Sonar - Now available as Cakewalk by Bandlab and free of charge

[Jaap]

Just found this out. Bandlab has made Sonar now available as free DAW (removed some 3rd party things, but otherwise it seems to have all its features). For now only available for Windows users, Mac version will come later.
Will definately look into this out again somewhere later on as old Sonar user.

https://www.soundonsound.com/news/sonar ... lk-bandlab

https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk

[Guy Rowland]

Wow - how are they making money?

[Jaap]

No idea as I am not really familiar with Bandlab, but I guess they will somehow use this as a bridge to their own products/services I guess?

[Guy Rowland]

What's interesting here is that until now there hasn't been a really solid and user-friendly DAW for Windows that was very cheap or free. Apple have Garageband. Sonar isn't directly equivalent - it isn't AS simple and can be very capable indeed, but this will surely throw the cat among the pigeons.

[catsass]

Will you be giving this a spin, Guy?

[Guy Rowland]

Not for replacement DAW just yet, too much Cubase specific stuff I'm still wedded to (just) - maybe in the future, who knows? But I do have a copy of Sonar on the machine for older projects, so I'll keep on top of this.

[Farkle]

What?!!?/ Dammit... I just dropped coin last year as an early Adopter for Cakewalk... then just paid for DP 9.5 crossgrade.

Sometimes, I hate this DAW industry...

There's no way I'm going back to Sonar; I just finished installing my new rig today; am imaging/backing it up this afternoon, then taking S1 and DP for a spin. Heheh.

Mike

[Guy Rowland]

It looks very impressive as far as I can tell. While Melodyne, and a couple of other things have gone for now, there's a lot that is still in including their Pro Channel and Vocal Sync. The latter is pretty incredible in a freebie, it aligns audio for BVs (or indeed ADR) much like Vocalign. Cubase doesn't have anything like it.

I wonder what the ripple effect will be. Cubase Elements will look very anaemic next to this free offering. I don't want everyone else to have to suddenly drop their prices and I highly doubt they will, but I do think they have to counter for their entry level products.