So are we glad that Roland bought Cakewalk?

I remember the worries at the time.  I think that I am.  X2 has been a quantum leap.  Hard to know whether Roland drove that.  Still at least Roland is a company dedicated to music making.  Unlike Logic users who are at the mercy of a consumer electronics company that puts out an update every 3-4 years.

I'm sure X2 would have happened with or without Roland. It just might not have included R-Mix. Meanwhile "V-Vocal by Roland" remains abandonware, which I really didn't expect. We might have hoped that Roland's financial and marketing muscle would have been lent to Cakewalk, but I see little evidence of that. Cakewalk has a smaller booth now at NAMM, and is presented as just one of many Roland products with the same booth space Roland gives to their accordions, organs and stompboxes.

Roland has always been big on collaboration over mentoring. Most of their acquisitions have remained separate entities, to succeed or fail on their own. I think the CW folks will tell you that there was never a big meeting where Roland execs sat them down and said "this is how we do things at Roland, and by the way here's your new boss straight from Japan, whose expertise is acoustical guitars".

Credit and criticism should go to those same folks in Boston who've been giving it their all for so many years. Credit should also be given to Roland for keeping their hands off and letting Cakewalk do what it knows how to do.

So to answer the thread's question, IMO it's a (somewhat qualified) "yes".

Of all the companies to invest in Cakewalk, we could have done a lot worse than Roland.

I just thank The Lord that Microsoft doesn't own cakewalk like apple owning logic. That way we'd have updates once every four years.

Lynn


Just my opinion, but I think X2 is the best DAW that CW has produced to date.  The mixing tools and Prochannel and workflow enhancements have made my life easier.  In regard to Melodyne in Studio One; that version is Melodyne Essential, which is less powerful than V-Vocal, imo, so that's a moot point.  Not that there's no bugs in X2, but CW usually handles most issues well.  Long before CW, I owned a number of Roland products, some which have become classics over the years.  So, no worries here.

I was speaking about ARA specifically, not just the inclusion of Essential. ARA technology is applicable to all variants of Melodyne - 
Here is info about the sdk - 


http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=ara_sdk

I think it was a good thing in respect of maybe financially secure the future of Cakewalk, because as Bitflipper said X2 would have happened any way.

@Bub - if you are that unhappy with Sonar, why don´t you find another DAW and move on?

jb101

Telecaster


I think it was a good thing in respect of maybe financially secure the future of Cakewalk, because as Bitflipper said X2 would have happened any way.

@Bub - if you are that unhappy with Sonar, why don´t you find another DAW and move on?

I think this applies to a few mcq users on here. 
 

@jb101 - You are probably right, and I´ll be the first to admit that I don´t use it as much and as deeply as other users, but so far I have had absolutely no crashes or any other issues that bothered me. Having said that I just build my self a new £1200 PC that is quite powerfull and only for DAW, maybe that is why I am happy:-)

Hardware dudes do not understand software, in general.

Decluttering is the latest mental illness.   Way stupid.

I want the tools I use most often to be immediately available.

We went through this insanity with hardware synths years ago.  Too few buttons, too many menus.

Hopefully we are at the top of the stupid hill with the hidden track-lanes menu button.


Roland's purchase of CW was a ME-TOO reaction to other hardware companies creating/acquiring of software products.

But the classic model is large company buys small company, does stupid crap, drops prices, stops/slows new development, and milks it to the end.

Commodore - Amiga
MS - Soundscape, Fox Pro,,,.......and way too many other programs
Apple - Logic

And so on.

jm24


Hardware dudes do not understand software, in general.

Decluttering is the latest mental illness.   Way stupid.

I want the tools I use most often to be immediately available.

We went through this insanity with hardware synths years ago.  Too few buttons, too many menus.

Hopefully we are at the top of the stupid hill with the hidden track-lanes menu button.


Roland's purchase of CW was a ME-TOO reaction to other hardware companies creating/acquiring of software products.

But the classic model is large company buys small company, does stupid crap, drops prices, stops/slows new development, and milks it to the end.

Commodore - Amiga
MS - Soundscape, Fox Pro,,,.......and way too many other programs
Apple - Logic

And so on.

+1 with th Hardware synths - too few buttons.
 
Sorry if I'm being stupid, but what do you mean by "the hidden track-lanes menu button"?

By the way jb101 - whats with those "typos"? Seems pretty childish to me. What kind of passive aggressive crap is that? Many of the longtime users are hanging around because nothing better than 8.5.3 has come out in another brand or from Cakewalk.

cornieleous


By the way jb101 - whats with those "typos"? Seems pretty childish to me. What kind of passive aggressive crap is that? Many of the longtime users are hanging around because nothing better than 8.5.3 has come out in another brand or from Cakewalk.

Passive aggresive crap.  Really?  What kind of talk is that?  Don' talk to me about childish if you know what  I'm talking about.  Pot, kettle, black..
 
I have no gripe with you.  I have not seen you needlessly posting argumentative  claptrap.
 
Childish.  Mmmm..

Wait! When did Roland buy Sonar? 

Roland is like, "a legendary," musical instrument company.   And for the foreseeable future, this market is going to be a difficult one to make $ in.   So, we should all be happy the companies will survive, and hopefully prosper by consolidating their resources.

  You know?  It sucks to buy a piece of software and think, "I just spent five years learning this through and through, and boom, the company went out of business, and now I can't get my key-file to work, or get their licenser to authorize me on my new machine," or whatever... 

I'd like to see Roland and Cakewalk stay with us, for twenty more years.  But in these economic times?

Its hard for me to say, "what I really believe," because I do not want to violate the TOS.  So I just want to say that it is my personal belief, "that the economy will not return to the 1990s."  and just leave it at that.

  Yes, I am happy the companies have consolidated.  I hope the employees are doing well, and I hope peoples families are thriving. 

I'd love to see Rapture 2.0, or a brand new, absolutely amazing Cakewalk Synth.  Or for X3, I'd like to see some amazing GUI work.   And also, I wouldn't mind seeing Cakewalk Brand Thunderbolt Audio Interfaces, that were not too expensive, and worked on PC/windows machines...

As far as X2 is concerned..  I'm skipping this update..   Has nothing to do with the software.  I have a limited budget, a lot of software licenses, and other stuff I want to purchase..   All kinds of school, work, and family responsibilities.

I look forward to a few years down the road, and see what new products, if any..  are actually coming.

WDI

IMO, it's not about the frequency of updates, but about the quality of the features in place. Sometimes it seems like cakewalk should slow down and perfect thier ideas. Often it seems like they go in a new direction just to get people to upgrade leaving some very basic things not working as good as they should. 

+1 to this ^^^^^^^
 
Innovation is obviously the key factor in technology-related industries - the difficulty is in getting the balance right between bringing the latest shiny new toy to the market first or designing a quality product that will last and releasing it when it's ready. Of course, if you get both aspects right, you've cracked it.
 
I think most of us would agree that Cakewalk have fallen into the first category on many more occasions than the latter.
 
It took a while, but I've grown to love X1 and now X2, but I'm so frustrated by a couple of (easily fixable?) things that drive me wild and have a real adverse effect on my workflow. And the irony is that these aren't new features as such that are causing me grief, but old features that have effectively been removed.
 
Less serious of the two is the transition from Take Layers (X1 and before) to Take Lanes (X2). I fully understand that some people prefer the newer incarnation of this feature and that's fine, but I also know that a lot of you have expressed a similar view to mine in that they should at least have kept the old feature as an option.
 
However, the biggie for me is colour/contrast customisation
 
My eyesight is such that I find it very difficult to distinguish detail in low light and in low contrast situations. I had 8.5.3 set up so, for example, you could see which track was selected from space. I spent hours one day working my way through all the various menus and got the program perfectly customised for me. But with X1 I was confronted by an almost homogenous sea of grey, and no real way of changing it.
 
Seriously, and to give you a rough idea, working in X1 and X2 is like this for me a lot of the time
 
We've seen how easy it is for Panu and Ben to give us some colour and customisation, and it's obvious that a lot of you want it back, but it's obviously been falling on deaf, or more likely, unlistening, ears.
 
 
 

D50 for me - and I still use it, albeit sparingly