue and I appreciate how you and Meng are jumping in on the forums and I really, really don't want to sound like I'm complaining about the past, just wondering what will happen and how to adjust to that reality, which I'm lucky I even get to do.
 
Thanks

 

I have no inside information, but if I was sitting around the conference table brainstorming this, I'd suggest that the simplest, easiest solution is to just keep the server going indefinitely. Once migrated over to BandLab's hosting service it would cost them next to nothing to keep it up.
 
I would in fact not encourage them to go with the permanent license option, as that would be an open invitation to piracy. Why worry about people pirating a dead product, you ask? Well, keep in mind that SONAR Platinum includes components that neither Cakewalk nor BandLab own, products paid for via royalties from SONAR sales. No sales, no royalties. BandLab has no right to give other people's stuff away.
 
 

ch.huey
I'm not complaining - just trying to realistically plan and I put a lot of projects into Sonar Platinum. Bad luck. I just want to make the best of a bad situation, which is difficult without knowing how fully bad it may be. I'm beyond glad Cakewalk by Bandlab will grow and continue and I appreciate how you and Meng are jumping in on the forums and I really, really don't want to sound like I'm complaining about the past, just wondering what will happen and how to adjust to that reality, which I'm lucky I even get to do.

 
ch.huey I'm impressed with your forward planning organization but with all due respect I think you are overthinking this and trying to plan for a scenario that in all likelihood won't happen. We're don't plan on taking out any features that could affect the playback of projects - the program will evolve not de-evolve. We have always been extremely careful with compatibility over the years and go to great pains to retain even obscure settings for this very reason. In short your old projects will continue to load in CbB without problems.
And regarding my earlier statement about unlocking back in Dec it was made solely in the context of the company going under permanently with no transition - which is not what transpired, fortunately for us all. 
 

bitflipper
What if a meteor levels Redmond, and the only server backup is in Singlish? We can imagine all kinds of troubling scenarios, but it only serves to raise our cortisol levels. So many other things to worry about these days, such as whether I'll be able to afford shoes after the looming trade war gets into full swing.

The question isn't whether we'll be able to afford shoes after the trade war.  Heck, I'll go without shoes, the question is will we be able to afford more plugins!!

Something that has been overlooked in this discussion is that the possibility of providing a permanent license was devised during the brief period between Gibson pulling the plug and BandLab taking over. At that point in time, no one knew if the server could be kept running. With Gibson not paying its bills, they would have eventually lost their hosting service.
 
Noel came up with the idea of delivering a license-free version of SONAR as a potential way of mitigating the worst-case scenario, should it come to that. A great idea under the circumstances, but those circumstances have changed. The need for that doomsday option no longer exists.
 
Today's situation is very different. Now that there's somebody willing to keep the server running, and no motivation for them to shut it off, I think we can rest easy. It's actually good news that the offer of an unlocked SONAR isn't going to happen - good because it now doesn't need to happen. 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]

ch.huey
I'm not complaining - just trying to realistically plan and I put a lot of projects into Sonar Platinum. Bad luck. I just want to make the best of a bad situation, which is difficult without knowing how fully bad it may be. I'm beyond glad Cakewalk by Bandlab will grow and continue and I appreciate how you and Meng are jumping in on the forums and I really, really don't want to sound like I'm complaining about the past, just wondering what will happen and how to adjust to that reality, which I'm lucky I even get to do.

 
ch.huey I'm impressed with your forward planning organization but with all due respect I think you are overthinking this and trying to plan for a scenario that in all likelihood won't happen. We're don't plan on taking out any features that could affect the playback of projects - the program will evolve not de-evolve. We have always been extremely careful with compatibility over the years and go to great pains to retain even obscure settings for this very reason. In short your old projects will continue to load in CbB without problems.
And regarding my earlier statement about unlocking back in Dec it was made solely in the context of the company going under permanently with no transition - which is not what transpired, fortunately for us all. 
 

Noel, thanks for responding. I jumped into Cakewalk just a little over a year before a scenario that I thought next to impossible happening did actually happen, so I'm trying to err on the side of caution right now and not knowing what to do is worse than an unpleasant answer about what I'll need to do. That being said, I stuck with Platinum and pulled all the workload in knowing that the platform had an uncertain, possibly short, future, and Meng came along so that was another improbability. I'm beyond happy with the program so I'm definitely not jumping ship in regard to CbB.
 
I think the safest bet would be to start saving now but leave projects open, and then pull them into an install of CbB on a VM machine install that has never seen a Sonar Platinum installation before, and see if things start going missing to ensure compatibility to really check since I'm not sure what I'm using that was or wasn't acquired by Bandlab yet, but it is very heavy on the stock Sonar plugins/channel strips. If nothing seems lost then I think when the final release of CbB comes along, I'll just transfer everything over to that program and save through CbB. I'm not going to switch over to CbB just yet, but if the projects do load in it, and back through Platinum without any difference by the time of final release, it makes more sense to archive them in a live program instead of a dead one, and they'll be able to be accessed via both as a CWB.
 
I am a little nuts with the organizaiton but... I'm a Zappa fan. I heard about his vault growing up so I got into the habit of keeping everything back to my high school boom box cassette recordings, and it's all been digitized at this point, mostly in Sonar in the last year. It's a bit obsessive sometimes but with today's technology but, a minidisc recording of a rehearsal from over 10 years ago can be the basis of a sample library. I could only pull some of them off by recording them through the line out due to the defunct Sony program for transferring the digital data, that wouldn't let me use one minidisc to transfer it to my computer if it was recorded on my older minidisc. It was a PITA, but I managed to get it off the thing eventually, but I'm wary of anything proprietary at this point. So I'm trying to transfer everything over in one format, then export to WAV if possible to divorce it from any specific platform for future compatibility. I know Zappa did something similar with his 60 era tape recordings onto his Synclavier when that came along, so I've kept as much as possible for most of my life. Doing so been far more useful than even I thought it would, as I never imagined how easy it would get to sample things quickly via software, and warp the most random noises or snippet from a rehearsal into something musical.  
 
If you say it's unlikely at this point, I'll take your word on it. I know there's a lot going on on your end that I simply can't know, but as long as I can still get the end result of keeping the projects archived properly and not kicking myself in the teeth in the future without knowing it (again), I'll be happy. It's just a lot right now for me that I have to make a decision on so it's been looming, for me at least. I got a big wake up call with the projects in Cakewalk 6 done on another computer and some I did with my own software in how not to archive stuff.
 
Thank you sincerely for responding to this issue.

 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]

ch.huey
I'm not complaining - just trying to realistically plan and I put a lot of projects into Sonar Platinum. Bad luck. I just want to make the best of a bad situation, which is difficult without knowing how fully bad it may be. I'm beyond glad Cakewalk by Bandlab will grow and continue and I appreciate how you and Meng are jumping in on the forums and I really, really don't want to sound like I'm complaining about the past, just wondering what will happen and how to adjust to that reality, which I'm lucky I even get to do.

 
ch.huey I'm impressed with your forward planning organization but with all due respect I think you are overthinking this and trying to plan for a scenario that in all likelihood won't happen. We're don't plan on taking out any features that could affect the playback of projects - the program will evolve not de-evolve. We have always been extremely careful with compatibility over the years and go to great pains to retain even obscure settings for this very reason. In short your old projects will continue to load in CbB without problems.
And regarding my earlier statement about unlocking back in Dec it was made solely in the context of the company going under permanently with no transition - which is not what transpired, fortunately for us all. 
 

After reading many of Noel's replies to the question for offline activation, all I can see when
I read between the lines is the answer: "we very, very much don't want it to happen". Of course
we don't know what is the problem, we've not been told any details about it, that's
understandable it's a business. All we can do is only speculate. But speculate is not what I'm
looking for, I'm looking on my hard drive and wish there will be an activation key for my SPlat
(for which I paid huge money, as for my budget) backed up for future PC rebuilds/changes. Like
for example switching from 32-bit to 64-bit somewhere in future, but I don't know how long will
it take yet. Or any system re-install in general. Online activation looks toy-ish, sorry to say
that, a gadget for young people to play a little with it, hard to plan long-term based on such
software. Look at the Harrison Mixbus, you just put your activation key file on disk and you're all
set.

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
Currently the old customer database is still active and so will activate through command center. Its not sure how long this will stay active so you should transition over to the CbB version as soon as possible.
 

Sorry Noel, but I do not understand. I have a paid version of Sonar Professional, for more than a year if I remember correctly. I have already registered as a user on the BandLab website ... is it necessary to do something else?