Reply To: Bandlab Raises Price of Cakewalk Sonar Subscription to $179 Per Year

[peter]

All of us who have projects in Cakewalk by Bandlab have skin in the game.

For those who think that Bandlab is some kind of customer-friendly company owned by a kind, altruistic son of one the richest men in the world (his family is the richest family in Asia), consider this. Cakewalk Sonar’s development team — part of a company valued at $425 million — didn’t even consider accessibility for those with visual impairments in the design of Cakewalk Sonar. Additionally, while the company could have simply allowed Cakewalk by Bandlab to work for all who had projects created in it, they instead chose to make sure that no one could use it anymore and would be forced to Sonar — which again, has a design that didn’t consider the visially impaired, and also, the product doesn’t work for users of Windows prior to Windows 10. Our own Patrick shared that, as he uses Windows 7, his computer cannot install Sonar, and as Cakewalk by Bandlab will no longer activate after August of this year, the only way he can access the projects he’s made with CbB is to convert the project files for another DAW.

Bandlab could have considered people in Patrick’s situation. They could have considered visually impaired users in their development process. They could have easily not required CbB to not require their authorization process anymore and just let those who used it to create projects continue to use it, without further support. The whole thing speaks volumes of a company that doesn’t listen to or care about its users. As someone with hundreds of projects in the CbB and original Sonar project file formats, it does impact me. I do have skin in the game. I wish Bandlab were a more decent company. I won’t pretend that they are. I get it that there are a bunch of users who — like myself — have been using Cakewalk software from the early days, but that company doesn’t exist anymore. The fairytale of Meng being a great guy who loves to altruistically give away software to people because he’s simply such a nice person was ridiculous and defied logic. Yes, he built up great goodwill by giving away CbB free for several years, but he’s undone all of that goodwill and shown himself to be unconcerned with listening to the voice of the customer in the past year and has put those of us with a good deal of CbB and legacy Sonar project files into a bad situation.

Anyone who trusts this company at this point is making a mistake, IMO.

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