meng
Hello everyone :-)
I hope you don't mind me jumping in and writing a note to everyone here. The positive messages (with many questions of course!) have been really kind and I believe I speak for everyone on the BandLab team in saying thank you. This community is really incredible and we're honoured to be here and to be part of building the future of Cakewalk and SONAR.
We're now in the process of transition and migration of data, trademarks, build processes and other fun administrative things that are necessary when deals like this happen - but it's important for you all to know that we feel that the people in the community (especially the lifetime fans and users of the product) are the reason this incredible product has been around for more than 30 years and will live on many more into the future, so I'll try and stop in personally as much as I can to say hello and make sure questions are answered about the transition where possible.
An important thing we strongly believe in is to be as open and transparent as we are able to be - once the product roadmap and more information on our plans are ready within the new establishment, you guys will be the first to know. We'll keep updating the Announcement FAQ as often as we have something to update, but I quickly wanted to address a key concern I saw in and amongst the threads so far and immediately reassure everyone that even though the suite of Cakewalk & SONAR products is now within a new company, our steadfast goal is that former SONAR owners (of all versions) will not need to spend any money to cross-over/cross-grade to the future flagship product.
As you can imagine, there is some complexity in this, and I am currently personally working through all of the agreements that have a $ per unit or % dollar amount and negotiating to remove them on the go-forward to ensure this is possible. We only have 2 left to go - they are specific replaceable bits of code and are a nice to have, but hopefully this moves quickly. If it's not something that can be achieved, we'll replace them with either our own technology or work with other partners who want to be part of future releases.
This may be TMI, but I thought it may be valuable for you guys to have some insight on what's already going on outside of changing passwords and rebuilding tables.
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In other news, I'm also very happy to let you guys know that Noel Borthwick and Ben Staton will be joining our engineering team and we're actively looking for talent to expand our team further (PM if interested!).
I was very fortunate to get to know Noel through the process, and as our conversations developed I was very pleased to find someone whose experience and personal vision on the world of music creation matched the aggressive one that our team has here at BandLab Technologies. It didn't hurt either that he promised to teach me jazz guitar...
With Ben, his passion for the project and personal story of joining Cakewalk from having started off as being a superfan really resonated with us and I'm very much looking foward to working with him too. We strongly believe that the best products come from thinking solely about what one would want as a user/consumer - it's a huge advantage to be one yourself.
There's a lot more we'll be able to share soon, and reading through all the posts here and around the web - I've seen nothing but love (famous last words ) for Cakewalk, SONAR and the community that has supported it over the years through good times and bad.
I think I'd better not say anymore, we'd rather under-promise and over-deliver, than over-promise and let you guys down. I hope you'll give our team a chance to earn your respect and for us to make great music together for many years to come.
With sincere regards,
Meng
p.s I will take responsibility for mistakenly coding in "Hello, Bakers"!! It won't happen again...
---- UPDATE 3/3/2018 ----
Just wanted to drop everybody a note for the start of the weekend. Thank you again for the words of encouragement and support, it means a lot to the team and gets everyone excited! A lot of progress has been made this week and I'm looking forward to being able to share details with all of you officially in the coming weeks :-)
In the past week, a lot of things have now been finalized and I'm excited to say that this will allow us to get the first iteration of our the new flagship product into circulation much sooner than expected. What I can confirm today (and apologies to those who are big fans of it) is that it won't be called SONAR.
For the time being, we can all refer to it as TDDFKAS (The Desktop DAW Formerly Known As SONAR) until we have a proper announcement about it.
Though I am a big fan of the name, I mentioned in my first note that there are some issues with continuing to use the name SONAR. For those who want to know why - apart from the problems with SEO, the complexity in the way the IP was transacted (not taking on the ongoing company) means that it could be altogether too confusing to have SONAR as the name for people who had done business with the previous company as well as in parallel with the legacy site which we would like to keep up for reference.
The plus side of this, however, is that the new installation will not affect your older versions of SPLAT (not the new name haha).
We've already got a firm timeline in mind internally already and are prepping our press releases & announcements which will be within the next 4-6 weeks, if not sooner. Can't wait to share with you all (especially existing SONAR users) what lies ahead for our beloved DAW - in case you've missed my posts around the place, it will absolutely be a desktop application so please don't worry about it becoming (cloud/web)-only.
Have a great weekend!
Meng
Wonderful news Meng!
Thanks for sharing with us so quickly...
The name is so trivial to me... In fact, i was not particularly pleased with it to begin with but as now, it is the product i care for, not the name!
Very excited to hear the next news and looking forward to a bright future together!
Keni