Without them, I wouldn't have ended the stream within 15 minutes because a lot of the freebies that the people on the Cakewalk forums seem to be obsessed with feel awful to use. IMO, it was saved by the fact that I already own a lot of the VI and Utility Plug-ins to make up for its lacks. I did a live stream with it because my viewers were constantly asking me to do it, and it felt very inconvenient to use. It's nice that they are adding new features, but they really need to go back and finish what they started in other areas. the old SONAR forums seemed to be full of these people). It must have niched itself off to a certain userbase that simply doesn't care about that stuff, so they never had enough heat on them to actually improve in those areas (add to the fanboys going out of their way to make even the worst aspects of their choice DAW seem amazing. I don't know how SONAR survived so long with such a terrible drum editor, drum maps system, tempo editing, marker system, etc. That's how I generally think Cakewalk stacks up. I would even use Samplitude Pro X over Cakewalk, as it has better MIDI Editing and exponentially better Audio Editing.

I wouldn't use Cakewalk for EDM or Hip Hop, personally.

Cakewalk by bandlab melodyne