Edsagoodn
Have to agree with Sharke. Making music  is no longer just the domain of the musician. I have seen so many comments on the forum about people needing to understand music theory better or to read the guide thoroughly. A lot of new music makers don't want or need to understand this. Pulling Sounds. chords, progressions  together to make something they like is what a lot are looking for and this without regard for accepted  musical norms or requires what we would call an acceptable level of musicianship. Sonar did not seem to see this market and focused on the 'old school' music makers. The ever improving Sonar has made ideal for me but  a complex mountain of knowledge to dig through for the growing market of new music makers. It's all about change.

Excellent points.  In the end SONAR, even though it was an outstanding product, was like the Sears of DAWs and found itself unable to compete in a changing marketplace.

The blame game? No one and everyone! One thing I noticed was Sonar was never mention in support of other vsts, ie: Drum Core with it's multi-outs doesn't work with Sonar, FaderPort etc. In it's own world Sonar was fine, however interfacing with other software and equipment more often than not, Sonar was not supported. Controllers with automation are non existent. Cakewalk knew this and ignored request but gave users candy instead. We liked that, didn't we?  Rapture and Dimension should have been abandoned compared to Native Instruments,  IK, and others. Sonar was looking to have one DAW with everything for production in one box. It didn't work and too expensive to get from other vendors. Most likely Sonar was losing money with every Platinum DAW sold.  Lexicon was a great reverb but they stopped offering it, why? $$$$$. Others if remember as well. People didn't was that I believe, but wanted to choose from others out there. Sonar never got respect from other companies. There must be a reason when you see "Compatible with ProTools, Cubase, Reason, Ableton........ and others. no mention of Sonar?

FWIW - the reason I continued posting here even after being fired was I thought that Cakewalk would continue but with reduced personnel to offset the losses. 
 
The time to start saving SONAR would have been long before Gibson bought it. I don't quite buy the "people just make beats so it's not relevant," Cakewalk was on top of REX files, acidized clips, slices, and such long before many other companies. But those aspects fell by the wayside until the Matrix view, maybe because of trying to make Project 5 happen instead. I don't know. I've only been aware of the company's internals since Gibson took over.
 
Little things, like not being able to loop in MIDI to create drum parts, were a significant omission. Yes, you had the step sequencer...but that wasn't quite the same thing.
 
It would have been interesting to see what Momentum would have done. I felt it didn't have a chance. because I didn't see people shelling out $120 a year for something that isn't that hard to do with existing tools for free. But, maybe it would have matured over a few years, and become more than it appeared to be at first. Now we'll never know, unless someone buys the IP.
 
 

Anderton
I don't quite buy the "people just make beats so it's not relevant," Cakewalk was on top of REX files, acidized clips, slices, and such long before many other companies. But those aspects fell by the wayside....
 
... Little things, like not being able to loop in MIDI to create drum parts, were a significant omission. Yes, you had the step sequencer...but that wasn't quite the same thing.

I think both of those things are true, while being somewhat in tension with each other. On the one hand, you're saying Sonar had all these great features for electronic music production, on the other, you're saying some of those features were lacking or underdeveloped.
 
Well, that's true of all DAWs. I think Sonar, in recent years, had a perception problem. You can do anything with it, really. Some things more smoothly and easily than others. But Sonar has never been hip, in the way that say, Ableton Live is, and it's never been a standard, in the way that, say, Cubase and ProTools are. I'm talking purely in perception terms here.
 
Around the time Roland passed over to Gibson, I remember feeling like Cakewalk marketing was reduced at the exact moment it should have increased. The issue isn't that the features weren't there, it's that the wider market of potential users didn't know, or more importantly, feel that they were there. So a tweak to MIDI looping would have made 1% of the necessary difference. Communicating what was there and targeting the communication better would have made 99%, I'm sure.

I don't know if blaming Gibson or Cakewalk at this point gets anyone anywhere.  It is likely a complex set of facts.

As a footnote: I'm in the UK, and work professionally as an audio engineer every day of the week. And my experience is this: musicians I work with have almost never even heard of Sonar. I'm talking about a fraction of a fraction of 1% here. Engineers and producers I work with are overwhelmingly only vaguely aware of it. The tiny number who have are very enthusiastic about it, but it is an extreme rarity to encounter another active Sonar user.

I think Sonar has, sadly, turned out to be the Betamax of the DAW world. First with lots of things, best with a decent number of things, but never quite got over into the popular conciousness*
 
*of its given market, of course.

deswind
If a new person was considering buying Sonar, first explored this board, they would have read lots of concerns and interpreted them as complaints.  I am guilty of some of that.  I wanted more colors.  I should have been happy with what I had ):
 
So I think there is enough fault to go around.

Ah not, really. All DAW forums are 90% ****in and groanin. It's a level playing field in that sense.

John T.  I changed my post.  I agree with your point.  
 

John T

deswind
If a new person was considering buying Sonar, first explored this board, they would have read lots of concerns and interpreted them as complaints.  I am guilty of some of that.  I wanted more colors.  I should have been happy with what I had ):
 
So I think there is enough fault to go around.

Ah not, really. All DAW forums are 90% ****in and groanin. It's a level playing field in that sense.
 

sharkeAsk the question "how long have you been using Sonar" either on this forum or the Facebook groups, and 90% of the answers will be along the lines of "Since the DOS days - here's a photo of my original floppies!" or "been using it since 1998." You'll be lucky to see a single person who says they just started using it. It had an image as a long in the tooth DAW popular with aging guitarists, even though it is better than things like Ableton and FL in so many ways. Many here never saw a problem with that and said they were happy to use a program which doesn't appeal to kids. Well, those kids have money - their parent's money - and Cakewalk needed it. Desperately.

Quoted for truth. Every last word of it. 
 
Saving dying pro audio software companies and/or their product lines is (thankfully) not my job. Any answer I could give on what I would have done differently if I were in charge of Cakewalk would almost certainly be wrong.
 
In fact to be completely honest, if I were in charge of Cakewalk what I would have done is more or less what happened. I would have built the company and product line up, sold it off, cashed out and retired young.
 
But rank amateur though I am, here's what I believe I do know about the situation. Like sharke pointed out above, Cakewalk in general and Sonar specifically had a very real very serious reputation problem. Fixing that reputation problem should have been job 1 for every last Cakewalk employee.

Bill Clinton had a giant sign hung on the wall of his campaign headquarters that said 'The economy stupid' Every minute of every day, that sign reminded everyone of exactly what they had to do in order to win the race. And it worked. I'm pretty sure that nowhere within any Cakewalk facility did anyone hang a sign on the wall that said 'The reputation stupid'. 

I can't help but wonder how things might be different today if those words graced the wall of every last cubicle. 

How does one go about blaming? Either it’s with full knowledge of what something should have been or become, or a bunch of guesses. I won’t blame - but I might say a few words. This sucks. Wow, that felt good...

My guesses. Sonar is a DAW technology product. DAW has gone from revolutionary to evolutionary. When in the revolutionary phase, everyone looks to a key thinkers idea and buys in when that idea makes sense, it’s a working viable product, and is worth the investment. GH was that person in this company. At some point, there come many other ‘me too’s’ companies - then the significant change. Adding in ‘listening and quickly responding to the customer and providing that which is relevant’.

That listening and responding part is very very tough. Some customers don’t know what they want. Some want one thing one day and something else the next. Some want everything. Some want no change. Some listeners hear literally but miss the reason. Some listeners hear the reason but literally miss what’s been said. Some listeners are bounded by scope and some listeners are unbounded. Some responders get the need and take forever to produce. Some responders produce and miss the need.

Lots of words but, the buck starts with the customer, and is received by a leader who focuses the entire teams energy towards the customer. That team, hired by that leader, has the skills needed to cut through false signals, and produce with quality, speed and focus on that leaders vision. My guess - too diverse of a customer base so much so that even the word focus was mind bending - and - a failure at leadership to drive each person into their own greatness to deliver the relevant as the leader sees it. I posit leadership - but it’s a GUESS.

I will keep Sonar for my own personal writing, it simply perfect for me - and have added SO3 Pro because of one simple thing. I already had one person ask, why are you using a dying product?