loq

I appreciate your most recent response. I will try to submit every bug I encounter and hope that it will be treated seriously.

13 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Are you running the latest updates to Fabfilter? We use those plugins routinely and never have crashes.

I am running the latest version. Note that I already finished this mix years ago, so at some point it was loading fine. I will escalate this issue and include the dumps.

13 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Many users would differ with you on this. Ripple editing is a fundamental editing feature that is used under the hood in a variety of operations which is why it needs to be robust. We can’t possible please every user with every update, but we do but we try to cover a broad area of stability and workflow fixes in every release. One of your reported issues is already in the next update.

Fair enough. I won't belabor the point and reasonable persons may disagree here. 

13 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

I realize that it takes time to report issues, time that you could be making music, but if errors encountered are not reported there is little chance of them being investigated. The use cases in a DAW are enormous so many others may never encounter the specific problems you see. We take every reported case seriously even if we don’t get to fixing them immediately. If you are willing to work with us, you may find that most of your problems can be solved quickly.

I'll take you at your word - thanks for taking the time.

21 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

My response was to your comment that there was no official channel to report bugs, when there has always been one. I apologize if your issue was previously reported. To clarify: reported issues go into a backlog and are prioritized based on user impact. We’re a very small team and your issue likely got missed somehow. The problem dates back to 2015 and isn’t something newly introduced so its not completely unexpected.

Bug fixes remain a priority but that isn’t all we do.

PS: I looked at the 5 cases you logged with support.
The plugin reorder issue is now fixed for next release.
The waves reset issue was fixed in early 2019. The other WAVES and autotune issues were 3rd party problems.
Re UAD we presently don't have a way to validate those in-house.

Regarding your comment about ripple editing and arranger I'm confused - are you referring to bugs you are encountering that are not fixed? If so what are the case numbers.

The five cases I've reported before are just the tip of the iceberg - literally every large mix I do in Cakewalk uncovers a bug. I've had clips disappear in take lanes when performing a series of operations on a track with the lanes collapsed. I've had glitches appear at the beginning of renders when they don't appear in playback. I mean, just this minute I opened an old mix just to refresh my memory of some bugs and Cakewalk didn't disappoint - I can't even recall a mix without encountering  a crash:

Is FabFilter to be blamed here? This is a recurring theme with Cakewalk - but Ableton, FL Studio, Reaper, etc. seem to not have this issue. If there was a way I could report every bug I encounter, and have faith that it would be taken seriously, perhaps I would report them all. An astute reader might have noticed by now that I have a lot of DAW's - this is because I've started the painful process of weaning myself off of Cakewalk and looking for a replacement, because time has shown that I can't trust it for serious work. I write this as a hail mary attempt at, perhaps, reversing this trend. Hopefully it isn't falling on deaf ears.

My comment about ripple editing and the arranger were meant to imply that a large portion of the bugs you're fixing are for recently introduced features that are at best, nice-to-haves, at worst, unnecessary.

18 hours ago, msmcleod said:

I'm pretty sure the iLok issue is not Cakewalk related.  All iLok integration is done within the plugin itself.  I had this message a couple of days ago - closing the project, opening up & signing into iLok manager, then re-opening the project fixed it for me.  

I'm not sure how your plugin ordering bug slipped through the cracks, but it's now logged & fixed it for the next release.

 

I just tried signing into ilok manager and then reopening the project - that didn't resolve the issue. If it was just one vendor's plugins that was exhibiting the behavior, I would have alerted that vendor - since it is more than one, it made sense to me to alert Cakewalk.

17 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Regarding stability we have been fixing hundreds of issues since we started and the focus has been on stability. Have you been following the change log? Most reported bugs are fixed in short notice if reported through official channels. Your issue has not been reported officially. There has been a way to report issues to support from the get go. See the FAQ:

 

I beg your pardon sir - my issue *was* reported officially on December 30, 2019 through support@cakewalk.com. I attached the same video that was in my last post with steps to reproduce.  Happy to forward the email thread to you. It's not wise to speak so confidently without having the facts.

And my questions are left unanswered. I'm sorry, but clearly email and user forums aren't a sufficient mechanism for bug reporting and tracking.  And congrats on the impressive changelogs - but what percentage of the bug fixes in Update 1 of this recent release are related to ripple editing and the arranger? Forgive me, but it feels a bit like two steps forward, two steps back.

Also, don't mistake me as a user without skin in the game - I've been using Cakewalk for almost two decades and have spent hundreds of dollars on software now being given away for free. It seems like there's a real opportunity now for Cakewalk to fulfill its potential as the best DAW not named ProTools for serious mixing - I speak up because I don't want to see that opportunity squandered by feature bloat and bug infestation.

It seems this version of Cakewalk has an issue with ilok's License Support - opening old projects containing plugins that it (e.g. Oxford Native plugins, Gullfoss, Slate Digital, etc.) gives the following error:

"The License Support software required to validate the license for this product is not installed. Please reinstall the product or download and run the License Support installer here: http://www.ilok.com"

As you can infer, the License Support software is already installed on my machine and is up-to-date. Opening these plugins in other DAWs (for example, Ableton) doesn't cause this issue.

I've tried reinstalling both the ilok and plugin software - do I need to rollback Cakewalk itself?

As an aside, can we please stop adding unnecessary features when there are still so many bugs? For example, a nasty bug regarding the silent re-ordering of plugins when dragging from one track to another (that I reported in 2019!!) has still not been addressed. Every project I work on that has more than fifty or so tracks is always the opposite of robust.  And every new release seems to bring new features that add to the bugs and instability. Why isn't there a formal bug reporting and tracking process? Why is the focus on new features, when the real killer feature of any serious tool is reliability and stability (which Cakewalk has seemingly always lacked)?

Plugin reordering bug: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m46gskzzu6s3af5/plugin_order_bug.mp4?dl=0