Earlier this week, Gibson Brands announced the end of Cakewalk, a music software developer within its portfolio of companies. Purchased by Gibson in 2013, Cakewalk was widely known for developing SONAR, a DAW software package that competed with Logic and Pro Tools.
Reaching its 30th anniversary this year, Cakewalk outlasted many other early DAW developers from the '80s and '90s and evolved significantly through different eras of music software innovation. While it had certainly lost ground to competitors like Logic and Ableton Live over the past decade, software like SONAR, along with a range of VSTs and other plugins, had earned the firm a steady and loyal user base of recording engineers.
According to a statement posted by Gibson on the Cakewalk website, the corporation hopes to refocus its energies on consumer products rather than software:
"Gibson Brands announced today that it is ceasing active development and production of Cakewalk branded products. The decision was made to better align with the company’s acquisition strategy that is heavily focused on growth in the global consumer electronics audio business under the Philips brand.
"Cakewalk has been an industry leader in music software for over 25 years by fusing cutting-edge technology with creative approaches to tools that create, edit, mix, and publish music for professional and amateur musicians. Gibson Brands acquired Cakewalk in 2013."
In a separate statement, Cakewalk CTO Noel Borthwick explained that "Cakewalk's servers will continue to operate, you will still have access to all of your online assets, and your software will continue to work normally. A dedicated team has been established during this transition period to continue to serve the Cakewalk community."
Borthwick also expressed sincere thanks to the Cakewalk company and community with its "astonishingly passionate base of artists, musicians and producers who used our software to create music on a daily basis."
As reported by CDM, Cakewalk also recently acquired the mobile music-creating app Momentum which now faces an uncertain future.