Wow, was not expecting this today.  Very sad.  Was not 
 
I think I will buy update for reaper and see which VSTs port over.   
 
Really quite a sad day
 

I am afraid I have to agree with Randy. As a closely held company, Gibson's financials are pretty much a black box, but it has always been my impression that Cakewalk was never a major cash cow. The "acquisition strategy" is just smoke and mirrors. If Cakewalk were a major income generator, the announcement would have been another sale to an eager customer wanting to buy a golden goose for cheap from a company that is deep in debt. Shutting Cakewalk down will have no significant effect on Gibson's massive debt, and more likely represents a mea culpa move on the part of the Gibson management to show that they are no longer foolishly spending on marginal investments in order to try to get new lenders to take them seriously and bail them out before the bankruptcy hits early next year. I expect we were close to this situation in 2008, when Roland, which was much more closely aligned with the Cakewalk products, decided to dump them. So many of us should probably be grateful to the insane acquisition frenzy that ultimately has gotten Gibson to this point. When the bankruptcy hits, you can expect that whatever money is set aside to keep the servers running is going to go to paying the creditors, and no one will have the authority to devalue the asset by making the software freely available in any form. As others have noted, once you disperse the employees, there is nothing left to sell except an aging suite of rapidly spoiling software. This is truly the end.
 
The offer of lifetime updates sounded like a hail Mary attempt to show the bosses that Cakewalk could still make an income stream in an over-mature market, and the generally acknowledged deterioration in support was another symptom of a company struggling to avoid becoming a cost center. The stress on new features at the cost of bug fixes also gave a hint that there were problems attracting new money. It is tempting to say now that we all would have preferred the bug fixes, but lacking the new customers that the new features were designed to recruit, we might have found ourselves here even earlier with that strategy. At least we would have more reliable software until our aging computers break down. The recent release of Momentum, which presumably now falls into the infant mortality statistic, was just struggling in the quicksand.