The free Cakewalk by Bandlab, or CbB, will cease to export or save once the last software activation terminates sometime during August.

While CbB is being effectively neutered Bandlab is replacing one free DAW that has not been supported in over a year with two free DAWs. Each new, free DAW has different features and are marketed to different users. But again both are free to anyone with a free Bandlab account.

Sonar has the 30+ year cakewalk and Sonar development legacy. It is a mature, up-to-date, full featured DAW. It's strengths are working with midi, mixing and mastering. Development has centered on updating the GUI interface, re-writing legacy software modules to improve efficiency, increase fault tolerance, fix bugs and have the program make better use of available mulicore microprocessors. Essentially Sonar began with the last released code from Cakewalk by Bandlab.

Next is an entirely new DAW product. It's marketed to producers and musicans that typically build a project track-by-track. At 49 MB in size it is not as feature rich or complex as Sonar. Building a track from loops aeems easy to me.

Sonar is backwards compatible with all CbB, Sonar and Cakewalk song projects.

Cakewalk developers created a utility that converts between legacy and Next file formats.

Yeah CbB wil stop saving or exporting soon. But I've started playing with the replacements and I'm happy with both DAWs offer.

Jim Fogle - 2025 BiaB (Build 1128) RB (Build 5) - Ultra+ PAK
DAWs: Cakewalk Sonar - Standalone: Zoom MRS-8
Laptop: i3 Win 10, 8GB ram 500GB HDD
Desktop: i7 Win 11, 12GB ram 256GB SSD, 4 TB HDD
Music at: https://fogle622.wix.com/fogle622-audio-home