pulsewalk

To answer your question, I did not use any folders at all at the point where these problems begun. Not in any of the projects I have problems with. Although I've organised the project into folders and subfolders, but that did not make any difference that I know of. The project was corrupt before it, and likewise after it.

No problem at all, just keep on "hijacking" .. I'm actually only glad to see I'm not the only one with these problems, because then maybe the developers are more interested in taking a look at it. Yes, there may indeed be a connection between freezing and these events. Although, everything is such a mess now in this project that I don't know anymore. I've had other similar problems also with automation that I've mentioned in this thread, there's also a link to that specific thread where I explain the problems and show it with a couple of videos. It's where automation information are "ghosting" between different tracks, which should NOT happen. And those were not frozen tracks. Seems like Cakewalk have problems with keeping the tracks well separated/isolated from each other. There simply seems to be a problem with "connected" tracks, for some reason. It should be good if Cakewalk could keep the tracks "separated" / "isolated" better so this cannot happen.

Yes, you are correct about this and this would probably be the way to go, if one want to get to the bottom of this. However, this is a project with around 150 tracks now, and over 200 before (I will have to go back to earlier versions too, to work myself backwards to find anything), and a piece that's running around like 10 minutes or so. It's "huge" really. This computer is struggling with both running it and opening it, even though I have 64 GB RAM and an okay CPU. To do all that you've described is not possible for me due to lack of time. It would probably take weeks to do all that. It's not like an ordinary little project that loads in a couple of seconds... oh no, this one is heavy. So what I'm doing right now is going back enough versions so most of the work is "intact" and "un-corrupted", and trying to recreate the tracks I now know WILL be corrupted in the future if I do this and that (I already know because of the newer versions), and then, instead of deleting these tracks, which I KNOW causes other tracks to go corrupt, I simply mute and archive them, then leave them be in the project. That's the only reasonably fast way to do this. Otherwise I would need a computer that is approximately 50-100x as fast as this one, and maybe then, it would be doable that you describe there, just like it would be on this computer if this project would be a much smaller one. But of course, if I find out anything at all that point to what could be the culprit, I'll report it here asap.

There MUST be some kind of connection between tracks. What is it? And how do I check this? So, if I delete a corrupted track. The freeze button on ANOTHER track suddenly are greyed out, why? There MUST be a solution! The solution can't be that I will need to trash the entire project

I'm trying to figure out what the culprit is. So the latest problem is that 3 track's has been corrupted because I fixed another track earlier. So these tracks does not play any audio anymore (they are VSTi tracks). One of them seem to have a functional freeze button, that you can press. However, when it's pressed, nothing happens. The other two have greyed out freeze buttons. None of these tracks play any audio anymore, complete silence. I've tried to delete all the FX on these, but no difference. Tried to set output channel etc. manually, no difference. Duplicating them does not make the duplicate work, it's just as dead as the original. Replacing the VSTi doesn't make any difference. What more can I try to reset this corruption? BTW, I also tried to open the project with SHIFT key, to open the project in recovery mode. Didn't help.

@sergedaigno, @Herbert Zio, @Jeremy Oakes None of those actions does any difference. The thing is, it's not like every version of the project is corrupted. It's enough to go back a number of versions and then the corrupted tracks forks fine. The problem is that when I in that state try to fix the one or few problematic tracks, then it creates a chain reaction, where other, never before corrupted, tracks go corrupt also. And if I fix them, something else goes corrupted... and it only gets worse the more I try to correct. It's almost like 1 correction creates 2 more, and correction of those 2 more creates 3 or 4 more ...like a never ending chain reaction of corruption. It really is a hell. It's more or less impossible to know exactly where this corruption begins really with so many tracks. This project is very heavy, so only to open it takes quite a while. So trial and error takes lots of time, not least with the huge amount of tracks there are in this project.

Thanks! Tried exactly this, but it made no difference

Now two more tracks are corrupted. They won't play. One of them also have a greyed out freeze button. Maybe even more tracks are corrupted that I don't know about... sounds like several other things are missing too, so I'm not sure anymore. Is it even possible to stop this chain reaction of endless corruption or is my entire project now completely f*cked??? About 150 tracks as of now and lots of work behind it. The project is like 2 years old. Of course, I've not been working on it constantly for that long, but it is lots of work behind it anyway.

Now two more tracks are corrupted. They won't play. One of them also have a greyed out freeze button. Maybe even more tracks are corrupted that I don't know about... sounds like several other things are missing too, so I'm not sure anymore. Is it even possible to stop this chain reaction of endless corruption or is my entire project now completely f*cked??? About 150 tracks as of now and lots of work behind it. The project is like 2 years old. Of course, I've not been working on it constantly for that long, but it is lots of work behind it anyway.

Oh I'm sorry. I misunderstood your first post, the below cited quote to be exact. My english is not that good I'm afraid Sorry. I also think Mark is correct in his analysis and that means that probably some plugin I use does not work well with Cakewalk, causing corrupted projects. This is of course a big problem for me since I use tons of different plugins and I have not the faintest idea which one that might be causing this. Not least because these corrupted tracks are different from each other, with different VSTi's, different VST FX or some even without any VST FX at all, where the VSTi (instrument) used is not even the same as the corrupted track that made the now corrupt track, corrupted. if you know what I mean. So I cannot see a connection even there. Maybe the corruption moves and are "spreading" with moved clips, I don't know that either. This project is huge with around 200 tracks for like a week ago, which I managed to shrink to just below 150 tracks. There's some more I could delete, but not many. Not with ease anyway, because then I'd have to rely on alot of automation instead and so forth, which only would give me a headache. It's sometimes easier to spread out vertically with track count, than horizontally by combining many clips from several tracks and taking care of them with automation. Of course, that does only work if the clips are played serially. If they're played parallelly (at the same time) with different settings, that is more or less impossible to achieve if you want different automation/settings on those parallelly played clips. So, hence the many tracks in this currently around 8 minute project, which will be probably at least 9-10 minutes when I'm done with it. If I ever get that far concerning all the newly discovered corruptions in the project, that is

Your explanation sounds as the most logical and realistic this far! I'm sure your correct in your analysis. This is a very old project with "endless" versions and saves, so I would have to go very far back to see what happened. This task would be practically impossible really. And since I have similar issues in other projects, it's not unthinkable that a certain plugin(s) are causing this in the first place. But which one of all the many ones I use is impossible for me to say at this point. Because the thing is, that by the time I discover these "corruptions", I'm a very long way from the instant where the corruption began, so it's like impossible to know what caused it in the first place. And I guess it's not possible to analyze a project file in an understandable way where it's opened up in a certain editor or viewer and one can see all the connections with plugins and all the settings etcetera. This way maybe one could find that error that are causing it but I guess there's no such "viewer". Also, I guess there's no "error correction"-feature that checks the entire project for errors and corrects them?

My guess would be that a project gets corrupted somewhere along the line and these corrupted issues lay latent until some portion of those are touched. And this for some reason involves that some sort of "links", that should not be there, are created between certain tracks. And when you delete one such track, that link is jumping back to whatever track that comes "next" on this chain. It seems like it here at least. I don't know how else to explain that perfectly working tracks suddenly go corrupt and buggy, just because another buggy track is deleted. There should not be any links between these tracks at all. And then you delete that one, and the bug jumps to another track, and then the next one, and next one. A seemingly never-ending link of bugs where in the end the whole project is so corrupted it's not workable. How this could be explained by user error is beyond me

One solution of course is to NOT delete a buggy track, but to instead archive it, and thus "containing" the bug so it won't "spread", almost like a "virus" . It can be done in situations where a huge project needs to be finished in the same DAW (Cakewalk) because it would be too much work to move it to another DAW. But this is of course no permanent solution, but only a solution to salvage what can be salvaged from a "buggy hell", so to speak.

Sure, why not. Not the fastest computer on earth nowadays, but it's certainly not slow: Windows 10 Pro 64bit on Intel i9-10850K running stock speed 3.60GHz. 64 GB 3200MHz RAM RME Fireface audio interface. Cakewalk version 2022.11 (Build 021, 64 bit) My system is extremely stable. No memory errors and all other software are running just perfectly, other DAW's too. Video editing, yeah what ever I run, it runs just fine, except for Cakewalk that is. Re-installation of Cakewalk does not make any difference. Reverting back to a clean OS install and then re-installing Cakewalk does not make a difference. I'm like out of options here. I would be so happy if I was the one doing something wrong. Because in that case, it would easily be possible to fix. But it does unfortunately don't seem that easy. Just look at this other thread of mine (see below).. also bugs that cannot be explained with user error. Also, please have in mind, I have similar problems with other projects too, although, I haven't tried to correct them as much as I've did in this project, so the bugs have not had a "chance to spread" like in this project.

Yeah! Seems like a good choice. Reaper is what I'm thinking also, not least since it can import CW projects as I've heard. So I'll try Reaper out soon enough here. 👍

Yes! And this has happened to me too a lot of times! And just as you, I just didn't give it much attention, I just let it be! However, now, when I've discovered that these problems just keeps building if I try to correct those errors, which you also describe, I'm starting to understand there are underlying problems. It feels like Cakewalk is "connecting" or "linking" information between tracks, which it should not. So when you do something to one track, certain things like freezing, automation work etc., then another track is affected for some weird reason. And when you try to fix that newly affected track, then ANOTHER track gets affected. A link of never ending bugs, which might be lying there latent as long as you don't try to fix them.

Trust me, these are bugs. There's no logical reason why it would do such things as I describe. I've been working with DAW's since the 90's, so I'm not new to DAW's and music production. CWPA was just fine back in the days compared to this. I'm not saying I'm without faults or that I'm the biggest Cakewalk expert on earth, rather the opposite and I probably know like 1% of Cakewalk. But since I've worked with computers practically all my life, tons of different software, not least DAW's, I must say I cannot see one logical explanation for the Cakewalk to turn perfectly working tracks into buggy tracks just because I delete another buggy track, that could somehow be explained with user error. Just look at this older thread of mine, there's no logic in it: It seems rather like that Cakewalk, somehow, and for some reason, wrongly links track information between tracks it should not. Or something like in that direction. So when I touch one track, something happens with another, which should NOT happen.

Okay, so here's an update before I reply to your answers. 1. So, after a lot of work I recreated the tracks that were buggy, and deleted them afterwards. And then I played the project. Yep, then came ANOTHER bug instead. A bug that was never there before. It is a bassline. I'm just hearing that it sounds really horrible, very out of rhythm, so I check it out. It is an already frozen track, and I've not touched it what so ever, so why is it out of rhythm? The clip has never been moved. 2. So I zoom in on the wave form and it looks just fine! It plays out of synch / out of rhythm, whatever you want to call it, but the waveform looks just fine visually. 3. So I decide to unfreeze the track to look at how the MIDI is aligned. I click unfreeze, the blue unfreeze button turns to grey and not-freezable again. Still, I cannot see MIDI, I still see the "frozen" waveform. So then I'm thinking that I duplicate the track with Events ticked, and the track is duplicated. What do I get? I get a MIDI track instead! I'm duplicating what seems to be a frozen track visually, and get a MIDI track instead. 4. Okay, so I zoom in on the MIDI, it looks just fine, it's aligned! Also it plays just fine, in synch and all. So, i'm thinking, alright minor bug, it works now, so lets freeze it again. But I can't freeze it, since the freeze button is greyed out, doesn't matter if I click it a million times, nothing happens. 5. So then I'm thinking, alright, let's recreate this bassline-track by inserting a new instrument and just move the MIDI clips into the new one, and then delete the old buggy track. So I create a new instrument track with Serum and then I open up Serum in the buggy track just to see the settings, preset used and so forth, so I can recreate it in the newly created track. But of course, when I open up the old instance of Serum in the buggy track, the whole VSTi seems initiated and it also says - init - in the preset window. And for sure the sound is no init sound! So next step is to go back, I don't know how many versions, and open up old saved versions of the project till I see one where the track has NOT been frozen yet, so I can open up Serum and save the settings as a preset. I find it, and I do that. Then back to the buggy project again. 6. So back in the newly created instrument track and Serum, I open up the saved preset and voila, at least that works. 7. I play the track as it is, with the working preset, which is now playing the MIDI clips which I copied from the buggy "frozen, but still unfrozen" track. And what do I hear? The preset sounds weird, like double tones or something. So I check the preset again on the piano roll and the sound plays just fine. But as soon as I play the copied MIDI clips it sounds really bad. 8. At this point I'm just double checking if deleting the notes and creating new ones solves the problem. IT DOES! Alright. So why is it playing double out of sync? Is it double notes on top of each other? I'm checking, it's not. Everything seems fine, it just plays weird but seems ok visually. I know now that I will have to redo all the notes manually probably. I'm also exhausted at this point and just ending my session to go to bed. Alright. Anybody see a certain pattern here? It's exactly as I described in my #2 post in this thread, that it seems almost like a chain of bugs that appear one after the other as soon as one buggy track has been deleted. And this is what I have to deal with from time to time. Restart of Cakewalk, or the whole computer, does not help one bit, no difference at all. I'm seeing the same type of serial bug evens also with automation lanes, here's an earlier thread from me with videos included with the bug:

For example, its almost like a chain of bugs... let's say you have 10 tracks, and all is OK but track 9. So you want to do something with track 9. Maybe freeze, or unfreeze, and when you do that, track 3 and 5 suddenly goes not-freezable or not-unfreezable. But when you, after alot of work, do a workaround that, by maybe importing the unfrozen clips from an older version of the track, and then delete track 3 and 5 to get rid of these buggy tracks, then track 2 and 7 get corrupted instead. If you do the same with 2 and 7, then 8 will go corrupt. If you fix that one, some other track will bug out. It's like a chain of events. If you with lot of work fix one thing, another thing goes bad. Quite frustrating. This well, the entire project just goes down the drain.

The "buggyness" of Cakewalk has gone so far, that I'm considering switching to another DAW. Am I the only user that have so much problems? It has been soo much the past months, couple of years. And now just today, I got to the stage that I feel this is just un-workable. I have a quite large projects and today, the whole project seems to be just going down the drain. It's not possible to freeze certain trakcs, it not possible to unfreeze certain tracks. If you unfreeze a track, then suddenly another track goes un-unfreezable (not-unfreezable). If I do it in another order, than yet again an other track is just playing constant white noise. So I will have to close the project and restart the entire DAW to be able to start over and make it in another order. When I do that something else happens. It's just buggyness the whole way through. I've not mentioned a tenth of all the things that just happened this evening. Yesterday, there was other things. The day before that, other things too. And so on, all the way back a couple of years. I can't imagine professionals can work like this, so I guess it's flawless for everybody else, or they just wont touch this DAW, I don't know. But for me, this for sure won't work for much longer. Smaller projects can be quite ok, with only a few bugs, but the larger ones are almost impossible to work with. I have a fast PC with lots of RAM, so computing power is not an issue what so ever, neither is the audio interface. I like the Cakewalk workflow, so I'm not so keen on switching DAW's, but when it becomes un-workable, I'm afraid I'll have to get used to some other DAW instead, no matter how much I'd like to stay with Cakewalk Does anyone else experience much "buggyness" or am I the only one?

Yeah, but unfortunately, as I wrote, the Mix recall does not work for me for some reason. It does not save the mute-state of any track at all

So, I have several large projects. One is around 200 tracks, where I have lots of muted tracks here and there. Is it possible to lock or disable the global mute button? (The one you can accidentally press and all the tracks get un-muted??) Or even better, is there an UNDO function for the mute? Because every time I do this, I simply have to close the entire project and open it up again, if I want the mute state (that I had before the accidental un-muting) back. Problem with this is not only it takes forever, since a project of this size is very slow to open,... but I also lose all the work I've done since the last save or auto-save. Most often, I save a new project either way with all the tracks unmuted, especially if I've done much work since the last save. Just to be able to manually re-enable all the old previous mutes. But this is extremely time consuming as I have to open an older instance of the project and start to comparing them to see which tracks that were muted. This is really a pain in the a**! Mix recall does NOT work with my mutes. According what can be read here, mute settings should be stored, but is NOT, at least not for me: https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=Mixing.48.html

I just tried this, but "Thru = Now" does only select all the "whole" clips(the ones that is entirely behind) "behind" the position cursor, not the ones that's crossing it. I need to particularly select the ones that's crossing the position cursor, so they won't be cut in half by Ripple edit when I insert time.

Yeah, a keyboard shortcut for locking clips needs to be added. I'll do that next time I need to insert time. What I also would like to see, is a feature, to select every clip that the play cursor touches (is placed "above"), so that way, what I need to do would only be 2 clicks away. 1. Select everything that the play cursor touches *click* 2. Lock all the selected clips *click* And then just insert time. As far as I know, there's no such feature, to select the clips that the play cursor "touches". Maybe could be solved with scripting?

Yeah, maybe I'll post a link to the finished track when its done The method I'm using is described in the second post in this thread: Your suggestion is actually the same method I've used from the beginning, you can read about it in post #2 in this thread, according to the link above (it's also cited there).