BandLab Technologies have relaunched Sonar, with the entire Sonar Platinum feature set and made it completely free, under the new title of ‘Cakewalk by BandLab’. Today, though, they’ve done something even more unexpected. Then, three months later, BandLab Technologies announced they would be bringing it back, having acquired the DAW-maker's intellectual property. I'm gonna get my money's worth.In November, Gibson publicly killed Cakewalk. I invested hundreds of dollar into it back in the Roland and Gibson years. I'll just keep using it as long as I can. I can record live instruments just as well in Reaper, but I'm way more efficient when composing/arranging in Cakewalk so. I've tried to switch to Reaper because of this apparent lack of interest, but after over 10 years of using Sonar I just can't gel with Reaper's MIDI programming (I do use Reaper live for running our backing tracks and video feed though, solid tool for that). You will have benefited from a free DAW that is just as powerful as a paying one during that time. Worst case they will EOL if and give you some advance warning to move your project to their own software. Does it matter though? It won't stop working overnight. It's a powerful DAW.īut I fully expect that they will stop updating it at some point. It works, it does almost everything Sonar Platinum did (just lost some included instruments like Real Piano), there's no catch or hidden fee. but then why do they keep updating Cakewalk? Maybe a contractual obligation, I don't know. Or perhaps they are using the underlying tech to improve Bandlab. So they do this solely as a promotion tool for Bandlab? Maybe. It's like this, if you look for Cakewalk you will find Bandlab, but if you look for Bandlab you won't find Cakewalk. They're only pushing their online platform. it's impossible to find if you don't come in through the right URL or a Google search. The only 'catch' I can think of is that clearly Bandlab is not interested in promoting it, and that scares me for the future.

Bandlab cakewalk review