Cakewalk gone on the long walkabout

[glowrak guy]

http://cdm.link/2017/11/gibson-just-kil ... k-philips/

Buy it before the code cools

[sysrqer]

What does this have to do with Linux?

[sadko4u]

Gibson failed their marketing and now closing non-profit trends.

The only reasonable thing is to ask them to publish source code, I think.

Bloated brand that produces too much overpriced guitars.

[glowrak guy]

Thanks for unlocking!

For those who read the comments after the article,
one of them is from Paul Davis. Shameless to namedrop,
But If it's readable enough for him, it's certainly worth a few minutes from me.

Cakewalk chose windows, and only windows,
at a time when cross-platform developements
were starting to take off.
Even as far back as apples' departure from powerpc chips,
the industry was accelerating towards high-end dsp becoming
affordable to beginners and hobbyists, while the cpus to compile
code at home, sans corporate licensing, allowed people to begin
serious coding without an office and servers.Then along come
the ipod, iphone, imac, ipad, and a horde of android devices,
the music industry gets turned on it's head by piracy, and
Cakewalk still stays windows-only. But the money starts drying up.

Established businesses are getting scared, and conglomerates
move in to buy up the pieces which might fill in
the gaps in their catalog, or expand them into new areas.
Somewhere in there, bookstores started selling boxed sets
of linux, manuals with a CD, and then doorstop books with cd/dvd,
and magazines began distributing music software and linux distros,
with a cover CD/DvD from the big booksellers, and people looking for one thing,
saw a shiny new thing, and pretty soon, linux and linux audio started taking off.
Demudi, Dhoruba, Ubuntu Studio, CCRMA, Studio 64, AVLinux,
Puppy Studio, KX Studio, Tango Studio, dozens and then
hundreds, of specialist linux versions, each spun to someones vision.

The Mac has a huge bankroll, no worries mate, and linux is attracting
talented coders worldwide, but for Cakewalk, it was still windows, and only windows.
And windows starts a side-business of data harvesting, further alienating
some in the Cakewalk userbase. Cakewalk's main-man finds greener pastures, Roland
buys Cakewalk, and proves clueless at the software end of things.
New competitors gain strong followings, Ableton, Reaper, Bitwig, Studio One,
Steinberg joins Yamaha, and Cakewalk falters. They hurry out a merger
of Dimension Pro, and Rapture, their flagship synths, but with a flawed installer,
and lack of support. Thud. Then comes the much ballhood subscription plan,
with great fanfare, but in the shadows, little substance. In the meantime,
competing plugin coders have Mac versions, and some even add linux versions.
And all the while, the wine team has made solid progress in hosting vst .dlls,
and some windows daw apps. Airwave is released to wrap plugins as linux .so files,
and LinVst brings more of the same. In the meantime, linux daw apps abound,
lv2 and vst apps and plugins grow in quality and numbers, software and sound developement suites
get stronger and easier to use, and linux musicians have great access to world-class
tools. Good times are ahead, linux is nimble and quick, and can change with the times,
rather than being left in their wake. Cakewalk got left behind. The fate of all that
code remains to be seen, hopefully it will end up in capable hands.
And loyal employees will move on to better things.
Cheers

[bhilmers]

I kept using Cakewalk until 1999 (version and by that time I has having some serious doubts about the workflow (plus it would crash a lot). There were so many other options at the time, even just on Windows. I think right about then I switched to using Sony's "Acid" and "Vegas" as I transitioned to purely software based production over the next five years. After the softsynth came of age it was all Reason, Cubase, and Ableton until 2010 when I switched to Linux full time. I'm actually surprised Cakewalk/Sonar is still around. I haven't heard another musician mention that DAW in years. In fact, I think I'm the only one I know personally that's used it.

[CrocoDuck]

I'm actually surprised Cakewalk/Sonar is still around. I haven't heard another musician mention that DAW in years. In fact, I think I'm the only one I know personally that's used it.

I have used that too, SONAR 4. Gosh... 12 years ago.

However, I found myself soon being more comfortable with Adobe Audition. After few years, around 2009, my transition to Linux would begin. The only cool thing I remember about SONAR was the notation editor. You could put MIDI on the piano roll and then look at it in musical notation as well (or vice versa). But honestly I was too clueless about music to understand how good of a notation editor it was (or to make any good use of one in the first place).

For those who read the comments after the article,
one of them is from Paul Davis. Shameless to namedrop,
But If it's readable enough for him, it's certainly worth a few minutes from me.

That's a e very interesting summary of the history of the product and how the world changed in the meanwhile. It clearly shows how much narrow minded corporate politics can hurt products by halting innovation and preventing to adapt to modern times. The article mentions that the final nail in the coffin comes from Gibson, now owning the product, wanting to invest full force into consumer electronics. This is very sad for me. Consumer electronics is a saturated marked dominated by copycat products deployed to attempt stealing market share to competitors by marketing hype, with very little and slow innovation, believe it or not. This is especially true in the audio industry: only few companies really invest seriously on innovation. Why to do it when 30 years old solutions (or even older solutions) still sell strong by updating the design of the product packaging?

To me, all of this shows an example on how, increasingly often, true innovation and research is at the hands of academia and open source, rather than the so called "free market". Even though, to be fair, SONAR (and many other products spawn from corporate strategy) must have had its fair share of influence in any DAW out of there.

[glowrak guy]

I think the Gibson 'leader' has no passion for the tools that make music,
and just fancy's himself a 'mover and shaker', only he sucks at even that,
has driven several buyouts into the ground, and buried Gibson in debt. He needs to turn all his
mirrors around for a few years, cut his salary by 90%, and get help from those
who care about their craft, are open to changes in the industry, and capable of high-end results.

Look around here, the developers are full of passion for their projects,
and making continual progress over many years. And the best is yet to come.
Cheers