Damn ...

I hadn't checked in here in a while, but I suspected this was the case when the new year came and there were still no updates since October.

This makes me REALLY angry at Gibson, and very glad that none of my money ever went to any product of theirs other than Cakewalk.

Well ... I guess it's a good thing I bought Cubase 9 a few months ago. And I suppose it's good that Sonar should continue to work as it always has. But Sonar has been my main DAW since 2004, so this is very upsetting.

At the risk of drawing the ire of some ...

Is this what we might call "Making Cakewalk Great Again"?

sharke
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.

Cold but true.
Darn I so hate the truth.

You know what I really f**king loved Sonar. I guess I was the ultimate fanboy. It's just so sad that nothing smart happened and the propaganda (you know what I'm talking about without mentioning names) screwed all over it, and many were happy to suck it all in. I'm a lot angrier now that when I started writing this paragraph so shall quit whist I'm ahead (or behind), but really this should have been a GREAT product and not a religion, to me that was really the major problem. That is my final conclusion after scanning all this mess and all the discussions here.

CakeAlexSHere

You know what I really f**king loved Sonar. I guess I was the ultimate fanboy. It's just so sad that nothing smart happened and the propaganda (you know what I'm talking about without mentioning names) screwed all over it, and many were happy to suck it all in. I'm a lot angrier now that when I started writing this paragraph so shall quit whist I'm ahead (or behind), but really this should have been a GREAT product and not a religion, to me that was really the major problem.

 
Well ... as long as Sonar continues to work at the same level it currently does, I'll continue to use it on my PC. If there are no issues with performance going forward, then the only let-down is that there will be no more updates and less (and less) support.
I bought Cubase 9 a few months ago, but I have yet to really dig into it. At least I have a back-up if Sonar goes all wonky on me.
I wondered about this inevitability when they first offered lifetime updates. I couldn't imagine how they would be able to maintain profitability with that format, and sure enough ...

Well, the vultures are circling. Just now found this. Cubase crossgrade for Sonar owners:

https://www.steinberg.net...sonar-owners-4579.html
 
And also this:
 
https://www.steinberg.net...e_for_sonar_users.html
 
Folks, this is the FULL version of Cubase's latest DAW (as of Jan 2018), Cubase 9.5, for $339.00 (that's 220.00 off the regular price). You got about 1 week left to jump on this.

CakeAlexSHere

sharke
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.

Cold but true.
Darn I so hate the truth.

You know what I really f**king loved Sonar. I guess I was the ultimate fanboy. It's just so sad that nothing smart happened and the propaganda (you know what I'm talking about without mentioning names) screwed all over it, and many were happy to suck it all in. I'm a lot angrier now that when I started writing this paragraph so shall quit whist I'm ahead (or behind), but really this should have been a GREAT product and not a religion, to me that was really the major problem. That is my final conclusion after scanning all this mess and all the discussions here.

Nice, thanks Alex.

sharke
... 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.

I agree to you both, you and chuckebaby. I think probably c) is the truth.
 
But from my own experience I have learned that it is the death of a software if managers become aware that there is not enough manpower to achieve a target, because they pump in to many heads too quickly and even the best working team cannot cope with that. And as the existing crew is in pressure anyway, they have no time to introduce the new ones. Therefore the new ones bring in a lot of new ideas and views, they want to replace almost the whole stuff, because they do not understand the current code. Additionally beginning from a certain number of heads, say 10 or more, it requires some coordination, say overhead.
 
All that's why I am convinced that it is best to have a small team of extraordinary people for the success of a software product. In the end this would be the fastest way to the target!

 

sharke
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?

As someone who's been involved in DAW development for over 30 years, I can maybe offer some insight here...
 
I was involved in producing the very first commercially successful DAW (AMS Neve's AudioFile back in the 1980's). In those days we were selling a mere 16-track AudioFile for well over $100,000 each!! Things are very, very different nowadays. It's near enough impossible to make a profit from just selling a DAW now (I'll explain why later). The real value of a DAW is in using it to sell associated products (for example, controllers / mixing desks etc). I'm guessing this is where it all fell apart for Gibson? Did they even have those extra products to sell? Maybe they could sell plugins with it - but someone buying a DAW isn't necessarily going to want a new guitar.
 
So why is it difficult to make a profit from a DAW? DAW's have a very specific problem which other hardware and software products don't have... the problem with a DAW is that you never manage to finish it. There's always some extra feature waiting to get added. It literally never ends. This is totally unlike any other audio product. Nobody decides they suddenly want a 9-string guitar for example. Or if you buy a mixing desk, you aren't forever pestering the manufacturer to add extra features. You just accept what you bought. But that's never the case with a DAW. Users always want more features (which is why it's so dangerous to offer lifetime deals). To me, it sounds like Gibson simply didn't understand any of this.
 
The only way that Sonar will survive is if the development team clubs together and uses their redundancy money to buy the rights. They'd need to find some other company to market it of course - preferably someone who makes mixing desks or controllers - but there are still such companies around.

Hi John and Marled,
 
Lifetime updates had nothing to do with this event. In the business plan and how it was presented to users it was never intended not to offer every feature free forever. The intent was to offer frequent updates where all bug fixes and certain CORE features would be free but major new or premium features would still cost money. i.e. it would be similar to an in-app purchase model. This is the way all software is headed in the future.  You can read more about my announcement about this in the archive of the Cakewalk Blog here. Even in retrospect I think this was one of the best things we did and users benefited enormously from it.
 
The SONAR team was very small for most of the time in recent years it was at a max of 4-6 engineers - mostly superstar players. I don't hesitate to say that we had among the best in the world. Dedicated people who really knew their stuff and could deliver amazing stuff in really short time frames. Developers at other companies were always shocked when they learned how small our team was. 
 
To the point about legacy code - that has been a frequent speculation by users and even some developers about why certain things were not fixed. Its a naive and observation however. A lot of the audio code is relatively new so doesn't fall into the legacy category by modern software standards anyway, unless you consider 10 year old code legacy. We had some code that is barely 3-4 years old that is highly complex for someone new to debug. The core issue is code complexity, manpower and the requirement of understanding a huge amount of dependencies and interactions. The audio engine and data model in a modern DAW like SONAR is very complex and to address some classes of problems requires a lot of context (think plugin API's the audio engine, data model and even plugin behaviors), and advanced debugging skills. Additional manpower is not necessarily a solution to this problem since you can add 10 more people and it could actually make things worse if they introduced more problems. Small focused superstar teams are by far the most effective and we had some amazing dedicated people.
 
I personally know the leads of many of the major DAW and plug-in companies (developers are generally cool people) and in my discussions with them they all face very similar or worse problems. 

thanks for all your recent input noel