End of a era.

Cakewalk, one of the world’s oldest music software companies, has been closed for good by its parent brand, Gibson.

The Boston-based company was best known for its digital audio workstation, Sonar, which started out life in 1987 as a software MIDI sequencer, also known as Cakewalk.

In a statement, Gibson, which purchased the brand in 2013, said it was closing Cakewalk “to better align with the company’s acquisition strategy”, focusing on building its presence in consumer electronics audio business through its Philips brand. The company also said that it is “ceasing active development and production of Cakewalk branded products”.

Cakewalk’s CTO Noel Borthwick said in a blog post that while Cakewalk will continue to work normally and its servers will continue to operate, monthly updates on Sonar will cease. “Our greatest motivation was the joy in producing software for an astonishingly passionate base of artists, musicians and producers who used our software to create music on a daily basis,” he said.

Cakewalk has had a turbulent decade. The company was bought by Roland in 2008 and sold to guitar giant Gibson five years later, but it retained a passionate following. In a recent studio interview, Chromeo told FACT they only stopped using their 1997 Pentium II PC and Cakewalk on the making of their current album.

The company’s last major announcement was Momentum, an app for syncing song ideas across mobile and desktop that requires a monthly subscription fee to get the most out of its features. Last year, the company launched a free version of Sonar for Mac users.

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