Brian Walton
While BIAB has been around for a while, you need a company that is actually bigger than Cakewalk to buy Cakewalk.
 
Look at BIAB, the web site they have is still stuck in the 90s.  

LOL that's why I've never really investigated BIAB. I can't get past that website. BIAB? More like BYOB. 

I wonder if sharke won't date ladies with beehive hairdos either.

As for Microsoft buying Sonar, I can't help but reference the job posting on KVR that led to this whole rumor of MS building a DAW in the first place. 
 
        "If you want to be a part of the future of music creation in multiple dimensions....."
 
Do you really think a buggy, 30 year old program is likely to be part of that vision? I mean realistically. 
 
I wonder what they mean by "multiple dimensions"? Virtual reality? And does this really suggest a DAW? Maybe they're planning on developing some kind of touch based controllers or something. Or perhaps they're looking to develop a very simple music making program that would enable musically inexperienced people to put together tunes. Maybe it's a Band In A Box style app. Who knows? 
 
 

bapu
I wonder if sharke won't date ladies with beehive hairdos either.

I'm allergic to bees 

BIAB gets a bad rap because of how it looks. But if you step up to Real Tracks many times you will be surprised at what you can get. Think of it as a jamstix for song writers. IOW more than just a drummer.
 
Herb Hartly (guitarhacker) uses it almost exclusively for all backing tracks adding his live guitar playing and his or others singing. He has produced some stellar tracks with it IMO.
 
I produced a Forum Monkeys track (a take on She's a Lady) solely using BIAB for the instruments and after Beepster (who sang it) found out what I used he was to put mildly VERY surprised. I even used a guitar solo generated by BIAB in another song where Danny Danzi said, "Why do you want to replace that? It's perfect for the song."
 
To me it's a just another tool in the band's tool box (see what I did there) along side of music construction kits and flat out loops.
 
Not trying make any converts here but again BIAB gets a bad rap by those who are turned off by the GUI or the website (which by the have no direct affect on it's output, IMO). Many say the Jamstx GUI is crap and cartoonish but they swear by what it can do.
 

bapu
 Many say the Jamstx GUI is crap and cartoonish but they swear by what it can do.
 

 
I certainly swear by what it does sometimes! 

sharke

Brian Walton
While BIAB has been around for a while, you need a company that is actually bigger than Cakewalk to buy Cakewalk.
 
Look at BIAB, the web site they have is still stuck in the 90s.  

LOL that's why I've never really investigated BIAB. I can't get past that website. BIAB? More like BYOB. 

But being stuck in the 90s for both the UI and the Web Site works for them. As one who complains about the UI I have to say that it lets you get the job done and they do make small changes with each release. Definitely evolution and not revolution which means that even if you skip a few years the program still works as you expect.

Everyone has an opinion or a theory and that makes for great discussion. But all the people saying "who would want to buy old, buggy software?" clearly don't understand software development. See my previous comment for a more in-depth explanation, but in short, using the words 'old' and 'buggy' together doesn't make sense. Legacy code in software is still in there because it still works great and can't be improved upon. It's already had its bugs fixed years ago. Bugs get introduced when new code is added. It makes more sense to use the words 'new' and 'buggy' together! All software has bugs. That's unavoidable. Bug fixes are prioritized by their importance - how many users are affected by this bug? and of course commercial ramifications - is this known bug affecting sales?
 
Other people are adding to the myths by saying things like, "You would have to take on the Cakewalk dev team to be able to do anything with the software as only they know the code" That's not how software development works. The code doesn't exist in peoples heads. It's written down and to a programmer, it reads like a book. Providing you have the skills, you could jump right into that code and get working on it straight away, which is what new Cakewalk bakers would have had to do.
 
Like it or not Sonar's source code has a hell of a lot of value locked up in it - 30 years of developmental value. To make sense of that you have to understand that the software isn't the singular program that you run on your computer. It is thousands of modules, each of which can be taken out, rearranged, adapted and put into something else. If you were a software company tasked with building a DAW from scratch on par with Sonar, it would take you 30 years to come up with something that was 30 years out of date. The solution would be to start off with something that has already had most of the hard work done on it, strip out the modules, adapt them, add to them and compile it into a new product with a different name, new look, and different branding.
 
This whole thread is completely speculative but if you are going to talk about the software aspect of it, please make sure you know what you are actually talking about! 

I think the best hope for Sonar is evolution, some of the bakers (the right ones) getting together and making a new DAW based on the better, newer parts of Sonar. I bet they could pull that off and I think it’s been done before but I can’t name the DAW. I do think if they could do it that it would be the best. They need a venture capitalist, and maybe something is going on that can’t be talked about yet. The future is bright no matter what... unless people who just use samples win out... IMO.
J

As a software developer who has even migrated complex systems from one nearly obsolete/boutique language to another more popular mainstream language, everything 35mm says is on point in posts 17 and 28 above.
 
This is one of the rare instances where the Helpfuls I gave were meant to be just that. Helpfuls for those that read it. These are not alt-facts they are straight facts.