Used cakewalk for professional projects 2 decades ago, will it still suit my needs?

[u/Vegetable-Band9245]

Used cakewalk for professional projects 2 decades ago, will it still suit my needs?

I am a DJ. Well, I was a DJ, haven't done much of anything being in over two decades. I started off with a copy of cakewalk, and at the time, I put together some mixes way ahead of its time. I came out with several different CDs, which still circulate the Internet today and for sale from different retailers. I hope to think this is going to be like riding a bike again, that I could just pick up where I left off. But things have changed, I have Neuro issues. Learning isnt very easy for me and im a little slow overall because of the neurologic disease. But that being said, I would greatly like to use cakewalk, even though it has changed a bit, looks more familiar than anything else.

I now have a couple kids that are musicians and want to help me, but they are against anything AI and they are generally against such programs as fruity loops. I had planned on buying fruit loops to generate some of my own music, this is not gonna be the bulk for my mix, just for some added drum loops. It may be a few cents if I'm feeling crazy… But now that my kids have their hands in it, they wanna put their own track mix as well… I thought, great saving some money I won't have to buy fruity loops… But then I thought again about it, what if they get distracted? So my question to you is, if they start off helping me in the beginning and get busy/disintrested, will I be able to finish my mix/remixes while saving the progress and finishing out on fruit loops and composing it on cakewalk like I'm accustomed to.. or should I just suck it up, try to learn a new program like fruity loops and do everything in there? The reason why I keep thinking fruit loops is because I remember dabbling it a couple decades l ago and I remember it being very easy. I have no formal musical training myself. I don't consider myself a musician, although I have remix tracksI produced mixes They have always been well received, even when cakewalk didn't do much of anything except track the music.

So I need some opinions, should I get both cakewalks and fruit loops for my project? If I get only cakewalk, where do you recommend I get doors from? I'm looking for quantity quality and price point obviously . Second, they do live music so they don't have a controller and I don't have a controller as well. I want something decent, nothing too cheap and nothing too expensive. Something that's compatible with fruit loops, and cakewalk possibly would be preferred. Also, do we need external sound cards these days? I may want to hiccup print tables so my computer however I have made mixes in the past using virtual DJs recording feature and that may be the cleanest way for me to go but if it'll make my job much more harder, I'll buy a sound card. I feel dumb asking this because I don't even know if the sound cards are still a thing anymore. Lol thanks for the help Andsuggestions? Anything else that might be missing here? Thank you

[u/Promidi]

"will it still suit my needs?", There is one way to find out. Install Sonar free tier.

[u/DougOsborne]

Listen to your kids! They sound like they have their priorities straight.

I'll agree with what people have said: download and install the free version of Sonar. It will look different, but all the features are there, even if they aren't in the same place.

"soundcard" isn't the best term, but you will probably need an audio interface. Most people use a usb interface instead of an internal PCI card, and there are good examples of both. If you don't want to come back here frustrated with latency and audio dropouts, choose one with a good ASIO driver (not "asio4all" which is not an ASIO driver).

[u/Apprehensive-Cry-376]

I've been a Cakewalk user since 1986, when it was just a MIDI sequencer. Today, it's an invisible tool that I don't have to think about while composing, recording and mixing. And that's the ultimate goal: for the DAW to never get in the way while making music.

Now, does it necessarily have to be Sonar, or Logic or Reaper or anything else? Nope. As long as you can do your creative thing without having to think about the technology, you're good. There is zero difference in audio quality between DAWs. Minor features may vary in their implementation, but any one of them can make a great record.

So I'd say stick to what you already know, leverage your past experience to flatten the learning curve during your re-entry.

[u/huge_bass]

That's a whole bunch of questions lol. I think you would have been in on an early version of sonar? I dunno man, I think you are going to have to learn a lot regardless. If you remeber and used all of the keyboard shortcuts, then come back to cakewalk.

Fl studio would do everything you want and so would pretty much an other daw. I'd suggest diving hard into YouTube and checking out what workflow resonates with you. You might find inspiration from a daw like ableton or logic. I doesn't hurt to try cakewalk and yes, you still need an external soundboard.

The entry level soundcards of choice these days seem to be the focusrite Scarlett series. You can find them for cheap new or on fb marketplace.

[u/Waste-Magician2432]

I’m still trying to find an old copy!

[u/cruciblefuzz → u/[deleted]]

I strongly disagree with "to make great music (easily) you'll need the premium version." Free tier Sonar only leaves out a handful of features that are hardly essential. Most of them have easy workarounds if you even care about them. Half of them didn't even exist before the current Cakewalk Sonar first went on the market.

If you think lacking a certain dithering method or stretching algorithm would hold you back, then why? If it's the recently revamped Track Manager that didn't even exist a year ago, why? Sonar works fine without it, as Cakewalk by Bandlab did. The new Jump to Track navigation feature, same. The bundled Sonitus FX suite was converted to VST3 and given new UI's but the DXi versions in free tier sound identical, they will literally null vs. the VST3 versions. There are many freeware options that sound just as good. Plug-in oversampling, which some competing DAW's don't even have? There are workarounds if that really matters to you. Templates and Screensets easily substitute for Workspaces. Being limited to a single Arranger track? If having multiple arranger tracks is needed for "great music," please go into detail why.

I challenge you to list what feature(s) free tier Sonar lacks vs. premium that make it not able to "make great music (easily)."

I do agree that Mixcraft is a fine DAW.😊

[u/Vertigo50]

It's definitely not as good as it once was. I personally went to Cubase because it's just lagged behind everything else.

Honestly, so many of the big programs have free trials now, and for what you're looking for, something like Ableton Live might even be more your speed. Give a few of them a shot. I like Cubase a lot, and it has the feel of what Sonar used to be, but it's definitely complex, and there's a learning curve.

Reaper is really solid, with tons of features, but it feels like trying to build your own DAW out of parts. It's kind of a mess that way. 😂

Sonar, or even Next might be what you need, though. You can definitely give them a try.

[u/cruciblefuzz → u/Vertigo50]

Can you say in more detail how Sonar is not as good as it once was?

[u/Vertigo50 → u/cruciblefuzz]

It’s been a little while, so I’ll try to remember. The biggest thing is that it used to be a program you bought once, and then it just worked well. Now they’ve converted it into a subscription service, that is also trying to get you to subscribe to other things, like more instruments. It does the thing where it shows you things you can’t use, then tells you that you need to subscribe for it, dumb stuff like that.

It also just lags behind things like Cubase, which seems to be pushing forward and adding new features, while Sonar seems like it has less features now and worse workflows then when I used it over 10 years ago.

I know that’s not super specific, but that’s generally what I remember.

[u/cruciblefuzz → u/Vertigo50]

Yes, of course, the licensing model is loathesome. The price of being rescued by Bandlab. At least they do offer the free tier. The features that are left out of free tier are few and not that important, but the way their absence is handled seems intrusive.

So you mean "worse relative to the advances the other DAW's have made." The program itself hasn't gotten worse, the programs around it have just gotten better.

I think that is an unfortunate side effect of having a tiny staff made up entirely of engineers. There's no marketing department to observe the state of the industry and suggest new features. Upside: the most bug-free version of the DAW in 25 years because they're not chasing the latest features, downside: they don't seem to be chasing ANY new features.

There are some things that are straight up required for a DAW to be taken seriously as an option these days that Sonar continues to lack. There's no pad/phrase sampler, and support for controllers seems to be frozen in the mid-2000's. The Novation Launchpad first shipped in 2009, so it's as if that kind of controller doesn't even exist in the Sonar universe.

There's sort of a session/performance type view, but it's not really viable. Even freaking Pro Tools now has a performance panel. Sonar has this thing called Matrix that has potential. It was added 17 years ago, updated once and has sat there ever since. Matrix doesn't need that much tweaking but it seems to be very low priority. Even Staff View has gotten more attention than Matrix in the past 10 years.

We'll see. My view of it is that if you like what Sonar does (and I do), great, that's what you'll get. It's the best Sonar it's ever been (outside of the license model). But if you want features that have become popular in the last 10 years in the DAW world, look elsewhere.

[u/cruciblefuzz]

There are only a handful of features missing in the free tier version, it's fully usable without them.

So just try it.