Well… that’s a shock. Sonar Platinum is now totally free from Bandlab. Gotta be a catch!
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I had to…
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64 bit only.
Now you can move even more zeros around.
Pete Brown, from Microsoft’s Windows and Devices Group, said “We’re thrilled that Cakewalk has found a new home"
I’ll bet they are.
"We look forward to working closely with BandLab to continue this innovation.” Cakewalk by BandLab will support pen, touch and Surface Dial throughout the user interface.
I’ll bet MS gave them more than just a free copy of Enterprise MSDN.
All your old gear that does not have signed 64 bit drivers goes to landfill along with a perfectly serviceable PC.
This is how we in IT turn over the compost every decade and take your money again.
When 128 bit comes along every electron in the universe can have its own IP address.
Ableton Live is also only 64-bit now. Spectralayers from Magix is also, and the new Sound Forge 12 is as well. Native Instruments dropped 32-bit support for Maschine as of version 2.7.2. Cubase 9 went all 64-bit. This is a trend, as 32-bit machines are indeed quite old by now and are seemingly a resource-hog of a burden to keep supporting two versions of everything when the numbers are so low now, I suppose.
Terry
That’s not a cause, it’s a symptom.
Follow the money.
The number of 32 bit apps is actually staggeringly high. Which is why MS has the WOW system.
Since software doesn’t wear out you need to entice sales with bloat features or force the issue with incompatibles.
You need to ask why your new Windows 10 machine doesn’t run stuff three times faster than your Windows 7 machine? It should. But Office, the browser and most others apps run no faster and usually slower.
I have three identical HP Workstations and no matter what I do, the XP runs PSpice, Circuit, Office and Reaper etc 60% faster than 8.1 and better again for 10.
I experienced the exact opposite, so we will simply have to agree to disagree on this one.
32-bit is going bye-bye. Good riddance. I shed no tears when 16-bit finally left either.
Terry
It always seems that there’s some weird inverse relationship between machines getting more powerful and software bloating out of proportion to take advantage of that fact. Just imagine modern machines running old lean and mean DOS word processors or spreadsheets- they’d go so fast time would reverse and the job would be done before you loaded the software 
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AHHH. The time before “THE MACHINES” was so simple. No way to insult a stranger on a smart phone, no location tracking, no .xxx versions of Windows bug corrections, no digital down time, no programs to fix programs, no hacking, no digital viruses, no boot sector…only time to make real music. 
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Yeah, and a single piece of gear to make a single sound cost at least a couple grand, in 70s dollars. And studio time was $200 an hour. No thanks
HA! I still remember the sticker shock of my first used Hammond. Of course you forget, local musicians made a helluva lot of $$ compared to to today’s local musicians.
I’m not against 64 bit for it’s own sake, but it’s the way many vendors have used it to scalp people.
My 2010 3.06 GHz Intel Core i3 iMac runs the latest 64 bit OSX and it flies. I just cranked Diva up in Divine mode on Reaper with 4 other vicious VCM plugins and didn’t get much past 40% cpu load.
The output is 2 ch 32 bit float 96khz
Now I certainly did not expect this from Apple but it shows that it can be done properly.
Windows 10 on an eight year old box is almost un-useable.
…And this is coming from a Microsoft MVP
LOL Ive actually done that with Windows 98 on a Quad core Workstation.
Excel, Access and Word loaded instantly, possibly before I clicked the mouse. Even Adobe Acrobat and reader were instant.
In Calkwalk and Voyetra the reverb happens before the note is struck 
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I’m glad Sonar is alive and kicking. Hopefully, it will be kicking
ass soon I hope they will start supporting MPE so I can more easily connect my Seaboard RISE
When I installed cakewalk, Addictive Keys suddenly thought the VST should be in the Cakewalk/VSTs directory. It threw an error starting such each time C3 loaded it up until I went back to the installer and told it to repair. This seems like the Cakewalk installer may be a bit more intrusive than it was intended to be.
As a software developer I hate when I have to support multiple platforms. It means extra code complexity, extra testing, extra etc… It really sucks, and it’s expensive. The assumption that discontinuing support for old technology is nothing but a money grab can only come from a lack of understanding of the software development process.
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What you’re saying is that there is no planned obsolescence in the software / hardware industry and anyone who thinks there is doesn’t understand the industry.
Not sure that’s entirely fair. I’ve been writing commercial software for nearly forty years, since mini computers. For some very very large clients. My accounting and LOB / Core business systems are still running after 20 years with minimal effort going from NT4 to WS2016. I was very careful when I picked my development tools and design process all those years ago. I am extremely good at it.
The guys at Cockos Reaper have no trouble either.
An example is I bought a fulltilt version of Cubase only three years ago. It now cannot be re-installed on any platform. Not even an upgrade path.
It’s also a reason jBridge is sooo popular.
Perhaps I’m old fashioned like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard et al and major developers are indeed paragons of virtue.
Anyway, no point even discussing this in such a hostile environment.
That’s why I write my x.factory librarians in Java 
- a big decision I took in 2001 to ditch C++ and learn a new language that claimed to be cross platform… The alternative was to stick with C++ and expensive cross platform GUI libraries. As I was starting from scratch I decided to make the big jump then.
I develop on OS X (much, much more pleasant that Windoze) and they also run on Windoze and Linux. My only concession on each platform are things I can do for minimal effort to make them more integrated into the platform.
And so long as JREs are developed I am as future proof against platform changes as you can be.
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That is the big advantage of Java, to be sure. there are definitely some drawbacks as well, but you weighed the options and determined which way was best for your application.
64 bit vs 32 bit in some cases require completely different pieces of code, such as with sound processing. When you have to start supporting multiple versions of a code base it gets expensive. Software engineering (and pretty much all types of engineering) is a constant decision making process between cost and function.
Of COURSE there is planned obsolescence in the software industry, just like in EVERY industry. It is necessary. The mistake in your rant against the big bad companies was in your assumption as to what drives that plan.
On a side note, I find it ironic that the guy who turns a positive thread about an application being offered for free into an attack on the software industry would accuse our community of being a hostile environment… lol
Sure, some software can easily continue to run on systems decades later with little or no modification. But in some cases, in particular large and complex applications such as DAWs that almost inevitably depend heavily on third party GUI frameworks, MIDI/audio frameworks, OS driver frameworks etc., it’s extremely difficult to support multiple platforms, and to support major platform updates in the long term. Particularly in the case of real-time audio/MIDI applications. You can hit problems such as the availability of newer frameworks, compiler incompatibilities, frameworks that were once de facto standard tha are no longer supported, etc. As Derek says, you can avoid many of these problems these days by using managed languages such as Java/C#. But on the other hand, when many of the leading DAWs first started, these languages were not an option.
That’s not what he said at all. He was saying that multi-platform support, and support for old tech does not come for free in many cases. In some cases it can cripple a company. And he said that anyone who thinks it does come cheap, and thus concludes that planned obsolescence is always done as a money grab, lacks some understanding of the difficulties and motivations. And I think he’s absolutely right.
There are also fundamental differences between LOB / Core business type software and consumer software such as DAWs. It’s hard to write software for millions of end-users to install on many different random configurations of computer and operating system, with many different drivers, and keep that going for decades.
It’s also worth remembering that Reaper v1 (C++) was released in 2006, only 12 years ago, where many great stable frameworks for C++ were already available and continue to be supported. Cubase first came out in 1989, 29 years ago, on the Atari, and ported to Windows 3 around 1992. Cakewalk 1 (the original predecessor of Sonar) came out in 1987 for MS DOS, 27 years ago. It’s not really fair to compare.
I think we just have to accept that some older software is just really hard to continue to support multiple decades later, especially with competition from with young whipper-snappers like Reaper.
That’s what they said about Flash 
Neil
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Now why do you have to come back and repeat what I said in a completely better way? You’re making me look stupid! 
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