Bandlab is basically a Community of musicians seeking for collaborations, which is possible through their app. Cakewalk by Bandlab was the answer by Singaporean founder of Bandlab Kuok Meng Ru after Gibson ( the former owner of Cakewalk ) pulled the plug. midi arpeggiator with tons of templates ready to use you will hardly find in other DAW's. I used Sonar Platinum long time and have been happy with it. At present Bandlab are actively supporting and updating it so I am optimistic for the future. Like everything it takes a bit of effort to get going but I promise you it is worth it. I've been using Reason since V,1 when it was very much just an add-on synth rack and I'm very comfortable in the Reason environment but it just doesn't do everything I need.Īt a price of free, Cakewalk is a no brainer. I quite often start a project in Cakewalk to get the basic arrangement and chord progression sorted then import it all into Reason to mess with it some more and to add any vocals or live instruments. The cons are that the supplied instruments are pretty MEH and the workflow can be a little clunky. Those are the reasons I use it rather than Reason. Other stuff I use a lot: diatonic transposition, midi event view, controller data thinning, midi loop recording. If you are a geek, Cakewalk still supports the CAL macro language which is a very fast way to adjust/filter notes, velocities, whatever. Reason does not do MIDI VSTs or VST3.Ĭakewalk has a half decent music staff view which helps if you need to collaborate with a 'real musician'. Yes, it Rewires just fine, but Reason has to be the Rewire slave and you can't use VSTs in Reason when Rewired (PH - why not?)Ĭakewalk is much, much better than Reason for MIDI sequencing and has better VST support. I also dabble with Reaper, Bitwig and Ableton but I always come back to Cakewalk when I need to get stuff done. I've used Cakewalk since the days of MSDOS and I still use it for probably 25% of my music time, Reason being the other 75%.

Cakewalk by bandlab price