MEGA POST below!!!

Great to see your Thor! I was hoping you’d show up soon! I’m not sure that I’ve told you the story that led to me creating this (for those reading this who are not Thorsten, he’s a long time friend of mine who is a musician / composer who does music for games who wasn’t part of Cakewalk Forums). Most of the people in the forum are friends I made from the Cakewalk Forum that I was part of since the early 00s.

The company has been through a lot of changes since the 80s when I started using the software — but most recently they were purchased by BandLab. BandLab always kept their hands of a small section of their forum, a subforum focused on deals / sales, largely focused on sample libraries, plugins and various kinds of virtual software a DAW user would find useful. That is, until a BandLab QC Manager took over control of the forum. I’ve had a number of emails with their social media guy and he told me to “be patient” that Jonathan is merely a tech guy and the forums are merely “legacy” — in other words, BandLab doesn’t really care about this guy berating customers on their forum. I did a couple of posts where I plainly stated that Jonathan’s berating of customers was unprofessional and forum users deserved an apology. I added that I cannot support a brand where they permit staff to behave this way towards customers. So, in two decades, I’ve never had single warning or any kind of violation of their forum policy. I’ve written forum policies at major brands. So that thread was closed. Jonathan never responded to me beyond saying that I was never one of the people he was complaining about in his posts (berating), to which I replied, it doesn’t matter. I don’t support companies where publicly berating their customers is acceptable.

So a few weeks go by and cclarry, who holds the world’s record for posting deals for DAW-related deals in forums, does a thread about updates to a non-BandLab DAW. Now, I was thinking, Jonathan just created a forum policy that censors any conversation about competitors. I posted in that thread, “I’m uncertain if BandLab’s new policy forbidding mention of competitors permits this thread or allows BandLab Sonar to be compared to competitor DAWs feature by feature. It would be valuable if a moderator could clarify.” Jonathan suspended my account for 5 days for that post, claiming that it was “hostile to BandLab employees” — which made no sense. He clearly had a vendetta from my post weeks earlier. cclarry’s account was penalized for making a thread about a BandLab competitor’s software update so that all of his posts going forward would need to be reviewed by a moderator. cclarry stopped posting at the forum because he, unsurprisingly, took offense at each of his posts and comments being moderated before posting.

When my suspension was lifted, there was a poster who made a thread and wrote a song about missing Larry — a man who has autism that I’ve looked out for. His original post and song expressed worry that cclarry is no longer part of the group. I thought it was important to let him know that cclarry is okay. So I posted (I’m doing this from memory), something like: “Hey, I just wanted to let you know that cclarry is fine. He — and I — simply disagree with BandLab’s new forum policies and how they’ve chosen to moderate our posts before deciding whether or not for publishing, so we won’t be posting here much, if t all anymore and can be found at another forum.” I didn’t mention what that other forum was.

So, as you do know, I started working on this forum, as an alternative to the Cakewalk Forum, and a story you know much better, as an alternative to the toxicity and bad behavior of forums like VI-Control. If you want to invite anyone here, just give them my email address linkedmusicians AT Gm@il dot c*m stating that they’re a friend of yours and I’ll register them. Otherwise, I won’t be opening up the site to public registration for another month.