It's nice to see you here Noel 😉
And good to hear Cakewalk may have a future. I'm not feeling too upbeat about it though, since even if it gets revived, you'll need to bring on a whole new team of devs (again!) so there will be a big learning curve and there must be a myriad of code that -no one- actually recognises any more - buried in there 😉

Anyway, I'm not going anywhere in a hurry, but I've been playing around with Reaper for the last few weeks, and after a little bit of a learning curve - I can get comfortable with this.

I'll just be making a slow transition, and if anything good happens with Cakewalk - I'll just slide right back.
Unless I get Reaper so customised that I can't move from it... ☺️

Bugs all DAWs really have. I myself am having a strange bug in the latest version of FL that prevents my swapping by presets screen on keylab Essential when in other Daws including Sonar this does not occur.

I have an approximate number of more than 2700 installed plug-ins. All detected and 99.9% of them work perfectly on Sonar. New and old plugins, something impossible to perform on protools. Any Daw that uses a few plug-ins, let's say small combinations of plug-ins and samples, manages to perform well. Now combinations using for example FX Chain (which has in sonar) where I built my own Racks for bass guitar and guitars and still use heavy samples, synths, fx. I've never seen any protools in any version running large amounts of assorted plug-ins and heavy combinations without making mistakes. Not only I, as my friend who uses it tirelessly (she's an engineer) she always complains about plug-ins in Protools. Especially now that she's using a larger stream of plug-ins and different combinations, she told me that she always loses about 30 minutes of work with bugs almost every day. The protools is very good for working with pure audio, when it starts to use many different plug-ins in large quantity happens bugs to close the software and sometimes does not open such project. This is on different computers and interfaces. So I can say that for my workflow in which I consider myself enthusiast in plug-ins, protools does not work. Lucky for anyone who achieves this miracle, personally I do not know anyone who only uses protools who have deep knowledge of plug-ins. Usually it is always the best known and loved by the Avid community. Returning to the future of Sonar. Thank you Noel for confirming what I posted. But what worries us is that Gibson will continue with Cakewalk. I sincerely prefer that they sell Cake to some really responsible company that is willing to change the scenario. It is for example I teach music production and Sonar is the Daw that all my students use. Now I need to upgrade and I'm going to add FL Studio as well. I will continue to use Sonar and hope that this problem is fully resolved.

sharke

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]

julianochrisway
...
 
So that's it, I made this text about my vision of what happened to the company, putting facts on the table, without creating crazy theories.

 ...
 
I recommend that folks take a wait and see approach over the next few months. It takes time to transition a company to a new owner. The product works great today and will continue to do so for many years even if there were no changes. There is no pressing need to immediately stop work on SONAR and jump to a different product despite other companies bids to acquire Cakewalk customers. I'd personally like to see our customers support a company that actually wants to retain the heritage of this great product and build upon it.

... 
 
Your last paragraph is certainly interesting and is going to get a lot of people talking. Does Noel know something? Is there something on the cards? Are there potential buyers? Are talks taking place as we speak? However without something more definite, people are stuck with the possibility that Sonar might remain unsupported in perpetuity, and while crossgrade offers are still on the cards then people are going to continue to jump ship. 
 
...

If there was a realistic possibility that Sonar (Cakewalk) might survive then the wording of the original statements and the subsequent FAQs should have been different. There is definitely some vague stuff in there like "Monthly updates to SONAR from Cakewalk will however cease during this time." but when I read the various announcements there was nothing that suggested to me that Cakewalk would survive. The subsequent silence, for me at least, confirmed that Cakewalk were finished and if I wanted a DAW with a future roadmap Sonar was no longer an option. I appreciate that its difficult to communicate with the restrictions that apply in these situations but as a user I have to base my response on the information that is available.
 
There remains one pressing reason for users to switch and that is the current set of Sonar specific crossgrade offers which will eventually end. 
 
In the final analysis Sonar's Unique Selling Point for me was nothing to do with the features it was the familiarity I have built up over a number of years. Sure it was/is a great DAW but the alternatives are also great DAWs, equally capable but different.
 
I sincerely hope that Cakewalk does survive but having invested in what I need to move Beyond Cakewalk it would take something pretty amazing for me to switch back.

One thing that's very clear though - if Sonar was to come back through a new owner, there would have to be some pretty drastic changes. It evidently wasn't selling well under Roland and it certainly wasn't selling well under Gibson so the question has to be asked - how does Sonar build up its user base to the point where it's financially healthy? Whatever they were doing over the past couple of years apparently didn't work.

Each DAW is in some way trying to corner a particular area of the market. You have your standard recording/mixing DAW's like PT, S1, Logic etc and you have your pattern based DAW's like Ableton, Bitwig and FL. Somewhere along the way Sonar was nosed out from the main lineup and never managed to muscle its way back in. Is that because the corner of the market Sonar is aimed at is already saturated with DAW's? It doesn't exactly fill a gap in the market. Are there any gaps in the market? If so, perhaps any future development of Sonar ought to think about accommodating them.

julianochrisway
Returning to the future of Sonar. Thank you Noel for confirming what I posted. But what worries us is that Gibson will continue with Cakewalk. I sincerely prefer that they sell Cake to some really responsible company that is willing to change the scenario. It is for example I teach music production and Sonar is the Daw that all my students use. Now I need to upgrade and I'm going to add FL Studio as well. I will continue to use Sonar and hope that this problem is fully resolved.

You might want to contact Acoustica. They have an Educational program and might cut you a good deal now.
Also they have this:
https://www.acoustica.com/edu/

I don't think Sonars failure was profitability I think it was their over head of 25+ employees = salary's = large profit turn around = loss of money.
 
I think if Sonar was to succeed there would have to be significantly less body's.
Which is too bad really because I think the crew they had worked very well together.

I have been lurking on these forums for years (decades?).  I don't believe I have ever posted; that's just me.  Thank you to all of you who have had so much to say over these years.  I have learned a great deal; I apologize for not reciprocating.  I didn't even know that this had happened but was wondering why I hadn't received a recent (lifetime) update.  Then, I signed in to this forum and, quite belatedly, learned something I did not wish to learn.
 
I must give my condolences to the people who made this such an awesome tool.  Thank you to the Cakewalk workers. You are responsible for so much music.  There are many other great things which are now available to you- find them.
 
I went through this very thing with my first computer based sequencer, VISION.  Crude and limited by today's standards but a brilliant piece of software in it's day and it was my springboard into the electronic space.  I loved it, but it died.  I love Sonar and, now...
 
I have such hatred toward the makers of this decision.  Hatred.  Yes I am an imperfect person and I do indeed indulge in hate.  That overpriced Les Paul hanging on my wall? - well, it may be pretty but it has never contributed to my creativity in the way that Sonar has.  I think I hate it as well.
 
I'll keep using Sonar for as long as possible.  As for that POS Gibson LP, it's destiny lies with Craigslist. 
 
Bill Trawick
North End Studio
Anchorage AK
 
P.S.,  As for the Gibson exec's who thought up this debacle, I'm reminded of what my father would say when he was displeased with a persons performance, intellect, or political affiliation; "I wouldn't p_ss down their throats if their GD guts were on fire".  Well said dad.

chuckebaby
I don't think Sonars failure was profitability I think it was their over head of 25+ employees = salary's = large profit turn around = loss of money.
 
I think if Sonar was to succeed there would have to be significantly less body's.
Which is too bad really because I think the crew they had worked very well together.

 
If the problem is too many overheads, then the problem is also profitability since the two are directly linked. Overheads eat into profit. 
 
You have to ask then, did Cakewalk have too many employees? It certainly didn't seem that way in its final year - many said their experience of support was that it was almost non-existent (an exaggeration I'm sure, but it definitely seems like support dropped off), and I certainly never got the impression that they had too many developers. Too few, if anything, considering the pressure they put themselves under with Lifetime Updates, which didn't appear to be rolling out in anything like the quantity people were expecting. I got the impression they were operating under tremendous pressure with too few resources. And to me, the bug situation was also a sign. Not that Sonar had more or less bugs than any other DAW (that one's still up in the air), but more that there are so many legacy bugs with years of history that never got fixed. One of the biggest complaints on the forum was that people perceived Cakewalk to be concentrating too much on shiny new stuff instead of polishing the core of the program and squashing old bugs that have persisted across version after version. I figure the reason why so many of those old bugs remain is because either a) they were tied up in legacy code and to fix some of them would require extensive rewriting so as not to break anything else, b) there just wasn't enough manpower to devote any meaningful effort to cleaning them up, or c) both of the above. 
 
Although perhaps hiring the guy to press the button to open the front door was overkill 

my first sonar was 7 and that had more bugs and less features than later models. It seemed to me at least that especially with x3 and platinum more people were saying the program felt "snappier" rather than "buggy".  
 
One bug/oddity that persisted with me from version to version and computer to computer and sound card to soundcard was the scrub tool would drop out if overused. But overall over my user lifetime I can say that Sonar was greatly cleaned up-- audio engine for one thing was a hell of a lot more robust

Been using since the early Cakewalk versions sad to see this.
Best of luck to the Bakers and all the support staff.
Freaking Gibson may have to change its name to Titanic things seem pretty disrupted as of late with that organization.