Steev
 
The only thing that mildly disappoints me about Bandlab is it's lack of support for Edge/Internet Explorer, and Firefox browsers. I cannot decide to remove or even disable Edge/Internet Explorer from Windows 10, I can only decide not to install software that interferes with it and the smooth operation of my system.
 And that's why I do kind of understand Bandlab's reluctance or at least difficulties supporting other browsers(?).. I could never get the Chrome browser to stop interfering with my Windows 10 based home, studio, and office network, so I can understand how the Edge/Internet Explorer, and Firefox browsers could create complications and have a bad effect on Bandlab's preferred Chrome browser functionality and networking across the entire PLANET!

That's the first I have heard of that. 
 
It would really surprise me that any modern web app would be limited to one browser.  If a web developer codes in compliance to the modern standards for HTML and CSS, it should work in any browser that supports modern standards. It's been years since Microsoft tried to create their own version of web standards.
 
Web developers these days are encouraged to write apps that are both cross platform and cross browser.  This philosophy is at the core of 'Responsive Web Design'.  https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_responsive.asp
 

Responsive Web Design makes your web page look good on all devices (desktops, tablets, and phones).
Responsive Web Design is about using HTML and CSS to resize, hide, shrink, enlarge, or move the content to make it look good on any screen

Steev
That's right, you read right, CAKEWALK, staring early from Pro Audio all the way up to SONAR, no matter what the nay Sayers say about what is the best DAW, Cakewalk has by far outsold all others making it the WORLD'S MOST POPULAR AND BEST SELLING DAW! And only really floundered when Gibson changed the rules of research, development, and distribution... 

Steve, I appreciate your passion, and in the 1990s, perhaps there was a period where one could argue that Cakewalk was the best selling in the new class of software called "DAWs".  But I don't believe any such claim by the time Roland had it.  Indeed, that was WHY Roland got involved -- because Cakewalk could not survive on its own.  And Gibson bought it after Roland concluded they could never make it profitable.


The market has spoken  It just doesn't matter which product was in theory "the best".  Customers have not been buying it.  The media has not been covering it.  Stores weren't selling it. 
 
I would agree with people who argue that SONAR has a good UI, workflow and feature set.  But in the end, that just did not matter nearly as much as other factors.  Other products brought in new customers with unique features (e.g. Live) aggressive pricing (e.g. Reaper) or hardware bundles (Presonus, and to some extent Cubase).  These things proved to be more important that the individual features.  In any market like this, momentum is very important.  People like to move in crowds.  If they perceive the crowd moving a certain direction, people naturally want to be in that crowd.
 
"SONAR people" seem to be fiercely independent.  I like that, but I also like Don Quixote.
 
The DAW game is over.  SONAR lost out.  The things that Bandlab is talking about represent, IMHO, a new generation that is something beyond what we call "DAW".  It offers he potential for a new lease on life, but only if it attracts a new generation.  If all this effort does is to placate the people who have loved Cakewalk for 20 years, the enterprise will be a failure.

cparmerlee
 
If all this effort does is to placate the people who have loved Cakewalk for 20 years, the enterprise will be a failure.

Sad, but true!
 
Being 'right', or 'best' is not all that it takes.  You also have to attract new customers to make a business profitable. 
 
Hopefully Sonar can change and evolve to attract new customers, otherwise the alternative is for it to fail forever.
 
I prefer the first option. 

They won't know they want it until they are convinced they want/need it. So many products are sold this way.
I didn't know I wanted an Alexa until I heard about it.
 

abacab
Web developers these days are encouraged to write apps that are both cross platform and cross browser.  This philosophy is at the core of 'Responsive Web Design'.  https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_responsive.asp

Responsive Web Design makes your web page look good on all devices (desktops, tablets, and phones).
Responsive Web Design is about using HTML and CSS to resize, hide, shrink, enlarge, or move the content to make it look good on any screen

Pages - yes, but apps, especially which responsive "GUI" and hardware integration, have hard time to work equally. Most browsers are PAGES oriented. There are good reasons why some apps recommend (or even restrict) to Chrome.
I mean they could probably make it FF "compatible", but whats the point if you will be really disappointed by the result?
I hit the problem at work, by coincidence just several doors away from "the place where the Web was born"
 

cparmerlee
The market has spoken  It just doesn't matter which product was in theory "the best".  Customers have not been buying it.  The media has not been covering it.  Stores weren't selling it. 

Then all musicians can look for a new job... When I try to find ANY song from not "top 100" on ANY radio station, I usually fail. And that "top 100" list has nothing to do with the quality, it is "popular" just because it was specially made popular, by investing money to collect more money, using predictable way. Does that mean I HAVE TO like it? No. I do not.
 

Starise
I didn't know I wanted an Alexa until I heard about it.

After the first time I have heard about Alexa, I was sure I do NOT want it. Every time I am forced to see yet another ad about it I just hate it more and more
 
I had more or less the same feeling about Reaper when it was mentioned in this forum. Especially after some "ads"  at the end of the last year. But since that is the only other DAW with binary API, I had no choice. And I am so glad I was forced to look at it. So who knows, may be my daughter will bring Alexa and I can write the same about it  The probability is low... after I have bought Apps capable phone for my wife, I hate WhatsApp more then any other program during my whole life.
 

Steve, I appreciate your passion, and in the 1990s, perhaps there was a period where one could argue that Cakewalk was the best selling in the new class of software called "DAWs".  But I don't believe any such claim by the time Roland had it.  Indeed, that was WHY Roland got involved -- because Cakewalk could not survive on its own.  And Gibson bought it after Roland concluded they could never make it profitable.


The market has spoken  It just doesn't matter which product was in theory "the best".  Customers have not been buying it.  The media has not been covering it.  Stores weren't selling it. 
 
I would agree with people who argue that SONAR has a good UI, workflow and feature set.  But in the end, that just did not matter nearly as much as other factors.  Other products brought in new customers with unique features (e.g. Live) aggressive pricing (e.g. Reaper) or hardware bundles (Presonus, and to some extent Cubase).  These things proved to be more important that the individual features.  In any market like this, momentum is very important.  People like to move in crowds.  If they perceive the crowd moving a certain direction, people naturally want to be in that crowd.
 
"SONAR people" seem to be fiercely independent.  I like that, but I also like Don Quixote.
 
The DAW game is over.  SONAR lost out.  The things that Bandlab is talking about represent, IMHO, a new generation that is something beyond what we call "DAW".  It offers he potential for a new lease on life, but only if it attracts a new generation.  If all this effort does is to placate the people who have loved Cakewalk for 20 years, the enterprise will be a failure.

I never said SONAR was the best DAW in the world I said it was the best "selling" DAW in the world. I think that had more to do with being bundled with new computers in the 90's than anything else. That's where I became aware of it and started using it as a MIDI editor/sequencer and syncing it to my Mac thru MMC running Pro Tools.
 
 That being said, in the 90's, absolutely NOBODY thought of Cakewalk Pro Audio as a good DAW, or even think it had a chance because it was utterly abysmal at handling audio.
 In my neighborhood (local NYC) area, E-Magic Logic ruled the Windows Kingdom, Pro Tools in AppleLand. Cubase was a maybe(?) which I believe it still is today, and still not Steinberg's flagship DAW. I believe that was classified as Nuendo, who today teamed up with Yamaha and created NUAGE which is a SERIOUS force to be reckoned with.
 And we all know what happened with Logic, a serious force to be reckoned with not only on Mac computers, but offers the tightest and seamless integration with Mackie Universal DAW Control. 
 And around early  2000’s I myself was toying around with Cubase SX comparing it to early versions of Cakewalk’s new SONAR Producer platform when some unexpected phenomenon happened that changed the whole world of what could be accomplished with a DAW. That would be the new force to be reckoned with called SONAR 4 Producer, which had such an incredible impact on me and my workflow I shut down my Mac and Pro Tools 4 EVER!
 
 In 2005 SONAR 4 won the grand prize of the MIPA Awards which is a collective vote award from all of the music tech magazines in the world.
 
  I thought it was a very logical move for Roland to buy into the new world’s champion of DAWs, Cakewalk SONAR, and  make a move to tightly integrate it with their hardware, and the Cakewalk V-Studio was born as was Cakewalk branded MIDI keyboard controllers.
 However there was nothing really new about either, they were just rebranded Roland and Edirol hardware, and the merger didn’t take the world by storm.
 That’s not to say it wasn’t profitable as many here “assume”, I would personally assume it simply wasn’t as profitable as Roland’s hardware products.
 
Selling DAWs as previously noted it a rather tricky business. Everyone wants more for nothing than they are willing to pay for, including extremely impractical things like “Lifetime Support”, never mind ongoing everlasting maintenance for OS updates, security patch and flaw updates without ever contributing another cent. AND EXPECT THIS FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?
 
 Ya know, I love new tech and the way the Internet shrinks the world with instant communications, but that has it’s downsides too.
 It gives some people a very extremely unrealistic and unhealthy sense of power to control, conflate, and extrapolate, and theorize on what others intentions are, and I also notice with some, a seriously disturbing sense of self entitlement, making it perfectly OK for them to profit greatly making music on software they didn’t pay for, while downloading and collecting everyone else’s software and or music music for free.
 Yes indeed, FREE is the culture of Internet and Google and YOUtube right?
 Right, totally free, yet ENORMOUSLY profitable, and that means  if you’re an honest hard worker, who takes the time to find out how they do it, and with all the free information they will provide you with, they will IN FACT explain to you how you can make money GIVING away things for free, as opposed to TAKING things that don’t belong to you.
 
So all that I see with what happened with Roland and Gibson, they don’t feel comfortable associating and relying too closely on the computer and Internet culture. They are too used to a sell it and forget about it business model. This don't NOT mean Cakewalk wasn't profitable, it means it costs more to run than their preferred business models. 
 
 Mass manufacturing electronics is insanely and ridiculously profitable. Design it, name it, manufacture it, promote it, and restart the process all over again next year.
 Hey here’s idea from Roland, let’s reissue our older “Vintage” products with the newer tech chips and silicon designs we’ve been using, already in stock to give the a bit of extra punch and resell them as new. And this year’s new innovation is the Roland TR-8. What is it? It’s all of the old outdated, opps, I mean “Vintage” Roland drum machines in one box. On sale now, or soon to be at your favorite music store for only around a paltry $500 (us). And for an extra $200 (us) we'll though in a sampler with the Roland TR-8s for only $700 (us) and both come with a one year limited manufacturer's warrantee. After that, your on your own.. Please enjoy.
 

Steev
Very cool post spacey. I honestly have no ill will or grave concerns with Gibson or Bandlab, nor believe Gibson had any evil intentions, they screwed up, and as much as I hate to admit it, I for one can really relate to that much more than I'd like to elaborate on.
 And I feel confident to say I truly wish and believe that Gibson will survive. They have indded reached the peak of the mountain top in their times, and there is only one way to go from there. It would really and truly be a sad thing if they crashed and burned.
 

Thank you Steev.
 
I agree- I think Gibson will survive. They're big and even if it takes it -it may be new owners that keep Gibson alive just as we're seeing if new owners can keep Sonar kickin'.
As with it all, time will tell.
 
 
 
 
 

spacey
I think Gibson will survive. They're big and even if it takes it -it may be new owners that keep Gibson alive just as we're seeing if new owners can keep Sonar kickin'.
As with it all, time will tell.

I realize that this is a site for music enthusiasts, not financial analysts, but I don't think people here appreciate the dire financial shape Gibson is in.  They are almost certain to enter bankruptcy, and that probably will happen within the next 6 months. 
 
That leaves the question 7 or 11 (liquidation or reorganization).  It could go either way and will probably be determined by the creditors.  If the company is able to shed enough baggage so that there is a core business that could operate profitably if it didn't have the heavy debt load, then the creditors might be willing to forego part of the debt if they are convinced the company will be profitable after that.  If they go chapter 11, I'd expect the creditors to demand that the company be cut down to the basics of making high-value guitars, and they would probably demand a new CEO with a reputation for managing costs tightly.
 
If they can't get creditor buy-in, then they will have to go Chapter 7 where the assets are put through a quick forced sale and the creditors are paid immediately at whatever percentage of their debt the sale covers.
Clearly the Gibson name is a very strong brand and somebody will buy the name, if not the company.
 
In other words, Gibson didn't shut down Cakewalk because they were tired of it or discovered some other "vision."  They shut it down because it was a money loser and they were trying to avoid bankruptcy, or at least to convince their creditors they were willing to take aggressive action.  The Phillips thing is a much bigger question.  That has to go, but I doubt it is worth so much as a brand.

Thank you back spacey,
 As do I, Gibson might survive if Henry Juszkiewicz starts to act more like a "QUALITY" guitar builder than he does a Vulture Capitalist, than I don't see why not. For more on that please CLICK HERE
 
I honestly believe Bandlab buying Cakewalk could be the best thing that happened in many years, and the positive proof of that is, they already did.
 And there is nothing to even remotely suggest any negative aspect. 
And as the saying goes........
 
"Paranoia strikes deep, into your heart it will creep." ~ Stephan Stills 
(Excerpt from FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH by Buffalo Springfield)
 
"There's nothing to fear but fear itself." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt 
 
" I'm making a point of living my life to the fullest until the day I die." ~ That'll be ME!

cparmerlee
 But I don't believe any such claim by the time Roland had it.  Indeed, that was WHY Roland got involved -- because Cakewalk could not survive on its own.  And Gibson bought it after Roland concluded they could never make it profitable.

Cakewalk could not survive on it's own and sold to Roland.
Roland could not make it profitable and sold to Gibson.
Gibson could not make it profitable and pulled the plug. 
Not Bandlab is at the plate with 2 strikes and no one on base. 
 
I was loyal to Cakewalk for so many years, but decided to try other DAW's after the Gibson fiasco. 
Although Sonar has great features, some of which I'm missing on other DAW's, I now find it buggy and its GUI is not top notch compared to other programs. 
If Bandlab wants to hit a home run with the software, some major bug fixing and redesign are in order if they want to keep playing in the same league. This is a very competitive market now, with new players getting better every month. 
 
That said, let's see what they come up with. I still won't give up on Sonar (or whatever they decide to call it) that easy......