Category: Cakewalk-In-The-News

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Cakewalk SONAR: Win32 lighting up on Windows 10

Build 2017 was a blast – so much technology to absorb!

It was an honor to be the only DAW vendor to present some of the great strides we have made in SONAR to take advantage of the best in Windows technology.

Below is the session Cakewalk SONAR: Win32 lighting up on Windows 10

There were two presentations of this session. A bit nerve wracking doing a live demo with Bluetooth on a floor with thousands of people with BT devices 🙂 Fortunately everything went really smooth – BT MIDI performed flawlessly and I was able to connect from onstage and run at a buffer latency of less than 10 msec. It was very responsive. Pete let some people in the audience try playing the keyboard (a Korg Nanostudio) and everyone was impressed with how responsive playback was, even 20 feet away from the stage.
I even did a live walk through of the Bluetooth UWP MIDI stack from the SONAR code. The audience enjoyed seeing breakpoints being hit in response to playing notes on the keyboard. Nerd alert!

I also had a spot at the Solutions Spotlight at the event – kind of like NAMM for nerds! We had a small booth where we were showing SONAR and the technology and were available to answer questions. In the solutions spotlight session I paired a Jamstik controller in addition to the NanoStudio and it showed up as a second MIDI device. Both the keyboard and Jamstik were able to trigger different tracks without a problem.

It was great running into so many people from Microsoft and other tech companies like Adobe and Google who had used Cakewalk software.

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Build 2017 Tech Talk – Cakewalk SONAR: Win32 lighting up on Windows 10

Tech Talk – Cakewalk SONAR: Win32 lighting up on Windows 10

A heads up for anyone attending the Microsoft Build conference in Seattle this year. Cakewalk and Microsoft are doing a tech talk demonstrating how Win32 applications can take advantage of some of the advancements on the Windows 10 platform. This is the only presentation at Build that focuses on media, audio and MIDI. There are two tech talks scheduled, on Thursday 5/11 2:30PM (Tech Talk C room) and Friday 5/12 10:30AM (Tech Talk C room).

In the tech talks we’ll cover topics such as:

  • UWP MIDI API with a hands on demo of how to integrate the UWP Win32 wrapper with a Win32 application
  • Bluetooth LE MIDI
  • Windows 10 WASAPI low latency audio support
  • Multi-Touch and Pen support
  • UWP desktop bridge
  • At the talks we’ll be doing a live debug session of SONAR showing code integrating UWP MIDI.

I may convince Pete Brown from Microsoft to jam on a Bluetooth MIDI controller with SONAR in that session, and we’ll trace the life cycle of a MIDI note which should be fun 🙂 Continue reading “Build 2017 Tech Talk – Cakewalk SONAR: Win32 lighting up on Windows 10”

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Executive Roundtable: Does Music Software Have a Future?

I was on an executive round-table at NAMM 2017 talking about The Future of Music Software

Craig Anderton (Gibson) moderated the panel which included Tony Cariddi (Avid), Noel Borthwick (Cakewalk), Jack Joseph Puig (Waves), Stephen Fortner (Fortner Media)

Some stimulating discussion on this panel about the state of Music Software today and tomorrow. Looks like the video was time stretched without pitch correction since all of our voices sound  higher 🙂

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A New Era For Cakewalk (an open letter from CTO Noel Borthwick)

Why we introduced Lifetime Updates

With the introduction of Lifetime Updates for SONAR Platinum, there have been many theories as to why Cakewalk would take such a bold move. For us it’s simple—it’s better for customers, it’s better for us, and we believe this way of doing business is the future, so we’re embracing it today.

Some history: In the past (pre 2015), we followed a more traditional annual upgrade cycle where we released a single version of SONAR each year. This model was flawed on many levels, both for developers and end users. As developers, we’re under extreme pressure to finish a product by a certain date to meet a revenue goal – often regardless of whether it’s ready or not.

SONAR-Platinum-Lifetime-Updates

Adding a lot of features to a product in a short cycle can create problems even skilled QA teams and beta testers won’t find. Furthermore, end users have to try and learn a huge amount of information at once—which is much less efficient than learning features at one’s own pace over time.

Continue reading “A New Era For Cakewalk (an open letter from CTO Noel Borthwick)”

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Windows 10 Enhancements For Music Production

Music Production for Windows 10: Overview

Music Production for Windows 10
On July 29, at 12 AM EST, Microsoft started rolling out Windows 10 upgrades. If you signed up for the upgrade earlier, you may have already received a notification. If not and you absolutely can’t wait, Tech savvy users can use the Media Creation Tool to install immediately on one or multiple devices.

Fortunately this time around, we have much more mature release compared to Windows 8—there’s no missing start menu, and the confusing divide between “Metro” and desktop apps is history. According to Microsoft, Windows 10 will be the last “version” of Windows. Subsequent updates will be delivered periodically to users, so we won’t need to wait two or three years to see improvements. This isn’t all that different from what we at Cakewalk have adopted with our “rolling updates” model; we’ve seen how this has led to a proliferation of new features and enhancements along with ever-improving stability, and we hope Windows users will see similar benefits. Continue reading “Windows 10 Enhancements For Music Production”