Death of Cakewalk
Imagine your old trustworthy friend suddenly passed away.
It started as the feeling in a harsh winter.
Then there was anger.
But finally it all ended in pure voidness.
So long, Cakewalk!
As stated by Gibson here, Cakewalk was SIGKILL'ed, perhaps due to insufficient resources, or a dangling pointer. Anyway, it was finally killed, with all development and vending activity ended.
I encountered Cakewalk in 2009, when I was skimming through an old magazine on computer software from 1998. There was an article about Cakewalk Pro Audio 5.0. Back then I was using a piece of software called "Music Maker DX" to edit MIDI files. After that I started using CWPA 9.0, which was, obviously, pirated. I used external synthesizer such as Timidity to produce audio files, because I had no idea about what I was really doing at that time.
I thought CWPA 9.0 was the last version of Cakewalk, and that Cakewalk has long been dead, until somewhere in 2011 I found that they had renamed their product to SONAR. So I tried SONAR 6 (which is, again, pirated) and was fascinated immediately.
In 2014, I started to try (pirated) SONAR X2 Producer. After a (really long) trial period of a year or so, in 2015, I finally purchased SONAR Professional from Steam. Soon after, I got the SONAR Platinum Lifepass, which hopefully is a penance of my earlier piracy. I made my major production during this period.
And then it was the saddening story at the beginning of this article.
I've tried multiple DAWs, namely FL Studio, Cubase and even OpenMPT (which is actually a tracker). Only SONAR deserves the words "it just feels right" for me. It is also my first time feeling saddened by the death of a proprietary software. If Microsoft ceased the development of Windows, I would be much happier.
My music production
I'm going to pause any music production of mine, not only to mourn the death of Cakewalk, but also due to my lack of time and inspiration.
Most of my current works are arrangements and "reverse engineering" (「耳コピ」) of Touhou project's in-game music, with a few original but mostly unfinished works. Therefore, to review the basic music theory, regain my piano skills and to learn from the works of great predecessors might be the most appropriate choice for me. Although I have an extremely small range of audiences, it's my duty to make sure that they won't be pissed off after listening to my works. So I guess those steps are also a must before resuming my identity of a music producer.
Future choice of DAW
Cubase is another classic DAW. It's even older than Cakewalk. It has aggressive DRM measures, which makes Steinberg much safer from piracy than Cakewalk. Apparently that DRM is also the center of controversy over Steinberg. I've got many of Steinberg's instruments.
Reaper looks nice and is fairly priced. Might have a try later on.
FL Studio. Doesn't feel right for me.
OpenMPT? ...
Vocaloid. That's not a DAW.
Contact me if you have other suggestions.