A philosophy student’s sequencer and a small ad.

Cakewalk began in 1987 as Twelve Tone Systems, a one-man software business started by Greg Hendershott. He told Create Digital Music in 2007 that he had been “technically a philosophy major” at Oberlin College, taking classes at its music conservatory, and that the sequencer grew out of a college project. After leaving Oberlin he rewrote it, placed a small advertisement, and “four or five people saw the ad and called up and ordered” — enough to pay for the next ad. In the early days he wrote the code, answered support calls and took boxes to the shipping office himself, he said. The company was based in Boston.

The name came late. Two days before the advertisement’s deadline, Hendershott said, he found that his first choice — “something like Opus” — was already used by other software, so he picked a word from a small dictionary of music terms: Cakewalk, “a simple English compound word” that suggested ease of use. The company name was a joke about twelve-tone music. Because callers kept asking “is this Cakewalk?”, he said, the company eventually took the product’s name; it formally became Cakewalk, Inc. in September 2008, according to a company press release cited by English Wikipedia.

The first Cakewalk ran on MS-DOS; a Windows 3.0 version followed in 1991. As it gained features it became Cakewalk Pro and then Cakewalk Pro Audio, once it could record digital audio, and it carried its own scripting language, CAL. A cut-down Express edition was sometimes bundled with sound cards, English Wikipedia says, which helped put the name in front of home musicians.

SONAR, Roland and Gibson.

Cakewalk’s flagship became SONAR, a Windows-only digital audio workstation that combined multitrack audio with MIDI editing, notation and mixing. Sound On Sound reviewed versions from SONAR 3 in 2004 through the X-series of 2011 to 2013; with SONAR X2, in October 2012, the whole family became native 64-bit, English Wikipedia says, and from SONAR Platinum in February 2015 the software moved to monthly updates. Alongside it Cakewalk sold software instruments such as Dimension Pro and Rapture, both reviewed by Sound On Sound in 2006, and consumer programs such as Pyro. By 2007 more than a million people had used Cakewalk software, Create Digital Music reported.

Ownership changed twice in six years. In January 2008 Roland bought a majority interest, and Cakewalk’s products began to carry the words “Cakewalk by Roland” — a product logo rather than a new company name. Hendershott stepped down as chief executive on 1 July 2012, after 25 years, and Michael Hoover became president, the company’s blog said. In September 2013 Gibson announced that it would buy Cakewalk, ending “years of ownership or investment by Japan’s Roland,” Create Digital Music wrote; Gibson said the Boston office and staff would stay, and Cakewalk went on to develop software with Gibson’s TASCAM brand. English Wikipedia dates the completion to 6 December 2013.

It did not last. On 17 November 2017 Gibson announced that it was ceasing active development and production of Cakewalk-branded products, and the Boston company stopped operating after 30 years, with only its user forum and licence servers left running.

Software as an instrument.

The seven makers in this guide build the tools of the home and project studio: digital audio workstations, the software in which music is now recorded, edited and mixed, and — in TASCAM’s case — the hardware that came before them. TEAC introduced the first Portastudio, a four-track cassette recorder with a built-in mixer, at a New York audio convention in 1979.

The oldest software house here is Steinberg of Hamburg, founded in 1984 by Karl Steinberg and Manfred Rürup and the maker of Cubase; Yamaha says it acquired the company in 2005. Cakewalk began in Boston in 1987 as Greg Hendershott’s Twelve Tone Systems, came under Roland’s majority control in 2008 and Gibson’s in 2013, and has been a brand of BandLab Technologies of Singapore since 2018.

Three are European and younger. Reason Studios, founded in Stockholm in 1994 as Propellerhead Software, was bought in January 2026 by LANDR of Montreal, Music Business Worldwide reported. Image-Line, the maker of FL Studio, was founded by Jean-Marie Cannie and Frank Van Biesen and gives its headquarters as Ghent, Belgium. Bitwig was founded in Berlin in 2009, and its company is registered there.

Cockos, the maker of REAPER, says it was founded in 2004; archived copies of its website show its postal address moving from San Francisco to Manhattan and, by late 2024, to Rosendale, New York. TASCAM is a brand of TEAC Corporation, which is listed in Tokyo, based in Tama, Tokyo, and was majority-owned by Gibson from 2013 to 2020.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Closed in Boston, revived by BandLab.

The brand returned within months. On 23 February 2018 BandLab Technologies, the Singapore music company founded in 2015 by Kuok Meng Ru and Steve Skillings, announced that it had bought all of Cakewalk’s intellectual property and some of its assets. On 4 April it relaunched SONAR, with the full Platinum feature set, as a free program called Cakewalk by BandLab, keeping SONAR’s Skylight interface, ProChannel mixer modules and 64-bit mix engine; Sound On Sound noted that SONAR Platinum had sold for £399 or $499. BandLab hired former Cakewalk staff, including the chief technology officer Noel Borthwick, to carry on the code, Sound On Sound reported, and the magazine quoted BandLab’s chief executive promising an “aggressive feature development roadmap ahead.”

In June 2023 BandLab confirmed that Cakewalk by BandLab would be discontinued and replaced by two products: Cakewalk Sonar, a redesigned version of the old program that can open earlier projects, and Cakewalk Next, a new application, MusicRadar reported. Today the Cakewalk website offers both — Sonar for Windows, which it says is “fully functional for free in evaluation mode,” with a paid membership for all features and premium plug-ins, and Next for Windows and macOS. Sonar’s page still names tools carried over from the Boston years, such as the ProChannel strip and AudioSnap, alongside newer ones such as VocalSync for aligning vocal timing. Since 2021 BandLab has sat under a parent company, Caldecott Music Group, English Wikipedia says. The name now belongs to a brand rather than a company: the Boston firm is gone, and the software is developed under BandLab.

For a design guide, Cakewalk shows how a product name can outlast the company that chose it — first replacing the company’s own name, then surviving its closure. Compare PreSonus, another American recording-software maker, and Steinberg, the Hamburg maker of Cubase and a rival since the MIDI-sequencer era. For this guide we use a warm orange, charcoal and cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cakewalk’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.