Ableton Live vs Cakewalk by Bandlab

At 749 USD, Ableton Live Suite (the most fully-featured edition) is more expensive than other DAWs.
Ableton Live Standard can be bought for 449 USD.
Ableton Live Intro can be bought for 99 USD.

Rounding up, all three versions will set you back triple digits. That's before you get into additional sample and plugin packs, which also cost hundreds of dollars. Consider the price of the software before you enter the Live ecosystem.

There are no global keyboard shortcut editing mechanisms in Live. You are only able save keyboard shortcuts per project. This makes production a long-winded endeavor.

To edit shortcuts on Live, use Ctrl + K, or CMD + K.

Soundfonts need to be imported as samples, and they don't work as intended since the zoning is lost.

32-bit VST support for DAW in 2022 it's CON. Make a bridge!

Live's freeze/flatten method of rendering clips is slow and doesn't work on single clips or regions. Bounce in Place has been requested for years by a lot of users, but devs are not listening.

If you switch from one track to another with APC- or Push-Controller.

The GUI feels too old and ugly compared to other DAWs.

Even the latest 11… version doesn’t have PDC that work. Manual PDC introduction was a lough…

For example: If you freeze more than the allowed number of plugins on a UAD DSP device, when you open your session, Ableton will open and close all the frozen plugins on every channel even though they are not active in the session. The UAD control panel application displays the DSP usage of the hardware. During loading the levels (bars) will fluctuate by extreme amounts and typically will produce errors once the Ableton session is loaded.

After the session is loaded, UAD plugins that should be running are disabled because there wasn't enough DSP available during load.

The user then has to open and look at each UAD plug in to see if they are disabled and turn them off and on again to enable them. This illustrates there is enough room for the DSP load for unfrozen plugins, but that the loading process was at fault.

Live has been known for its hilariously bad stability on weaker systems. But this is only when it is under enormous strain. It will be under enormous strain, too.

Most people that work in this software love to fill their projects up with tons of cool ideas. Ableton should bear this in mind when continuing to update Live.

This can be a privacy concern for some.

Tracks can go into groups and sub-groups (as of Live 10), and sends are available, but that's the extent of routing.

Does not support the LV2 plugin standard.

Cakewalk is based on old code, that is why you see errors randomly. Since more than a decade ago no function has been improved - they were more concerned in the past with buzzwords and packaging third party software than in improving their own tools. The result is that it is now a decade behind developing competitors. There are better DAWs on the market that outperform Cakewalk. Free doesn't mean having the latest and greatest in technology - Cakewalk has never had it, there are important components of that DAW that haven't been touched for almost two decades, and they will likely never get the upgrade they need.

Cakewalk has constant errors such as engine crashing when working with songs with more than 100 tracks, it loses saved settings, BSOD, it randomly stops recognizing your midi controller and disconnects, do not try to disconnect it, the software goes crazy, your tracks are exchanged for other vst or midi clips known bug years ago.

Cakewalk by BandLab is currently available exclusively for 64 bit versions of Windows 7, 8, and 10. There are no current plans for availability on other operating systems.

It's a con for those who don't like having to use a program to install and update another program. The Bandlab's installer doesn't even have the courtesy to stop and ask you where you want the middleware installed.

Does not respect your freedom. Does not provide source code.also if it were really free, there wouldn't be any need for the Bandlab Assistant and signing up, and having to reauthorize every 6 months or drop into 'Demo' mode (get that? Demo mode in a FREE product :lol: :clap:), you would just download, install, done . . . there is a price to pay.

Cakewalk has some buggy and unfinished features, probably due to marketing decisions and the changes of ownerships: Staff view, Matrix View, Audiosnap etc.

For a complete and free package it is amazing what Bandlab is offering here. But crashes on startup or audio engine failures happen too often.

If you are squished for space on your boot drive, don't install this. It automatically sets up the Bandlab Assistant on C without giving you the opportunity to put it elsewhere. If you choose to use certain Cakewalkfeatures like the Drum replacer, it just starts installing all the drum samples onto drive C regardless of the fact that you've already set up a Cakewalk Content directory on D.

Unfortunately Cakewalk has a kind of philosophy of recycling old plugins under the DX and DXi code such as the sonitus fx and the newly added Classic Creative Suite audio effects (which were included in old versions of previously known SONAR) in its new update, which requires to new users or beginners to look for free or paid plugins, since these plugins are once again surpassed by the best vst in the market in addition to that they often sometimes block the software and disappear strangely, which is sad since most Of the DAW's on the market, both paid and free, include their own factory plugins so that the user does not have to spend any penny on third-party plugins.

Stability and tools are unfinished. As an example, AudioSnap simply does not work as it should when editing transients in the audio and staff view it does not work correctly.

If you like to work with external hardware, this software is not compatible with most software: when inserting an external effect on a track or bus, the DAW will crash and send you an error message. This is because Cakewalk has not fixed in years the problem with external insertions, which puts it behind the competition.

SO3 cannot control your synth. You cannot see/control or access patches, their names, or SysEx. It seems that everything is centered around use of virtual instruments, and not hardware synth.

Cakewalk does not have a sampling instrument for multisample playback and import. Third-party plug-ins exist but they often crash the DAW. It is strange that cakewalk does not have a sampler for the modern musician.

Cakewalk by Bandlab does not have a promising future since the company that acquired it does not even market it. For example, Cakewalk's social media platforms are practically dead, the user base seems small and, in general, it seems past for high. The Bandlab pages are live, but without even minimal mentions of Cakewalk on your website or social media, it will one day die quietly.

In the same way, Cakewalk does not have a drum sampler for playing and creating beats from jazz musicians to EDM producers.

It doesn't matter if you have a decent enough PC or solid and robust cakewalk is too laggy when one navigates between the mixing console the PRV. It is not optimized for Windows 10.

Unusable third party Pro-Channel modules such as Softube (Mix Bundle) and Overloud (BREVERB and REMATRIX) will not work properly when trying to open a project with them will cause Cakewalk to crash on the desktop.