watch out Abes...Cakewalk Project5 new pricing = $99!

[Poster]

The price has crashed because nobody is buying it.

that was my first thought as well..
there's more than meets the eyes in this..
99,- cannot be the real price..

plus;
putting P5 in the market should've been quite cheap because,
- P5 is probably based on Sonar's engine..
- low to none R&D costs because P5's concept is stolen from Live
- they dropped PSYN, DS864, and Cyclone, so no development costs for that anymore..
- Dimension Pro LE included, but that's being developed with 'other' money..
so quite cheap to include the LE version..
- PC side development only..

obviously Cakewalk is making the real money with other products so therefore they can drop the price on P5..

Ableton has only 1 product so can't really drop the price to something like 99,-
If Cakewalk only had P5 it sure was in the region of 500-600 as well..

[leisuremuffin]

yeah, it's ugly.

the workflow is clunky at best.

and you have to stop playback to do almost anything.



of course i only came to this conclusion just from watching people from cakewalk demonstrate the thing at trade shows.... Which dosen't bode well for the thing. I mean if somebody trying to sell the thing to me can't make it seem smooth......




.lm.

[headquest]

@ Woodie: lots of respect of most of what you say there. I owned Live since version 2, and I do think that in the last 12-18 months they have become somewhat more arrogant, and demanding in terms of the rising cost of maintaining the software in a complete form (including their add-ons). As someone said, it now costs similar to Logic (if you get the full package) which seems a little bit silly given that Logic is in itself overpriced.

On the other hand I own Sonar 5.2, which is a great piece of software in many ways. But I don't think that overall the Cakewalk products are as sturdy. They too have a policy of releasing stuff that is full of bugs and it takes 2-3 updates over a six month period before you get the version that works properly

The way it goes perhaps (except with the Props of course )

As for P5, I tried version 1 and version 2, but not 2.5 (yet). Some of the areas where I felt it fell short the last time I tried it are:

* Gapless audio engine - it doesn't have one. For <cough> live use this is not good.
* Multicore support - doesn't have it
* Video - doesn't have it
* The instruments included... are (except Dimension) really aweful . My goodness...
* General ergonomics - didn't fit for me, perhaps because I am so used to Live anyway.

What I did like was the channel strip type area with the arpeggiator built in (it is one of the best software arps I've tried, and far better than Live's)
I thought it had a lot of flexibility, especially given the low price tag (as a Sonar owner I have been offered this for well under 100 before )
Customer care - the bakers really do have a healthy attitude towards looking after their customers. Special offers abound every month .

[woodie]

The price has crashed because nobody is buying it.

Nobody is buying it because it's shit.

of course...how could I have overlooked that!? Thanks for your words of wisdom.

It's a golden rule of marketing that when your product is selling well you always slash the price of it by 60%.

Everyone knows that.

Obviously, if you have a better explanation.

Golden Rule to slash 60%, huh? well...as a Marketing Major myself, popslut....that's a new one I tell ya. You know there's many way to skin a cat, right? I was just overly impressed with your conclusion that the reason why they dropped the price was because "it's shit". I would have expected a little more insight than that. If you just hop over to the Cakewalk Forums.....there's plenty of happy P5 users over there that would gladly challenge your viewpoint vs Live.

Now....I'm not claiming I know the reason why they would drop the price like that, but looking at the market right now and seeing how the Cakes are trying to make amends....this is what I think is happening:

1) there are plenty of linear DAW's on the market, but there's really only 1 competition to Live....and that's P5.

2) yes...P5 has had it rough since the beginning...that's known in general, so that's no big secret.

3) Cakewalk is a many-products company (not all eggs in 1 basket)....unlike Ableton which their only product (their bread & butter) is LIVE....not to mention their instruments which only work in LIVE as well.

4) in ref. to Point 3 - Cakewalk has the flexibility to play with pricing unlike Ableton because their flagship product is Sonar which I assume is selling quite well against the other DAW's in the market, but they have a bunch of other products as well to lean on, so again....all their eggs are not in 1 basket, therefore this allows them to "spread the cost" of development.

5) since Live was really the first of its kind - they were able to charge the price that they can charge as it's "unique" and different from the traditional DAW's and many folks (like me).....like that uniqueness as it offers alot of inspiration/creativity that the others lack. Cakewalk obviously saw the interest in that and with P5v1....went back to the drawing board and took on that same concept with v2.

6) because Cakewalk seems to have a renewed interest in salvaging P5....and seeing that LIVE is it's only competitor and priced WAY HIGH - why not hit them where it hurts...and because they have other products to lean on for revenue....they can afford to?

7) at the same time....it's a "golden rule" that you don't want to leave money on the table, but with the right strategy, supply & demand...how bad do you want the customers.....there's alot of factors involved in this kind of decision.

The way I see it....they're more likely to convince P5 customers to purchase Sonar and their other synths that convincing Sonar users to purchase P5, so if they can sell this dog-shit out of P5....that'll bring on a whole new customer stream that could eventually be customers of Sonar, Rapture, Dimension Pro, etc.... this would in turn bring more revenue of course....and then they'll be able to expand their business more. It's all strategy and every company operates differently. The Abes obviously made a decision to be a 1 product company and to charge the price they're charging....they have a staff they need to pay monthly and if they drop the price....then they'll have to re-group themselves.

This is why I originally said that this is going to be interesting to see what happens as 99 bucks for something damn near LIVE....is going to be very attractive to ALOT of people (PC users of course) esp. since they can start creating music in a LIVE-like environment with the included synths....for a 1/4 of the price.

[woodie]

obviously Cakewalk is making the real money with other products so therefore they can drop the price on P5..

Ableton has only 1 product so can't really drop the price to something like 99,-
If Cakewalk only had P5 it sure was in the region of 500-600 as well..

bingo

[jamester]

Bottom-line is that P5 has barely sold since its inception, and I do believe the major price drop is a reflection of that actually. I'm not saying it's a bad program mind you, it's...ok. But between Cake's utter neglect of marketing it, and Live and Reason's already established dominance of the "workstation" concept, commbined with a major false-start with v.1 and flakey-at-best audio capabilities of v.2, P5 has had an uphill battle which so far has proved pretty insurmountable.

With the new update and price drop, I think this is Cake's last-ditch attempt at getting P5 to stick. Unfortunately, I think it's too little too late. Cake has to have the worst marketing/advertising of all the major companies, I've complained about this many times to them! It's unreal, each print ad seems to be more head-smackingly bad than the next...especially with P5 - anybody remember the baby with the stupid look on its face and its finger in its mouth, with bubbles behind it...reading "Blurs The Line Between Studio And Stage"? WTF???

I switched to Live from P5, and I think Live is the superior program. I re-visited P5 with the new update (since it was free to registered users), and it didn't take long for me to remember all the reasons I switched...

just my .02

[woodie]

@ Woodie: lots of respect of most of what you say there. I owned Live since version 2, and I do think that in the last 12-18 months they have become somewhat more arrogant, and demanding in terms of the rising cost of maintaining the software in a complete form (including their add-ons). As someone said, it now costs similar to Logic (if you get the full package) which seems a little bit silly given that Logic is in itself overpriced.

On the other hand I own Sonar 5.2, which is a great piece of software in many ways. But I don't think that overall the Cakewalk products are as sturdy. They too have a policy of releasing stuff that is full of bugs and it takes 2-3 updates over a six month period before you get the version that works properly

The way it goes perhaps (except with the Props of course )

As for P5, I tried version 1 and version 2, but not 2.5 (yet). Some of the areas where I felt it fell short the last time I tried it are:

* Gapless audio engine - it doesn't have one. For <cough> live use this is not good.
* Multicore support - doesn't have it
* Video - doesn't have it
* The instruments included... are (except Dimension) really aweful . My goodness...
* General ergonomics - didn't fit for me, perhaps because I am so used to Live anyway.

What I did like was the channel strip type area with the arpeggiator built in (it is one of the best software arps I've tried, and far better than Live's)
I thought it had a lot of flexibility, especially given the low price tag (as a Sonar owner I have been offered this for well under 100 before )
Customer care - the bakers really do have a healthy attitude towards looking after their customers. Special offers abound every month .

yep...I have to agree with you as well, headquest. As a Live5 user myself....I just like the recent attitude and effort that Cakewalk are putting into their products lately. If I was going to guess.....I think there might have been an internal company shake-up that's got them back on track with P5...who knows, that's the way I see it.

They've been around what seems forever and they are still here, offering more solid products like DPro and Rapture....and with the recent v2.5 FREE update to P5 users - that's a good sign.

I don't have P5 and TBH, haven't tried P5v2 yet....but I've seen the videos....read the posts and I guess as a Cakewalk customer via Dimension Pro....I really like what I'm seeing. It's the whole package that has got my attention. Let's just see if they keep it up the momentum!

For you programmers......the same thing is happening to Borland/CodeGear with Delphi, etc. Amongst the community of developers, they seemed to have dropped the ball at around Delphi 7...were looking at selling that division in 2006...decided to make it a "wholly owned subsidiary"....called it CodeGear and trying to win back the confidence they lost.......and I love it. I'm a big Delphi fan and I just love to see the underdog back in the ring and it's really great to see the effort they are making to be the leaders again in the development world.

I don't know.....I guess I have a soft heart for situations like that.

[chis]

I'm not fond of P5s interface either. But it has rock-solid MIDI timing (for a Windows application). Live doesn't - it seems.

Now that I have more hardware, and am doing more combined audio/MIDI projects, this MIDI bug has begun to grate on me.

Is it a problem in Live 5? If it isn't, I might just go back to 5.2.2 for now...

[popslut]

It's a golden rule of marketing that when your product is selling well you always slash the price of it by 60%.

Everyone knows that.

Golden Rule to slash 60%, huh? well...as a Marketing Major myself, popslut....that's a new one I tell ya.

Obviously not a Sarcasm Major though eh?

Bottom-line is that P5 has barely sold since its inception, and I do believe the major price drop is a reflection of that actually.

...is another way of putting it.

P5 never caught on for all the reasons stated in this thread. It's just not as good as the [excellent] competition. It's not even as good as its own press releases.

I've used it - it's shit.

woodie - I'm starting to suspect that you are employed by the Cakewalk marketing department to go to competitors' web forums and spam this impressive price drop and try to salvage P5 before is is abandoned to the great obsolete software inventory in the sky.

P.s. Regarding you being a Marketing Major:

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root. I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show.

"You know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar, that's a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research, huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags, quit putting a godamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!

[woodie]

Bottom-line is that P5 has barely sold since its inception, and I do believe the major price drop is a reflection of that actually. I'm not saying it's a bad program mind you, it's...ok. But between Cake's utter neglect of marketing it, and Live and Reason's already established dominance of the "workstation" concept, commbined with a major false-start with v.1 and flakey-at-best audio capabilities of v.2, P5 has had an uphill battle which so far has proved pretty insurmountable.

With the new update and price drop, I think this is Cake's last-ditch attempt at getting P5 to stick. Unfortunately, I think it's too little too late. Cake has to have the worst marketing/advertising of all the major companies, I've complained about this many times to them! It's unreal, each print ad seems to be more head-smackingly bad than the next...especially with P5 - anybody remember the baby with the stupid look on its face and its finger in its mouth, with bubbles behind it...reading "Blurs The Line Between Studio And Stage"? WTF???

I switched to Live from P5, and I think Live is the superior program. I re-visited P5 with the new update (since it was free to registered users), and it didn't take long for me to remember all the reasons I switched...

just my .02

As we also mentioned here, jamester.....you're right - it's hard to argue the lack of attention to P5 as compared to LIVE. That should have never happened and yeah...they're making up for lost time here no doubt, but.....it's better late than never. too late though? I disagree....it all depends on who has the better combination of features and price.....and that will be dictated in future versions of each. Is the GUI not as pretty as LIVE? I personally think so, but at the same time....there's plenty of other folks that dig the P5 interface more than Live, so.....

My thoughts are is that I think someone in the company spoke up and reminded them of P5 and that they shouldn't neglect P5 as the users felt like they did as obvious as it is a Live clone and pretty much it's direct competitor - it's a no brainer to see how well LIVE is doing. I like to think they huddled up together and re-strategized, but who knows.....time will tell.

I can't argue about the robustness and stability of Dimension Pro.......it's a helluva product, built by Rene (Z3Ta) and crew.....so if that and Rapture is a sign of things to come.

I also don't agree with some of their "marketing" decisions either, but I don't agree with alot of Ableton's marketing decisions as well.

[woodie]

I'm not fond of P5s interface either. But it has rock-solid MIDI timing (for a Windows application). Live doesn't - it seems.

Now that I have more hardware, and am doing more combined audio/MIDI projects, this MIDI bug has begun to grate on me.

Is it a problem in Live 5? If it isn't, I might just go back to 5.2.2 for now...

chis - I did a little forum searching and looks like 5.22 does NOT have the MIDI problem that Live 6 has. seems like plenty of folks are getting pissed here as a year back it was also a Live5 problem and it seems it's happening all over again. I was never part of that discussion, so I really have no idea, but it's nice to know 5.22 doesn't suffer the same issues. thank goodness I have the patience to wait until 6.22

[headquest]

...seriously though Woodie... in case you 've not really tried out P5: without gapless audio it is unsuitable for live use, and hence not a direct competitor to Ableton. On the production side, maybe... but certainly not in terms of stage use

[chis]

Thanks Woodie! I'm sure I can go without dual-core support for now...

Edit: You have Adam A7s, you lucky sod. (But I have a Sub 8 at least )

[headquest]

PS, it also doesn't have any equivalent to Live's warp markers - a pretty fundamental feature of what Live is.

It kinda looks like a Live-wannabe in the sense that some elements of the GUI design are directly lifted from Ableton. But as soon as you start to dig you find it is not really proper competition at all, because fundamental features of what makes Live so special are simply not there.

I think that Cakewalk saw how successful Live is becoming and thought they would make a rival... but maybe they wrongly assumed people bought Live for its GUI design/workflow. I think what actually impressed most of us into buying Live is its amazing audio warping ability and gapless engine. That's certainly what grabbed - and has kept - me

[woodie]

It's a golden rule of marketing that when your product is selling well you always slash the price of it by 60%.

Everyone knows that.

Golden Rule to slash 60%, huh? well...as a Marketing Major myself, popslut....that's a new one I tell ya.

Obviously not a Sarcasm Major though eh?

nope...no scarcasm there buddy....

woodie - I'm starting to suspect that you are employed by the Cakewalk marketing department to go to competitors' web forums and spam this impressive price drop and try to salvage P5 before is is abandoned to the great obsolete software inventory in the sky.

think whatever you want to think

P.s. Regarding you being a Marketing Major:

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root. I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show.

"You know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar, that's a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research, huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags, quit putting a godamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!

Now THAT is hilarious!!!