Cakewalk and all associated products are registered trademarks owned by their respective copyright holders and is only used in this article for informative purposes
Ok, this is a short one but it has a pitfall that I feel I'm gonna fall into eventually if I don't make a record of it and who knows, it may help someone that comes across this same pitfall.
If you're reading this, have no idea what this is about and aren't looking for some disgruntled customer story time then I recommend you stop reading, otherwise here is a summary:
A few years ago Gibson used to own Cakewalk, a company dedicated to developing software for music production, with their flagship being Sonar, a very mature Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that predates other popular software like FL Studio by decades. Under Gibson Cakewalk published several pieces of software on Steam, important to my case being Sonar and Rapture (A massive collection of instruments). Their software wasn't very popular because it was actually stupid expensive, but I ended up buying it anyways because it was a single payment for a permanent license with no subscriptions attached.
Then, shortly after Cakewalk published some of their software on Steam Gibson started running into financial issues (Because you know, them kids ain't into trying to be rock stars anymore) and they decided to axe Cakewalk completely as part of some re-structuring this killed the authentication servers for all Steam programs effectively rendering them unusable with customers that had spent 500+ USD on software being stuck with bricks in their libraries (Ouch). However, Cakewalk somehow survived this and published a free version of Sonar for a while in order to make it up to their stranded customers (Both on and off Steam) while they figured what to do. Eventually they were acquired by Bandlab and in what I can only interpret as a good-faith gesture (Because honestly nobody expected them to do this), they released free executables of the program used to verify the license of the small module that checks the authenticity of the license (I imagine pointing to some new servers). And the rest is history, the software works again, for now at least.
Now. to get the software running, although to be honest I think it's pretty straight forward.
First you have to download the new Steamreg programs provided by Cakewalk, uncompress the archive, grab the x64 exe (x86 is busted and I don't think they have any interest in fixing them) and overwrite the exe in the program you want to use, In my case Sonar.
After that's done you have to open a cmd in admin mode and execute the program with a modifier containing your license.
After this you can run the program (It has to be a windows account with admin privilages) and it will prompt you for some info regarding your mail and place of origin to verify you're the legitimate owner of the license, if everything goes okay and the authentication server isn't shitting itself (Which DID happen to me) then you're free to use the program.
Now for the aforementioned pitfall.
If you have multiple Cakewalk programs instead of keeping everything in a single folder called Cakewalk Steam will separate it into Cakewalk + app number (It didn't use to do this).
This present a problem because as I stated above the x86 versions of the SteamReg exes are busted and unlike Sonar all other programs use the x86 version of the program you're trying to load by default (It's so tiresome).
The workout I found to this was by adding the path to the steamreg exe within the custom launch properties on Steam and have it point to the x64 folder of each program with the "Activate" option.
And then after running the above CMD for the .exe in the x64 folder of the program I wanted to use, everything worked without any issues.
Now fingers are crossed this version doesn't stop working again because legally cakewalk has no reason to keep these servers alive as they're a different legal entity after the Gibson fiasco.
