Anderton
Also, I believe that if you open any locked FX Chains in SONAR X3, they will unlock by themselves.
In any event if there are FX Chains that I created, you are welcome to use them however you want. I am replicating several of the amps in Studio One's FX Chains using S1's processors in conjunction with TH3.

Thanks!

What comes to mind for me is all the file converter apps out there. I have used a few like Handbrake to convert movie formats. And even converting a Wave to a MP3 used to involve paying for the codex. 
So if what you are building is a converter app that will say convert a CWP into CPR ( Cubase) or whatever it is Studio one etc uses I don't see how that's breaking anyone's copy-write. 
 
The only laws  if they existed,  is that you are forbidden from  tampering with the coding that you might need to build such a tool. If you cannot find that in writing seems it's all good to go. 

Forgive me for looking stupid, but I thought the OMF export file was supposed to be a way to get your projects into different DAW's. That was my hope. Unfortunately I can't get Mixcraft or Reaper to see or import the OMF files Sonar generates. Maybe the OMF files would be a place to start rather than the CWP files. Again, I know nothing about programming, but it sounds logical to me.

azslow3
While not all EU Directives are directly laws, I understand that in some areas EU has almost direct control on things. It comes from "EU" meaning in general, while the behavior is not US like, it is definitively stronger then let say UN. Without common patents, trademarks, copyrights and related rules enforcement, economically borderless  EU will fall apart in no time.
 
Such formats (several markers) have no technological component. I have already found several (EU) courts decisions that even proprietary scripting languages can be "parsed" without any restrictions or permissions, at least for purpose in question. F.e. when someone creates own program and has considered to USE some proprietary format for it, it is not the same as TRANSFER the information from that format. The later fall into "fair use" case in all documents I have seen so far.
 
But since you are here... Reaper does not support FX chains and CW "FX chain" is not a normal plug-in. I guess I will have to "un-roll" them. Your (locked) FX chains contain not exposed to users IP and so should not be un-rolled. Is that right?
 

 
Here is the EULA. Note the standard reverse assembly sections. http://store.steampowered.com/eula/241070_eula_0
So in theory this isn't kosher to do. Besides it would be incredibly difficult to actually do a full translator. Several years ago I was collaborating with a company who wanted to do just this and started writing up a specification. However since our file format is a modern object oriented chunked based (forward and backwards compatible) format, its very hard to write up without providing the actual code. Reverse assembling the file would be prohibitively difficult since each object has its own persistence history of versioned chunks.
 
I'm impressed that you want to try doing this but even if I wanted to do it myself it would be incredibly hard. I wouldn't recommend wasting your life on this :) Even something basic like pulling volume levels and parameter info for tracks would be very tricky since that data is all in a sub document within the project file. Each parameter is keyed by a bunch of guids etc which makes it pretty hard to find.

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
Here is the EULA. Note the standard reverse assembly sections. http://store.steampowered.com/eula/241070_eula_0
So in theory this isn't kosher to do.

Thanks for the answer. I guess you mention this section:

2.2. You may NOT reverse compile, reverse assemble, reverse engineer, modify, incorporate in whole or in part in any other product or create derivative works based on all or any part of the Product.
...
2.6 You may not perform engineering analyses of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, including performance analyses, or benchmark analyses, without the written permission of Cakewalk.

Are CWP files generated by Sonar also a "part of the Product"?
I mean I do not see any statements about anything GENERATED by the product (WAVs, MIDIs, CWPs, presets, etc). Do I miss something?
 

Besides it would be incredibly difficult to actually do a full translator. Several years ago I was collaborating with a company who wanted to do just this and started writing up a specification. However since our file format is a modern object oriented chunked based (forward and backwards compatible) format, its very hard to write up without providing the actual code. Reverse assembling the file would be prohibitively difficult since each object has its own persistence history of versioned chunks.
 
I'm impressed that you want to try doing this but even if I wanted to do it myself it would be incredibly hard. I wouldn't recommend wasting your life on this :) Even something basic like pulling volume levels and parameter info for tracks would be very tricky since that data is all in a sub document within the project file. Each parameter is keyed by a bunch of guids etc which makes it pretty hard to find.

As I have written in this thread, I am not at "want to try" stage... I am rather close to the first prototype. Even exporting the information I can extract at the moment can simplify project transfer. And I am sure I can advance.
 
So, in short. Are you "do not recommend to do this" or "forbid to do this"? That is the major question.
 

Firstly, I think there's no doubt you own your .cwp files. 
If you wrote a book in word, does Microsoft own your .doc file? I don't think so.
 
Also, I don't think there's any legal issues with producing something to read .cwp files.
Microsoft's .doc and .xls formats have never been published, yet there are a miriad of libraries available to read them, and many of them with the source code freely available. And to go a stage further, programs such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice can also WRITE back to those formats.
 
The main reason companies don't publish their formats is they want to be able to change them whenever they like without worrying about breaking 3rd party programs they have no control over.
 
There's only one thing you have to watch out for, and that's how you reverse engineer the format. Looking at the .cwp file itself is absolutely fine. Reverse engineering Sonar, or TTSRES.DLL to find out how it does things would cause some legal issues.
 
M.

Thanks for the above suggestions, all appreciated. I do know that I can export my tracks individually as wav files with a timestamp, however, I was trying to figure out a way to avoid having to export each track individually. I have a lot of projects, and most have between 10 - 30 tracks, so that's a lot of bouncing and/or exporting one track at a time, it would take forever one track at a time. If I save as a normal cwp file, all the audio does get saved individually as wav files, and they can all be loaded (one at a time) into another DAW, but will all load to the first beat of the first measure by default. I'm trying to find a way for the other DAW to see where the tracks should fall in on the timeline as they were in my Sonar project without having to convert each track one at a time. If Sonar sees that info, why couldn't another DAW see it? 
 
I would think that with so many other DAW companies aware that Sonar is no longer, one of them might step up and put an update into their DAW that enables it to load Sonar Project or Bundle files.  How hard can it be for another DAW company to do that? You would think they would jump on it because they would probably quickly scoop up a lot of Cakewalk's customer base if they make their DAW format compatible to Sonar's....or at least make a provision to read the embedded info that dictates where the track goes on the timeline. Most can read the tempo of an audio track, why not the rest of the info?
 
 
 

Interesting.
 
A couple of things come to mind. First is the recreation of the IBM BIOS by Compaq. I don't remember the term used but it was like the developers could not have ever seen any of the IBM BIOS (black box?). As long as they weren't using IBM code or ever exposed to it, and recreating it all from scratch, they were immune from copyright enforcement. As you have never seen (or likely never seen) the actual source code for reading and creating CWP files, you should be safe on that point.
 
Then there was the GIF hoopla of the 90's. They used the LZW compression that was later copyrighted. While Compuserve owned the GIF file format, some of the codec turned out to be copyright-able, which Sperry did later. Again, unless you are using code from some 3pt (likely the same 3pt code that CW used) you should be safe here as well.
 
The way it sounds, there would have been utilities or other daws that would have been able to open CWP files had there not been so much accumulation of mud and cludge over the years.
 
Plus, like others have said, it is no skin off CW's nose. They aren't losing revenue by somebody being able to read a project file. They may not like the fact that it is helping the migration from their product but they didn't give anyone a choice in that respect.

azslow3
So, in short. Are you "do not recommend to do this" or "forbid to do this"? That is the major question.

 
Its not up to me azslow, I'm not a lawyer and Cakewalk the company has stopped. However Gibson or another company that potentially acquires the assets and wants to continue the product could take issue with an unauthorized translator even if you could manage to do one so you would have to be prepared to deal with that.
You are a smart dude and I'm sure you could get far with the basic transfer of tracks and audio and maybe even plugin data but a full blown translator that can take a project and make it sound the same in another DAW is a pipe dream. Even the guys who were in the business of doing just that who we were working with couldn't do it.

I'm glad Noel chimed in but doesn't sound like a few people read what he said by the next couple of  post.. Like the one that said "how hard can this be" did you not read what he said,, It's near impossible and I can see that. And one must keep in mind that it's possibly not in the best interest of DAW "A" to make it easy to switch to DAW "B" as that's a sure fired way to loose clients. 
 
The only conversion I can see would appeal to potential customers is one of Sonar to Pro Tools. There's no danger of Sonar users crossing over to Pro tools, but it would have made life easier for those with small commercial studios to take their projects to the bigger studios for further work. 
But a conversion so you could easily switch to Cubase, Reaper or Studio one is too close to home and if I owned Cakewalk I would not see it as good business.