cparmerlee
 
Absolutely.  We have come full circle.  The beauty of mainframe processing was that all the precious assets were in a central location (or multiple central locations) under the careful management of a professional IT staff.  

 
I was among that staff 35 years ago ... good times!  Full circle indeed! 
 
Then I trained on Novell servers while we were trying to figure out how to make the client/server thingy work.
 
So today we are back to the mainframe, except it is now called "cloud".  And the browser on a high end workstation is now a mighty "thin client"! 
 
The potential for a iPhone or iPad to interact with the cloud could be interesting, but I think there will always be a place for a solid workstation.  The issue of latency and bandwidth on a global scale could be a real challenge for large projects.

abacab
The potential for a iPhone or iPad to interact with the cloud could be interesting, but I think there will always be a place for a solid workstation.  The issue of latency and bandwidth on a global scale could be a real challenge for large projects.

Well, "always" is a big word, but I think you are right.  What today's DAWs can do is way beyond marvelous and pretty darned close to magic, IMHO.  I think it will be very hard for distributed software to match this function in a commercially robust way.  And really, people doing "serious studio work" don't really have a need to involve the cloud.  It is relatively easy to maintain a very powerful DAW today.
 
If you go inside the design labs at any auto manufacturer, you will still find engineering workstations, even though some of the business may be done in a "cloud" fashion.  Likewise at movie studios, I bet all the serious animation and CGI work is done on high-powered workstations, not cloud apps.  Weather forecasting, economic modeling, etc.  These are very intense, specialized applications that will be the last to migrate to "the cloud."
 
I'm trying to think how I would go about implementing the Melodyne ARA workflow hosted on the cloud.
 
Bandlab is a little different because they are in a position to add value by building seamless linkages from the cloud end back to the workstation end.  That could be pretty cool if it works well.

Theoretically a company could be making $50 profit a week and call itself profitable. I don't think Cakewalk was losing money, it just wasn't profitable enough. I should think its core base paying for upgrades was probably keeping it afloat, but what it really needed was a steady stream of new users, and an honest appraisal of the forums and various user groups was always enough to make you realize that this was just not happening. The "newbie" activity on the forums has always been pretty lacking IMO. The vast majority of activity is from long time users and has been since I joined the forum in 2012. BandLab's focus has to be about attracting new users, and I think they're probably all geared up for that. Kind of makes me laugh to think back to the (recent) time when so many here were begging Microsoft to buy it. 

sharke
...what it really needed was a steady stream of new users, and an honest appraisal of the forums and various user groups was always enough to make you realize that this was just not happening. The "newbie" activity on the forums has always been pretty lacking IMO.

Agreed. Thinking back and trying to make sense out of today's DAW market, I think all the major DAWs, including Cakewalk's, were an outgrowth of the recording studio industry as it was, say, from 1965 to 1990. I'm an example, coming from a "real" physical studio environment. I sold my operation and didn't do any recording for several years, but when I looked at Cakewalk Pro Audio for the first time, I knew exactly what I was seeing, because it was graphically designed to look like the hardware I'd been using. It even had "transport" controls! I -- and I'm guessing thousands of my peers -- jumped in and started using the DAW, exactly the same way I had used my studio.
 
I could still do good work and make high-quality recordings, and the software itself kept improving, becoming more powerful and versatile, but I was basically using the DAW like an old-fashioned recording studio. When I got stuck with the technology I came here and found help, mostly, it seemed, from people just like me. (And I stayed for the community, by the way.)

Somewhere along the way the newbies arrived -- non-musicians who didn't know how the studio is "supposed" to be used, but who intuitively grasped the power of laptop-style digital recording with drum machines and loops, and went to town. These DJs and producers gravitated not toward old standards like SONAR or Cubase, but to newer, non-legacy software. I've never used Ableton Live, but my guess is that it looks a lot less like a tape machine and a console. Because, who needs that? So we never saw them here in any great numbers, and Twelve-Tone/Roland/Gibson never saw them at the checkout screen, either. Most of us would have complained vehemently if SONAR went all hip hop, and the "kids" still wouldn't have bought it anyway. My era was more or less over. (I just didn't know I was dead, so I was able to keep writing, performing and recording new music.)
 
I'm not going to change my basic style of recording and music that I've done my whole career, and I'm not worried that all the old-fashioned, standard DAWs are going to disappear before I do. One of the benefits of The Gibson Fiasco is that I went out and explored several different DAWs for the first time since I started with Cakewalk Pro Audio, and was pleasantly surprised. If Bandlab some day dumps SONAR or drastically changes it so I can't use it, I'll find something to use that I'm comfortable with.
 
Meantime, hats off to the next generation, even if I have no idea what they're up to.  

cparmerlee
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. 

With people posting links to articles on their financials left and right, I think most people here fully understand that Gibson has problems.  I haven't seen an office pool for when they go bankrupt yet, but I don't go into the coffee house that often either.

I was using Cakewalk in the 1990s as a teenager, now I'm in my 30s. I was blessed to have an Atari ST with midi and a Roland keyboard before I was ten back in the 80s.
How's that for your average Cakewalk demographic user?

Larry Jones

sharke
...what it really needed was a steady stream of new users, and an honest appraisal of the forums and various user groups was always enough to make you realize that this was just not happening. The "newbie" activity on the forums has always been pretty lacking IMO.

Agreed. Thinking back and trying to make sense out of today's DAW market, I think all the major DAWs, including Cakewalk's, were an outgrowth of the recording studio industry as it was, say, from 1965 to 1990. I'm an example, coming from a "real" physical studio environment. I sold my operation and didn't do any recording for several years, but when I looked at Cakewalk Pro Audio for the first time, I knew exactly what I was seeing, because it was graphically designed to look like the hardware I'd been using. It even had "transport" controls! I -- and I'm guessing thousands of my peers -- jumped in and started using the DAW, exactly the same way I had used my studio.
 
I could still do good work and make high-quality recordings, and the software itself kept improving, becoming more powerful and versatile, but I was basically using the DAW like an old-fashioned recording studio. When I got stuck with the technology I came here and found help, mostly, it seemed, from people just like me. (And I stayed for the community, by the way.)

Somewhere along the way the newbies arrived -- non-musicians who didn't know how the studio is "supposed" to be used, but who intuitively grasped the power of laptop-style digital recording with drum machines and loops, and went to town. These DJs and producers gravitated not toward old standards like SONAR or Cubase, but to newer, non-legacy software. I've never used Ableton Live, but my guess is that it looks a lot less like a tape machine and a console. Because, who needs that? So we never saw them here in any great numbers, and Twelve-Tone/Roland/Gibson never saw them at the checkout screen, either. Most of us would have complained vehemently if SONAR went all hip hop, and the "kids" still wouldn't have bought it anyway. My era was more or less over. (I just didn't know I was dead, so I was able to keep writing, performing and recording new music.)
 
I'm not going to change my basic style of recording and music that I've done my whole career, and I'm not worried that all the old-fashioned, standard DAWs are going to disappear before I do. One of the benefits of The Gibson Fiasco is that I went out and explored several different DAWs for the first time since I started with Cakewalk Pro Audio, and was pleasantly surprised. If Bandlab some day dumps SONAR or drastically changes it so I can't use it, I'll find something to use that I'm comfortable with.
 
Meantime, hats off to the next generation, even if I have no idea what they're up to.  

I don't think there was any ever real need to make DAW's look like real mixing consoles outside of a marketing perspective. In other words, I don't think the lack of a "console look" would have ever stopped analog guys from adopting the world of digital editing and mixing. Let's imagine that the full editing and mixing capabilities of today's Sonar had been available in 1984. Back then, computers couldn't handle a GUI like today's DAW's, and the resulting program would have probably looked nothing like an analog studio. It would have been quite utilitarian, but it wouldn't have stopped anyone from using it. In fact I think most analog guys would have been excited beyond belief to use it. 
 
So it was definitely a marketing ploy used at a time when a) digital recording and mixing was becoming affordable and b) computers had powerful enough graphics capabilities to handle such a GUI. I should imagine that if computers had powerful graphics cards back when word processors were becoming popular among writers, then we probably would have seen word processors with GUI's designed to mimic typewriters (makes me cringe just thinking about it). But since word processors became popular back when computers were very modest, that whole angle never took off. So the utilitarian look became "the norm" for word processors pretty early on, and any attempt to introduce a skeuomorphic look for them later on would have been met with ridicule. 
 
I must admit I'm definitely leaning away from the skeuomorphic look, not just in DAW's but apps in general. I can really appreciate a design like the Valhalla plugins, or the stock synths in DAW's like Ableton and Bitwig which are purely functional and look nothing like real synths. I have no desire to imagine that I'm sitting in a real studio with real gear. In fact the less unnecessary clutter in a GUI, the better as far as I'm concerned. Just give me the functionality in the clearest way possible!

sharke
I don't think there was any ever real need to make DAW's look like real mixing consoles outside of a marketing perspective. In other words, I don't think the lack of a "console look" would have ever stopped analog guys from adopting the world of digital editing and mixing.

 
True enough, but not really my point. What I was getting at is that all those early DAWs appeared to work the same way -- in fact, the same way your old-fashioned studio worked. Newer DAWs don't, and the graphics they use look hipper than the boring old fader-and-timeline look. For all I know, they are hipper. Whatever, the new young practitioners like them better. I prefer the skeuomorphic look -- that way I don't have to relearn things that I spent years getting used to. People that didn't spend years naturally don't care,and that is probably reflected in sales. Why is there not a Studio One with a Matrix/Performance view? Maybe it's too hard to rebuild. I don't know.

All these whiners. Come up with a doable solution or piss off. I'm so tired of losers who never contribute.

backwoods
All these whiners. Come up with a doable solution or piss off. I'm so tired of losers who never contribute.

What do you need a solution to?