Category: Company News

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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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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”