First off, I do not believe that Cakewalk is dying or going away any time soon.
I am NOT leaving SONAR as my main DAW.
But I did start my experiment of recording a full song in that PeaSomus Pro 2.5 product. It's a new original.
So far I have recorded a rhythm guitar track to a click track. No surprise there; it sounded just as fine as it would have in SOINAR.
I added FX inserts. Of course nothing shocking there. Similar drag and drop from the browser like SONAR.
My "setup" issues were minor. My transport and fader controls via the Tascam FW-1884 only required that I set the FW-1884 to Mackie HUI emulation mode (of course I'll have to remember to switch back for SOANR, or examine how SONAR can accept Mackie HUI commands from my FW-1884). I read a fred on the PeaSomus forum about how to have the FW-1884 learn the S1 keyboard shortcuts, so that is something down the road when I want to do more sophisticated controller things in the mixing stage.
And since I also have a Frontier Tranzport (a gift from Mooch) I can just use that for transport control during tracking. Which I tried out for one take of the rhythm guitar. Worked as expected.
Next step is to record some drums and/or percussion to the song then some bazz and probably piano. Of course drums/perc will be MIDI, maybe me playing my kit (we'll see). As well the piano will be MIDI too.
Then wrap it up with some vox (uh oh, Mooch is gonna hate that I'm going to claim to be singing again).
As you can tell, the plan is for this to be all me. No collabs on this experiment. Maybe it will be a demo for a SONAR collab. Maybe not.
In the meantime I am working with Philz on a new original of his in SONAR.