 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you well. Things have already gone wrong. My phone, hear that? That's my phone playing the live stream without me muting it. G'day, how are you going? It's 9 a.m. here in Perth, Western Australia, or a little bit past, if I'm honest. I was busy pushing buttons trying to get ready. It's such a long time since I did a live show for you guys. I hope you're hearing everything okay. I'm seeing that you are, which is good. And I thought that this would be a great opportunity to do a live show because I thought this should be a more interactive experience than a video as well, okay? And if you haven't guessed already by some of the news going around, there is some big news, of course, about Cakewalk, some changes to Cakewalk. And I am in this video, first of all, going to go over what that news is. I am going to attempt to give some more detail than what is on their main webpage, okay? With some other answers that they've given elsewhere to fill in some of the gaps of what we're learning about what's happening with the future of Cakewalk. And I'm going to be discussing, I've read so many comments over the last 24 hours since I found out about this, so, so many comments from the community, and trying to absorb what the impact is for different people. And I'm going to be sort of discussing that and what I think some of the different perspectives can be with this. And then finally, I am going to be discussing how this affects me as a creator, stroke educator, who has sort of been a part of the Cakewalk community reasonably prominently, let's say for the last three years or so. So I'm seeing for me at the moment that the picture is really grainy. I apologize, the Australian internet here this morning is struggling, but as long as you can hear me, I think that's going to be the main thing. Quick hi to some people in the chats, lovely to see some of the old moderators here, Mimo Japan, Doug Kitter, and I think we've got Keonri in there as well. So nice to see you folks in here, nice to see Pete Johns from Studio Live today as well, who's also been taking interest in this and I've been discussing it with him over the last 24 hours. And a number of so many really awesome people in here who have often been a part of the chat and are often a part of the channel and the Facebook group as well. So lovely to see you all in here. I will be trying my best to be taking note of your comments, okay, and responding to them. But we'll get to some of that in a moment. Now, before we do get into everything, I'd like to thank the sponsor for this live stream, DistroKid, you can see the link up here, you can see it in the description. If you follow that link, you'll get 7% off at already amazing price to distribute your music. So let's get straight into it. I don't want to mess around because if you're watching this on the replay, I know you're going to be tempted to skip ahead. Can I ask you to try and avoid that temptation? Because I think some of the things that I'm going to address kind of are only going to make sense if you've heard some of my previous parts, if that makes sense. Okay. Oh, nice to see Jade in here as well. Good day, Jade. Nice to see you in here. So let's start off with the main part of the news. And for that, I am going to go over to cakewalk.com, which we can see here. And what they basically announced probably a little more, maybe 36 hours or so ago, is that they will be launching two new products, okay? It doesn't say here, I don't think, but I know that these two new products destined to be launched by the end of the year, okay? We're going to talk about those two new products in a moment. But what's really, really significant about this, and let's get this out of the way now, is the current cakewalk for BandLab, which is free, will no longer be free. If that makes sense, or they're not going to have a free product available, I should say, I'm going to clarify this. So let's fill in a couple of the gaps, just to get some of the anxiety out of the way, okay? And we can all relax. You will still continue to be able to use this product after these two new products have been released. So the free product that you're using at the moment, you will be able to continue to use that for free after these products have, these new products have been released. However, after these two new products have been released, there will be no more updates for cakewalk by BandLab and they will not be supporting it anymore, okay? So that's a significant thing. But if you have it running on your computer, it will still apparently run on your computer. There's some little details about that I'm going to address later on. But this essence of it is, is that they will not be updating it. There will be no more new versions. And instead, there's going to be these two new products which are called Cakewalk Next and Cakewalk Sona. You'll recognize one of those names there. And these are both paid products, okay? I hope that all makes sense for you there. Let me just double check that everything's going okay on this live stream, multitasking here. So, let's look at these two products quickly first. All right, this is on cakewalk.com, okay? So I'm not going to go through some of the details on the screens here. I'm going to give you my quick summary of what these two new products are about. The first one is Cakewalk Next, okay? So Cakewalk Next, I'm going to describe this as what they're promoting as a kind of real easy to use application to get going with your music. All of the language that you'll read if you go here is all about, hey, this is going to be quick and easy to get in and you know, sort of create your songs, arrange them, all of that kind of thing, all right? They've got some screenshots. In fact, these not just screenshots, these are videos and I've sort of analyzed these in full screen to get what I can out of them. A couple of things I want to talk about this, I'm sort of pre-empting some of the questions that may come up about this, but it does list on the website that this was Windows, is Windows and Mac compatible, okay? This new Cakewalk Next. And initially I thought, oh, are they just saying it's web based and you can use it on PC or Mac? But that is not the case. It has been confirmed by some staff members over on the Cakewalk discussion boards that this is indeed a desktop application, okay? So this is not just BandLab, the web door, it's not just that kind of rebadged or something like that, okay? So it is a native desktop application, although I can see from the blurb and again, I'll invite you to go over there later and have a look yourself, that they do certainly talk about some integration with BandLab. Here you'll see access to unlimited samples, you know, et cetera, et cetera, from the library found on BandLab. So, you know, I think when we look at the interface, it has some similarities to that kind of approach, yeah? But it's definitely not the same interface as BandLab itself, okay? But I'm gonna say this is your kind of marketing-wise, this is targeted at people who wanna get in there real quickly and make music, they're not bothered about really detailed stuff. That's my impression, okay? So over to the second product, which is going to be launched by the end of this year, which is Sona. Right away, for those of you who have already looked at this image and zoomed in on it, you will see this is an iteration of what we call Cakewalk by BandLab at the moment. This is gonna be called Cakewalk Sona, and excuse me while I drink. And if you do zoom in, you'll quickly see that it's sort of, that you can see the pro channel in there, you can basically see the same layout of things we've got. We're gonna touch upon that later because more detail has been given about that in the answers on the discussion forum, and I've kind of compiled a list of, or summary of what some of the answers have been there, okay? So, looking down further with this, award-winning UI, it talks about the skylight interface there, yeah, which we are familiar with, unlimited tracks, audio, MIDI, that kind of stuff, high performance engine, which we'll talk about later, and then we have some screenshots. And I don't want to, I'm gonna be very careful during this show to make sure I'm giving accurate information. I don't know that these screenshots sort of are very representative. I don't know if some of them have been taken from old marketing material or what have you. However, we can try and glean something from there. So they're saying a world of instruments, access to all the instruments you need to build production from the ground up. So we can see there that we have some old players here, SI drums, SI bass, strings, some of the virtual instruments which come with Katewalk by BandLab at the moment, and did indeed come with Sonar previously, okay? We also see on the right-hand side here an interesting thing. We've got a couple of pro channel things in there. We've also got this multi-band compressor. I think it's called L-shape or something like that. And it used to be with Sonar many moons ago. So, is that gonna be reintroduced or not? Or is this just a screenshot which has been used from old marketing? I don't know for sure with that. But that's kind of quite interesting is are some of the old effects coming back? We can see it's got vocal sync in there. That's in Katewalk by BandLab. And it's got R-Support. And R-Support is mostly used for things like Melodyne, okay? Most doors have got it now. But anyway, that's already in Katewalk by BandLab. So, those two things are not new. I can't see anything new at the top left here. Possibly an old thing being reintroduced on the right. We're gonna come back to how much new stuff is there gonna be, et cetera, a little bit later on. So that's a bit of an overview. Now my take on this to draw a bit of an Apple parallel, try and say that at 9.13 a.m. is that I'm gonna put it like this. I feel like Sonar is kind of like Logic is for an Apple user. And the next is kind of like GarageBand is for an Apple user, okay? That's my sort of take on it. We don't have much information yet about how well these two products are going to interact with each other in themselves, okay? I'll be interested to find out about that. Is there a pathway between the two or do they just exist kind of separately? They certainly look like they have a very different design to the interfaces, okay? And therefore the sort of user experience. So that's a bit of an overview of what we can sort of know publicly from Katewalk.com. I apologize to all of you if you kind of already knew all of that. Okay, any questions so far? Put them up now, I'd love to hear your questions, all right? So I would like to now address some of the things that I've learned beyond the public material that we can see on their website at the moment. Just something that comes up here and it's kind of interesting, I think. We have a comment here from Tony. Well, I thought it was odd that it was free to begin with, to be honest. If the newer things have things I will want, I will probably move over. I'm not an unfair guy, I know they're running a business. Yeah, so let me give my first opinion about that before we move on. I actually have felt for a very long time that it would be a good thing that if Katewalk became a paid product, I've never really believed that a free product was sustainable. I don't wanna go too much into the weeds of that. It somewhat comes from my own background because I've been involved in software development and I know how terribly time consuming and sort of competitive it can be. And to do that for a free product is not necessarily very sustainable. Now I know that there are business models where there's this term in say loss leaders, for example, this is a product that you may offer very, very cheap or for free in order to entice customers in okay. I always did ponder, was this a loss leader? Where did they make this free so that they could gather people's email addresses, market to them, perhaps entice them into using band lab itself, all of this kind of thing. I've got to say with my, I'm not basing this on any evidence as such, but my experience with the community is I've never ever heard anybody in the community kind of say, I'm not using Katewalk by band lab anymore, I'm just using band lab. I don't view that there was any kind of migration from the free loss leader over to something which was more potentially monetized by them. However, I could be wrong about all of that. And now is a good time actually to mention that I actually have no connection with Katewalk at all. I don't work for them. I've probably exchanged like two emails with them in the past four years. I have no insider information. I learned about this in the same way you have, et cetera, et cetera. So there's going to be an element of speculation. But in essence, I think that it not being free actually makes it much more secure for those people who want to continue to use it. I think it gives a more secure future. However, I know that some of you have been and are currently struggling financially as musicians do. And look, this is not good news for you, I guess, in that sense. However, as I said right at the beginning, you are still going to be able to use the current version. This leads me on to something that I want to mention from what I've learned from the Katewalk discussion, the forums. Let me just go over to some notes I've made here because, and I want to be clear here, I am doing almost quotes paraphrasing, but pretty much quotes from answers that have been on there from members of staff. We're talking about Noel and I hope I'm pronouncing it right. Jesse, is it Jess or Jesse? I'm not sure, but mostly these are answers from them. So these are clarified answers. These are not just rumors, okay. So one of the things that I picked up there, what was I relating that to? I've forgotten what I was saying. It doesn't really matter. Oh, yes, sorry. One of the things, and I think this was from Noel, is that before these two new products are released, there will be a final update to Katewalk by BandLab. The current free thing that we're using, okay. There's gonna be a final update to that with some bug fixes before they release these new products. I think it's a really nice good faith thing for them to do. It's kind of to finish it off and say, hey, look, we've done as much as we can with this at the moment. Now their language, and I want to sort of be careful here. On the website is definitely the users will be able to continue to use this product after the new ones are available. However, what I don't see and what I haven't seen an answer on, what I'm wondering myself, and you may rightfully ask yourself is, yes, we can continue to use it, but will it still be available for download after that point, okay. I'm gonna guess no, maybe initially, but I think ongoing potentially, you may struggle to find that, I say that only because they're running a business okay, so they could actually lose sales if they continually have a free version available of their new Sona, essentially a similar, very similar free version, so I don't know. Hey, maybe I'm misjudging them, but that could be the case. So I would, certainly if you've got an executable that you've downloaded or installer, I would make sure you, as John is saying here, probably a good idea to download an archive, okay. Because this is potentially, I've gotta say, it could be something that you will still be able to use for many years. I know that lots of people have used it on Windows 11. I'm still using it on 10, but lots of people are using it, no problems on Windows 11, so this could be quite usable for quite a long time, okay, in the future, whether it will be available, I don't know, so make sure you get, I would download an archive, the current version, and also just look out for that final version that they're going to release, okay. Make sure you grab that, because that's gonna be the one with most of the sort of the most updated one, okay. So, let's have a look at what Mr. Johns is saying here. These GarageBand users come in here. I think you're right, Mike, I think they will have BandLab as their free option. Yeah, that could be right, Pete, that's the way they're doing it, maybe, who knows. So let's go on to some of these other things, which, sorry, just to confirm, I know I'm a bit scatty here, folks, but I know that someone here, Kent, is just saying, thank you, Kent, it works fine on 11, okay. Doesn't sort of surprise me too much, but glad to have that confirmed there. So, I just want to go over a few points, which I think are really significant, or some of them less significant than others, and it's gonna kind of lead on a little bit to the way I feel about this, personally, and the way that I am gonna be looking at this in terms of the future of this channel. I know. Okay, so, first of all, first of all, the products will be available later this year. That's the best timeline that we have at the moment, okay. So that's what, six months or so, a little over six months. So, we've got time to absorb this and make our dastardly plans, okay. Now, one of the things I haven't got, I'm not gonna bring anything up here specifically, is about pricing, because what I can tell you is, I can see that they're very much undecided about how they're going to price this. A big thing, of course, for many of you, is going to be whether this is going to be subscription or not, okay. So, I think that they would be foolish, in my opinion, if they made this subscription only. Recent history waves. How long did it take waves to go back on their decision? Two days or something? The public outcry was so bad. Look, so here's my position. I don't mind subscription. I currently have some things on subscription. I personally don't mind it, or I can tell you, without any doubt, is the vast majority of the community really hate subscription, okay. Especially subscription only. So, if the good folks at BandLab are watching and the Cakewalk team, I'm gonna suggest you, if we just look at our community, I would suggest make both available. I think that for some people, subscription works really, really well for a cash flow situation where you can't afford, say, a few hundred dollars upfront for something, and 10 or 20 dollars a month seems affordable to you, then cool, I think that works, and that gets you into music production and keeps you there. However, for many, many people, they don't like it, they've already got Netflix and everything else on subscription. They're sick of them, and they just wanna buy stuff and feel like they own it, and they're gonna be able to continue to use it. Chris here has brought up something, Prisanna seems to do well enough with both models. I 100% agree, Chris, as one of the things that I actually do. So, I'm gonna touch on this a little bit later, but as well as using Cakewalk, I also use Prisanna's Studio One. I pay a subscription for it, and with that, I not only get Prisanna's Studio One, I get all of their plugins, I get some other pieces of software from them, and I always get the most up-to-date one, and you get some space, some web space, et cetera, et cetera. I don't mind it, I don't mind paying it because I always wanna be up-to-date, and I'm running a business surrounding audio production, so it's fine, I don't mind that as a little ongoing expense, okay? But I think if they had offered it subscription only, they would have suffered badly, and that's not what they did. So, that's up in the air at the moment. I would encourage you to take part in conversations on, you'll find a link in the description to my own Cakewalk Facebook group about pricing and let BandLab and Cakewalk know your opinion on that because I reckon my reading the tea leaves a little bit here. I reckon they are reading this like crazy and deciding what should we do, okay? And I've seen a couple of things floated around a little bit from them. They're not indications of what they're gonna do, but I can see that they are considering some kind of subscription model, but I wanna be clear on this, this is reading the tea leaves. I'm pretty sure that they'll be looking at both if they're sensible, in my opinion. Okay, whoo, let's move on to the next point here. I could waffle on forever about these kinds of things I've got no one to waffle with or by myself here, Pete Johns, Jade Star, okay. So next, this is really, really, really, really, really interesting. I might have to give an opinion here. So, wait for it, we're talking about Sona now, so not next, we're talking about Cakewalk Sona. This is sort of bits of quotes put together from Noel, okay? Sona, that's the new one, is built from the identical code base of Cakewalk by BandLab, so no change there. Massive revamp of the UI to make it DPI aware so it can run on higher resolution monitors. Note, this doesn't change the UX in any way other than new vector-based graphics and a crisper look. Let's just take a look at that for a moment, folks. Deconstruct it a little bit. So, we've got some acronyms being used here. So, UI, user interface, okay, just in case you don't know this, I don't want to assume you know these things, is that UI is just like the buttons and things like that, okay, the things that you're gonna press, those parts of the interface, what you would think of the graphics of the interface. UX is for user experience. That's more to do with the workflow, the way that you do things, okay, on a piece of software. So, what they're saying is, there's a revamp of the UI, the way that the graphics are created. We'll talk about that in a second, but nothing has changed in the UX. So, the way things are going to be done in this new version is gonna be the same, pretty much. I'm gathering there. Now, let's quickly talk about the UI, so I know what they've done here. They've talked about it in other posts a little bit to get this, how can I say this without getting too techy? So, basically, the UI at the moment is made up with a whole bunch of bitmaps, which is why currently we've got a theme editor with Katewalk, and you can swap out some of those bitmaps and change it to different buttons and things. Well, a new UI is vector-based. What is vector-based? Essentially, it's a way of drawing things in real time, but because you're doing that, it means that when you scale them and make them bigger, they look crisp and clean still, okay? Probably what you see, a vector-based thing that you use all the time, is fonts, okay? Most fonts, you'll notice with your fonts and your word process or whatever, you're making them big, big, big, big, big, and they've still got nice smooth edges and things, okay? That's because they're vector-based. If they were made of a little bitmap image, a little pixel image, and you made it bigger and bigger, you know what happens with photos when you do with that. So that's the main thing they've changed for this new version, this paid version. However, what they haven't changed is the way you do things in there, and he's literally saying it's built from identical code base. So the underlying code they're confirming is precisely and exactly the same. So, should I get back to what I feel about that? I'm gonna get back to what I feel about that. Let's just quickly go through some of the other things that have been confirmed. So this obviously will mean that there's no theming in the initial version. So we've lost theming. I don't theme, I've touched upon it. I can see why people would want to theme, but I can also see why they wouldn't want to invest much time in making that a thing. Okay, do you remember on MySpace? Do you remember MySpace, how we used to be able to change the layout and the look of our profile and things like that? Do you remember that? And everyone used to do that. And then when everyone jumped on Facebook and forgot about MySpace, you could no longer theme your profile on Facebook and nobody cared. I'm just saying that I think that there's some people that are into it, great. I'm sorry, I don't wanna offend you if you love it, but I just don't think that many people do it. And although they are saying that it may be possible in the future that they'll have a theming element, I'm saying, I probably wouldn't if I was them. There you go, I said it. So next, so this just confirming some of these points here. And I believe this was Noel who said this. So there's zero changes to compatibility or program function. It'll also install side by side capable by BandLab and load all of your plugins without even needing to re-scan, okay? I'm just reiterating here that essentially this is at the core of it, the same program as the one that you're using for free now. And now in fairness, the free one you're using now is also sharing a massive amount of code base with something that many of you paid for in the past, okay? So it wasn't created completely from scratch as a free program. And again, reiterating, Sonar will provide exactly the same control, layouts, menus, commands, and workflow as KiteWalk by BandLab has today. And just to again take this a little bit further, KiteWalk extensions currently supported by KiteWalk by BandLab will continue to open in KiteWalk Sonar. In other words, your files are still going to be open, able to open in the new KiteWalk Sonar, okay? Now, so I think that we're gonna mostly be talking about KiteWalk Sonar. As I say, you know, this other version, which is next, all we really kind of know is that it's aiming at being a sort of a nice simple program to use. It may have some integration with BandLab, but it is a Mac Windows desktop program. And by the way, just in case they didn't make it clear, KiteWalk Sonar is going to be Windows only upon release. Ooh, covered a lot there. Let me just have a look at some of your chats and see how you guys are going. By the way, I'm really enjoying this now. So ages since I did a live show. So look, lots and lots of comments here. I don't know if we're talking and cover. So let's have a look at some thing, just thing. Ooh, UX, let's have a look at what? Again, I'm sorry to keep bringing Pete Johns into this. I actually really like KiteWalkers and Freedo. It features and the UX are unchanged and now it's paid. It's a harder value proposition. Yes, yes, that's what I'm gonna be getting to. I think a little bit later. Yay, eShortSax, nice to see you here. He's on both of my channels, as I often see your comments in both of my channels and we'll be bringing that up a little bit later on. Okay, that sort of ties into some of the things I'm gonna chat about. And look, this is a pretty good representative sentiment here, Fabio, nice to see you Fabio. I'm pretty happy with KiteWalk as it is. There's definitely an element amongst the community where they are not too worried about new changes. They're not worried about having the latest bells and whistles. KiteWalk has done what they wanted to do for a long time and, you know, that's fine. They'll keep, they'll pay for it. I've seen a lot of people that happily pay for it to support it. They like it. They don't want to change it, okay. And I sort of, well, I'll get on to some of that and my feelings on that after a quick break and a quick, very quick word from my sponsor, DistroKid. If you want to release your music via DistroKid, there's just a couple of things you need. First of all, the music itself. Here's mine in my door, KiteWalk, and I'm exporting it to an uncompressed wave file for best results. Now, the other thing you'll need is some artwork. I just grabbed an old photo, which I'd taken on the beach, chucked on some text here, and that's what I call art. Then I went over to DistroKid and I just have to fill in this extra easy form. It's a no-brainer form. You get helped all the way through with little hints and things. You can't really do anything wrong. You just go ahead and confirm a few things about your music and then you just have to actually upload the artwork and the song itself, and DistroKid takes care of the rest. It's gonna send it out to all of the best platforms so that people can hear and buy your music. I feel like one of the most significant things, which has been noted by the KiteWalk team, is that the underlying code is exactly the same and that the user experience will be exactly the same. What I mean by that is the way you're gonna do things. If you're going to create a new track, create a bus, add a plugin, do certain things with MIDI, it's all that's gonna be the same as it has been. And in this new iteration, what's gonna be different is the way that that interface has been drawn and created. It's gonna be clearer, crisper, more scalable, great, better on 4K screens and what have you. I wanna quickly mention, though, because I didn't have it in the notes there, that Noel did say that there will be some new features. There has not been, they haven't expanded on what those new features are, but there will be some new features. But you can kinda see by the language that they don't wanna overemphasize that. They're basically saying launch, the main thing is this new UI. So I wanna talk about some of the different types of people that I observe using Cakewalk. Now, there's no nice way to say this, so I'm gonna say it in a not very nice way. Oh yeah, it's gonna get tasty. There's a whole bunch of us, I'll say us who use Cakewalk who have used it for decades and are old guys. Some girls, but mostly guys. By some vast majority. Keonra, hi. I had a phone call with Keonra yesterday and I think she had to correct me on my language a couple of times in this way. So, but yeah, so I've seen several messages. I've had emails from people all over the place where there's quite a number of us who have used it and some people just to attach some numbers to this will be saying, hey, look, I'm 70 years old, right? I've been using Cakewalk for years, I love it, okay? And I fully understand, like, why would you, you don't really wanna bother learning a new door, do you, hey? And you probably sort of know what you wanna do. You wanna record some audio, you wanna do some MIDI, you wanna do some mixing, blah, blah, blah. You know, you've sort of got the basics and that's what you use. You've heard that some other doors maybe do this or that but the pain of changing to another system is, you know, too much. So that's one group of people, definitely. And so I could see why they would be happy when Cakewalk or the team members at Cakewalk assure us that the UX is going to be exactly the same because they're gonna go, okay, it's just a decision where I'm gonna pay for this or not, how much is it? And that's what many of you have said, you're just gonna wait and see how much it is before you make the decision. But I'm gonna say if it's affordable, it's okay. A whole bunch of that group of people are gonna stay with it. And I fully respect that, I must say. It makes sense, would make sense to me. There's a whole, now the other people, a whole other bunch of people who have come into Cakewalk in the last few years while it's been free, they're completely new to recording music. Keonra, you're one of these people, aren't you? Pretty much, you're completely new to it and you just got into it. And it's a bit different for you because you haven't fully invested, you're still learning about the user experience with this. So you could still adapt to something different, okay? Now, Pete John's touched upon this earlier on. I think this is really significant. When this was a free product for those people, there's probably a big aspect of this, it's free, okay? As I've said, look, can I just say before I had this channel, if we were back four years, four to five years, the kind of income I was on then, like $20 was a lot. I didn't get my haircut very much. You'll see old photos that was a bit scraggie because $20 for a haircut was a lot of money for me. I couldn't always get one. Not looking for any sympathy here. This is just the way that people have to live, right? So I really understand that for people like that, like $300, $400 for a door to get into it and you're not even sure if you are gonna pursue this or not could be a barrier to entry, big barrier to entry unless they're prepared to use a pirated version or have you which I wouldn't recommend. So those people are in a different sort of area now because now this is not free and it stands alongside all other products, all right? Studio One, Cubase, Logic, Reaper. I'm not gonna say Pro Tools because I don't even think these things stand alongside Pro Tools. That's a different bucket, okay? But Reason, any number of others. So from the time they launch this product it is gonna stand alongside them and be judged absolutely equally alongside those products, okay? I think that's really, really important. When you think about that people in the comments how do you think that that affects Cakewalk? Because I'm gonna say some things later on which I'm gonna say that some of you might find mildly upsetting. That's what we said. So I need to go a little bit back in history for you guys and I know I waffle on about these things a bit but I do think the backstory is important if you're gonna understand where I'm coming from in my overall opinion about this and how it affects this channel. So going back, I started using Cakewalk around about 1997, I would say. Something like that. I do, I did record an album using Cakewalk in 1997. And I used it for many, many, many, many years after that. And interestingly, and I think lots of you will sort of identify with this. If we went back, I remember reading articles, Cubase has got these new features and I think what are they talking about? We've had this on Cakewalk for two or three years. It always seemed like it was ahead of the curve in terms of features and development but it always seemed like it was a little bit ignored and that those things didn't get noticed. That was just my impression as a user back then. Continues to be my impression about Cakewalk now. I've spoken to people in the industry, people who make plugins, obviously I speak to those people and some of them was still not aware that Cakewalk is even available for free, that it's still going, all right? Not all of them, but some of them, okay. So it's somehow, and I don't know the reason why, Cakewalk has always managed to be a little bit ignored by some parts of me. But anyway, I didn't care, didn't care a bit because it did what I wanted it to do and it did it very, very well. And then came 2017 and Gibson announced that they were ceasing development of the Cakewalk products and that basically Cakewalk was, from our perspective, from the user's perspective, done at that point, okay. And that's very unnerving when you're software that you're using to do your favorite thing is suddenly going, now, I could have continued using it at that point and many of us could have just continued using it. Some people do still use that last version of what was Sonar X3 back then and they still use it and it still works on current versions of Windows and things. But I felt that it wasn't a good thing. I felt that it's not just about the software, it's about an ecosystem, it's about a user group, it's about support, it's about keeping up to date with operating systems, with plugins, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so it's not just, it doesn't just exist in isolation. So at that point, around about that point, I started looking for another door to use. And at that time, studio, there was a lot of buzz about Studio One. There was endless articles and blogs posts about people saying, oh, I've done pro tools, I'm going Studio One. So I thought, well, that's interesting. Maybe I'll look into that. So I looked at Studio One and for about two months, I'm gonna say about two months, I was like, agony, agony. Because that thing we talked about earlier, UX, user experience, was different. Let's say different. And I was like, oh, God, this is, when you're, it's like when you drive a car. I don't know how many people can identify with this. We have two cars in this house. One's got the indicator on the right-hand side. The other one's got on the left-hand side. And every time you swap, you're doing the wrong one. You always do the wrong one for some reason. It was a bit like that. You know, you expect to be doing this keyboard shortcut and something will happen. It doesn't happen. And you go, oh, yes, that's right. I'm not using this anymore. So lots of things are different. So, but it took me a couple of months. And then I began to use Studio One and I began to like Studio One. And I also found quite a few things. I'm gonna be sorry if this upsets people. Don't want to upset you. But I actually found that there were several things, quite a number of things, in terms of user experience that Studio One did better than Cakewalk. Sorry, I put it out there, but that was my experience. Now that doesn't mean that just because another door is, does things better or smoother that you should swap. Definitely not, because if you're used to the way things are done in your current door, stick with it, you know? So, so then I, this is probably the most unknown thing about this channel, which you probably wouldn't assume about creative source. My second video ever, don't watch it. Don't watch it, whatever you do, it's awful. My second video on this channel ever was a Studio One video. I made about Studio One. I think I made a few videos of Studio One. I would often in my demos of things be using Studio One when I started this channel. I actually didn't even realize when I started this channel that Cakewalk was, it was, because it was available then. We're talking about 2000, late 2018, okay? So earlier that year, it had been acquired by BandLab. And so I wasn't aware of it at that time. Then at some point, I think 30 or 40 videos into this channel, I wanted to do something about free doors. I've always been interested from the beginning of this channel about educating people who are new to recording at home, making it easy and accessible to them. That excites me. The idea of people who haven't got much money, can still make music on some gear. They've got, it's tremendously exciting to me, but the barrier is always knowledge. And I thought, well, if I can just give knowledge to these people, that's going to be really helpful. So that was my idea. So I then realized when I had to research free doors, the Cakewalk was there. I was like, oh my goodness, Cakewalk. Well, my old door is there. I was so excited. So I made some videos about Cakewalk. I thought, well, this is brilliant. I know that this, I know, I knew at that time, this door can do everything you need it to do to produce a professional production beginning to end. No doubt, no question in my mind. I've done it the way that you do it, maybe awkward in some ways and blah, blah, blah, but you can do it. So I thought, I'm really happy, super happy to endorse this door because this, it's a huge barrier to entry money. I'm sorry, it just is, right? For some people. So there you go. However, what I have publicly avoided doing over the past few years is criticizing the flaws that I've seen in Cakewalk. Why did I, in terms of workflow, user experience, why? Why have I done that? Have I been calling you now? The reason I just didn't see the point in for those people who can only afford nothing and this was really their only choice to record music. What's the point in someone like me then making them feel bad about it and say, oh, by the way, you're not really using the best thing you could be using. Well, it's just pointless to do that, right? So I just didn't feel that that was something that I wanted to engage in because it's free. It was made like one of its big features and very, very capable. And I want to make no bones about this. Cakewalk, if you want to use and continue using it, you can produce top-class music on it. Full stop, no problem. But how painful will that experience be? Well, it doesn't really matter if it's free, but what about when it's not free? Now it matters. Now it stands alongside everything else and people can usually download trials. By the way, they've said that you will be able to download a trial for Soda when it comes out with a 15-day trial. Okay, so by the way, just give myself a break. Conor says, I don't think I'd be producing music if Cakewalk wasn't free. Absolutely, Conor. But case in point, Keonra no longer uses Cakewalk. She actually, you know, is using Cubase now. So I think I would love, here's my personal thing. I think that, sorry to keep bringing the same people up. Oh dear. Pete Johns is such a liar. Nobody's criticizing my Toyota Camry for not doing 250. I am, I am Pete. I don't believe you've even got a Toyota Camry. You walk everywhere. Don't lie to me, Pete Johns. Don't lie to me. Anyway, so I think I've got a little bit passionate there. I think you can see where I'm coming from. This near now needs to stand up to scrutiny of the marketplace as a product now that it's going to be sold alongside Studio One, Logic, Cubase, FL Studio, all of that stuff. So if you may be one of those people, by the way, I'm just going to say you may be one of those people that's used it since 1996 or what have you. You don't want to change. You don't care about the workflow because you're used to it. And that's really good. That's fine. I've no issue with that. And I think that may be a reason why they've done this. They've thought, hey, let's not change things up too much. We don't want to alienate our current user base. However, I do believe that there are just so many things that are done in other doors at the moment with a much smoother workflow. You see, expectations is what it's all about. The way we did things in software in 1997 and in the early 2000s is not the way we do things in software now. People's expectation of the way that we operate the software is an expectation that will be incredibly slick and smooth and they shouldn't have to read a manual or watch a YouTube video to figure out how to do it. That's, I'm afraid, what their expectation is. A lot of that is to do with these devices. They all are, by the way. Say hello to yourselves. And how sort of smooth and user-friendly things tend to be on there compared to desktop computers. And so, look, I don't want to go on about this too much, but here's my position. And by the way, I keep clicking on the wrong one. Someone's saying this here, oh, there we go. By the way, so Veggie Godzilla, are there any prices announced? No, there's no prices available at the moment, okay. Where is it likely to be at? Who wants to guess what it's likely to be at? My guess is going to be, as a purchase price, as something to buy somewhere between $2 to $300 is going to be my guess, US dollars. I don't know why I think that. I think that when I look at the prices of other doors, yeah. Bill Hansen saying $200 here. If you're watching on the replay, by the way, do make your comments on these things. Dez is saying $400, getting close to where it used to be. Dez, I think, with that. Lee here. Good day, Lee. Nice to see you. Is $350. I'd love to hear from some of these names that I'm seeing here. People like Lee, but a number of others here. Love to hear your opinions about what I was saying about the UI. If you completely disagree with me, absolutely fine. You won't offend me. I can promise you, I hope I haven't offended you. So where does this place me? So I've continued to use both Studio One and Cakewalk. I did do quite a number of Studio One videos on the channel. Let me see. Probably about 30, I'm going to say. And I decided something like a year ago, I would say, that I was no longer going to do Studio One tutorials on the channel. Why? Because it's terribly confusing as a subscriber to a channel to be given a tutorial on one door one week and another door the next week and something else the week after. It's just too confusing for you as audience members. There's too many videos that pop up which are just not relevant to you. Interesting. So I stopped to do it. I favored, I thought, look, I'm going to keep doing Cakewalk tutorials because, again, that satisfies my desire to want to invite people into our community to do music production at home. And Cakewalk's very, very good for that. Then around about, I'm thinking about five or six months ago, because what happened is there were still lots of people asking me when are you going to do more Studio One tutorials? And there were still a lot of people watching the tutorials I made. So I actually launched a Studio One channel about five months or so ago. All right. And that is called Studio One Revealed. It's going really nicely over there. We've got a little community building over there. And that's just sort of a way out of the way so that people who watch Creative Source aren't continuously seeing Studio One tutorials which may not be relevant to them. So that's why I did that. So having said all that, so what is my position in the terms of this channel in terms of my Facebook group, et cetera, with these new versions of Cakewalk? After all of this, I'm going to say to you there's a bit of I'm going to wait and see about this. So it depends for me on the product. Not just the initial offering. I'm not going to judge it that harshly, but the ongoing product. First of all, do you guys need support for it? Are you going to need tutorials to update to the new product from the old products? Can I add value there? How good is their own help? Can I add value because is there the help that they supply with it useful? All of that kind of thing. So there's no point in me making videos about things that you know if I can't add value to you. My approach, if you haven't guessed, is that I like to sort of take some sort of complex scenarios when you're recording and kind of go step by step in simple steps so they're more understandable for most of us. Not because I don't think I'm a great teacher because I've got a very simple brain and I personally have to break things down into really simple little steps in order to understand them. So that's why I explained them. So if I feel like I can still add value there to this new product or these new products, then I'm sure I will do it. I am thinking that I may do as I did with Studio One and actually have a new channel completely dedicated to Cakewalk Sonar. I'm thinking about that. Hey, what do you reckon? You let me know in the comments if you're watching the replay or let me know in the live chat now. So it's a little bit of a wait and see, but I think I've indicated here, and Cakewalk if you're watching, impress me, okay? Impress me. I so want Cakewalk to succeed as a door, but I want it to evolve into something which more reflects the way that people expect things to work these days because those guys out there who are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, I keep saying guys, guys and girls who are out there in their 50s, 60s and 70s, I think that's great if you want to stick with it. But I think in order for Cakewalk or Sonar to survive, it needs a new influx of users who are coming in, users who expect things to work in a certain way, who are going to be writing different types of music than the music that we currently write. I'm not talking about looks here, it looks fine to me, just the workflow. I don't want to get into specifics between Studio One and Cakewalk because I'm going to sound like a Studio One fanboy, which I'm not, I'm not any door fanboy. You use whatever door you want to use. I'll just say that there are several, several instances where I know there's things that I do in Studio One which are just drag, drop, done, which in Cakewalk are currently drag, drop, check that box, do that, click on, you know what I'm saying, right? You know where I'm going with this, which have several steps involved when they could be like one step, as much as I'll say on that, and that's where I'm going with that. I'm not going to judge it on the first version, but I'd like to see them improve. My concern is also this, there's several, what do you think door manufacturers are doing at the moment? What do you think they're concentrating behind the scene, right? I'm going to take some stabs in the duck, AI, right? I'm not talking about complete AI doors, but parts of that process with, if they think they can have it AI assisted, they're going to do it for two reasons. One, because just like we, exactly AI, just like we see with say, for example, Isotope and their plug-ins, there's an AI element, yeah? Analyzes your mix, basically creates some mastering settings for you, right? So they'll be behind the scenes, they're all really, really busy with AI. Buzzword as well. Big marketing buzzword, right? Love it or hate it, bit your life. The smart ones, I've got something bubbling there. Another one, I haven't touched upon this subject at all, but the other one is Atmos, okay? I have no idea whether Atmos is really going to be successful or not, but Atmos is going to be something, I think that a number of them are working really hard at behind the scenes and making sure that they are kind of Atmos compatible, okay? I know with Cubase, for example, there's some great Atmos features in there already. Already many of them have improved the video aspect of it, okay? So, you know, making music for video. So I'll go on, but imagine those are the things those guys are working on and in what, four or five, six months from now, we're going to see big announcements from these doors, right? Just saying. So, I'm just a little bit concerned that Kate Walker might already be behind, you know, and just trying to catch up and just be a modern door in its workflow. So, I might be completely wrong about this, by the way, this is all speculation, completely wrong, completely, completely wrong, maybe. So, take with it what you will. I'll just give you another example and here I'm going to use a studio run example. Let's just go over and look at this, this is next, okay? This is not, I'm not even talking about sonar here, but I noticed, for example, one of their little marketing, not marketing, but one of their features here was about lyrics, all right? Craft lyrics at speed, build the backbone of your track with dedicated tools to edit lyrics and synchronize them to a song's timeline, okay? So, great, that's okay. And look, there's already some sort of lyrics features available and what have you, but the way it's being implemented here as a useful tool. So, I think in the version six, maybe in one of the updates of studio one, they really improve the lyrics features, for example, and just telling you what's already out there, guys. So, I started using this because it's actually very, very useful. You can put the lyrics on the track, you can put them really big, display them really big, and the vocalists could see them and you don't have to print out bits of paper like I've always had to do for Susie because she doesn't learn the lyrics. Ooh, that's Susie. So, here's my workflow for studio one. When I do that, put in the lyrics, it's all in time, right? It's very easy to do, so I won't go into the details, but here's the key. It also links up with their Studio One iPad app, yeah? And then the iPad app, which she can have on a stand next to the microphone, the lyrics come up nice and big just like you're using a karaoke machine, right? In time with the track, right? To me, it's the fact that it's on the iPad app, which makes am. Is there a Cakewalk iPad app? Dude, does your lyricist want to look at your Cakewalk next screen on your desktop computer while they're over in the booth or in the other part of it? I'm just saying. They may be just already a bit behind what's already out there. It's just a silly example, I know. So, this is the type of thing I'm talking about. It's the type of thing that concerns me. I don't want you to take this as too negative because let's recap, Cakewalk is going to continue to be available for free as it is at the moment. If you want to support the product itself because you've loved it for decades, you can pay for it. It will continue to sort of be developed and I think will be more secure. I think overall it's much better to have it as a paid product than it is as a free product in terms of it moving forward, it deserving development input, R&D, all of that. All of that good stuff. So, I'm going to wait and see on this. I don't know if I missed some of the comments. Do let me know. What do you reckon? Create a new channel for me for Cakewalk Sonar. Should I do that on a different channel? Or do you hate that? Do you want me to just keep it on creative source? I would love to know about that. Just a quick note on the Facebook group that we have, the Cakewalk by BandLab Facebook group. I am not the most useful member there although I created it. It comes from my YouTube community. You are the guys that really make that happen. You are the guys that take part, answer each other's questions, etc. So, given that the user experience of the UX for the new version is going to be at least similar, I still think that's going to be a useful place which I will maintain definitely as a community and I will probably maybe change the name of it at some point, we'll see how that goes. All that good stuff. Just a final thought. Some people keep asking me how much it's going to be. I don't know how much it's going to be or when that is, they haven't announced that. I don't believe they've decided themselves on that reading between the lines and everything they're saying. I think they're gathering information. Maybe they're watching this video. Hi guys. We shall see. I hope I haven't upset you with criticism of Cakewalk. I'm not a fanboy of any. I could tell you a million stories as well about Studio One where I think it fails in some ways. All doors have, you know, minuses and pluses. You should always use the door which you love. If you love it, you don't need to apologize or explain it. Just love it and use it and, you know, do you, as it were? Something that came up. Oh yeah. A lot of people have been suggesting in the comments. Okay. I'll just, before I get into that, some predictions here. I've always said people, 1976, but it's not quite as at Pewep, 1976. I predict Cakewalk will go with the dos. You know what? That would be a brave prediction because people have been predicting that since about 1999. Who knows? Nothing lasts forever, they say. Happy Ron wants me to keep one channel. He's signing all caps, Ron. All caps. My goodness, mate. Calm down. Thanks, Ron, for your input there. We have Bill. He says, I do appreciate this chat. No worries, Bill. My pleasure. Cake Sauce. Yay. That could be a channel name, couldn't it? Unless they change the name, then I'd be stuffed, wouldn't I? I'd have to be careful about these things. Paris? Or is it Paris? Says, yes. Keep one channel. And what we are saying here, this is going to, it's actually John. Thanks for bringing this up. It sort of talks to what I wanted to close off on. He says, John's saying, I hope they use a tiered model, the most expensive lifetime update model, a one-year updates model where your license is perpetual to use, but not for updates. John, correct me if I'm wrong, and you may or may not know this, but didn't they use to have a model a bit similar to that from memory? I think they did, and I think that they may be thinking about that. I can see some sense in that. Makes kind of a lot of sense to me. So something that's come up quite a lot in the chats. Some people have been suggesting, hey, what about us, you know, us people who paid for, you know, a lifetime license of the old, the old Roland Stroke Gibson sooner. What about us? Shouldn't we get, you know, like a discount of some kind or, you know, what have you? And I think many people have rightly pointed out, thanks Paul Williams. By the way, Paul, I don't often get a chance to chat to you, but thank you so much for everything you do in the community. You're incredibly helpful, Paul. See you there often and very knowledgeable as well. So Paul says, yes, they did. Then I think, yes, they did. Lots of people saying, keep one channel. Okay. Well, that's another logo. I don't have to design, I guess. So lots of people, as I say, so let's get back to should they give you the you folks who previously bought sonar a license or should they give you a discount? So here's where I stand on this. Obviously, and evidently, they have no legal obligation to do that for you. I'm afraid you did get burnt and that is not BandLab's fault that you got burnt. In fact, BandLab came along and in my opinion, they made it free for the last few years and did bug fixes and things actually kind of made it worth the fact that you had invested that money. If that makes sense. So I don't think that they owe you that from a company's point of view, although I do understand why you would be so disgruntled about all of these situations that have come up time and time again. However, BandLab, hello. Are you watching? If you could find it in your heart to offer either a substantial discount or honour those licenses. One great marketing, wonderful. People are going to love you for it. It's going to be big news and yeah, you will get the loyalty of many thousands of users just like that. Maybe, you know, maybe they don't get updates or what have you. I'm just suggesting if you can find it within your ledger if your accountants can find it within your ledger and business plan to accommodate that. I'm just suggesting that would be a breath of fresh air in all of these situations that have occurred. I don't think it's beyond BandLab as a company from what I've seen of them and as I say, I don't have any inside information. I don't know any of them. I don't think it's beyond them to think about that as a possibility. And I, for one, would admire them greatly if they did it. But I don't think they're obliged to do it and I don't think they're terrible people if they don't do it. Just saying. It's interesting. I just did a little survey of what you guys' impressions were where you've received good customer service. A little shout out to Arturia here in terms of developers. Arturia were noted, I think, in my little surveys and polls that I did as the top developer. They've certainly impressed you customer service was as have and they're not developers but in terms of companies, Sweetwater by a massive, massive margin. Okay? Massive margin. Sweetwater time and time and time again have been praised by people. But Arturia, I know one of the reasons that I know that people admire them is for the many anecdotal stories I've heard where people have say bought version 3 of a piece of software and then version 4 came out, you know, a week or two later and they've emailed Arturia and Arturia have honoured that and given the latest version. Those types of stories going about the community being passed on by word of mouth can do an awful lot for the reputation of a product and a company. It's good business, really smart business in my opinion. So, look, I think I've made my point here. Bandlap, if you're watching. No pressure. So anyway, there you go. Let me go through some of your comments here. This has been over an hour long. I can talk for an hour. No problem. Anyone who knows me. Let me go through some of your comments before we close down. Thank you so much, by the way, for joining me. I know there's been, there's still, where's my stats on this? We've still got 200 odd people here. It's nice of you to be here and I hope I've cleared up some questions for you. So, just a few things. One of the things, sorry, I wanted to talk about it because I've just seen, what have you seen here? This is unrelated to someone's comment. Someone mentioned Behringer here. Sorry, I keep clicking on the wrong one. Sorry. Don, Behringer Door was announced like three years ago and still no news. So true, isn't it? Actually, Don, Ricky was talking about that when he used to be on here, the Behringer Door coming. If it comes, you know, then if it's a paid one, then it stands alongside with the new Cakewalk Sona. But what it reminded me, Behringer. So it reminded me about hardware. This is the other thing I think is so, so important. We have seen, for a long, long time now, especially with things like door controllers, we have seen Cakewalk by BandLab especially be ignored. There's nobody who reports, not nobody. There's only a few people who report testing with it. There's only a few scripts and things get supplied, you know. I could make endless videos, to be honest with you, with tutorials about how to make Cakewalk work with this or that piece of equipment. And very often it can be made to work with pieces of equipment. I'm not talking about audio interfaces here because they operate much more at an operating system level, okay. And Cakewalk just kind of borrows that, but you know, I'm talking more about keyboards, especially when they've got door controls and things like that, okay. I could make endless videos about how to make it work and make it work most of the time with a lot of clicks and try this and try that and go into the options and go into preferences and what have you. And again, my experience with other doors, studio specifically, but also with some other doors has been so much more, not always, but so much more plug and play. I hope they're looking at that. I hope they're reaching out and maybe, look, this is a good time to mention this. Again, BandLab, if you could. Start to reach out to some of these guys. Most of the people I work with them, they're so helpful, they know this from the past. Reach out to Arturia. Reach out to Native Instruments. Reach out to Akai. The list goes on. You know, say, hey, look, we're launching a new product. You know, can we work together to make a script to make sure it's, you know, it's going to be compatible that your products can work with it, et cetera, et cetera. Super, super important if you want to sort of have your user base feel comfortable with your product and, yeah, that's another big aspect of this which comes up when people are evaluating doors, okay. I think people evaluate price and I think people evaluate the user group, how many other people are using it, what forums are available, you know, what features are available. If they're a beginner, they're just thinking, can it do what I want it to do? Can I record my music on it and release it? Yes, you can do that with Katewalk. How easily is it going to be done? So those are the main things. Anyway, I don't want to go on and on and on. Thank you so much for joining me here. Thank you so much for all your comments. I'm sorry I didn't get to, I think I've probably already answered any questions you've got there. Radio silent on this, but I'm going to keep, I don't think there's any more opinions that I can really give without seeing more information. So the news at the end of it is sort of watch this space. I will support it if I think that you guys want me to support it, if I can add value and if I think the product is worth me putting my name to and endorsing because I'm really endorsing the product. And I have to wait and see. I'm just like you guys. By the way, for Katewalk, next you can go on the site there and register to be a beta beta tester. I've already done that. Probably won't be able to give you any news about that. Probably won't be allowed to until it's actually out. But I hopefully will get access to that and I'll be looking into that so yeah, thank you so much for all the people and who are thanking me in the comments here. Thank you if you watch on the replay. Sorry you've had to endure an hour and 18 minutes of me waffling on. But as always, a huge thank you to the creative source community for allowing me to live this wonderful life that I do. Talking about things I incredibly enjoy and I feel completely blessed and the reason that I am blessed is just 100% because of you. That's it. Amazing. You're amazing. And I'd love to hear all of your opinions in the comments down below. I'll see you in the next video. Something will be out next week. It won't be this. But something. I don't know what. I don't know what. I haven't nailed it down yet. Bye.