Noel Borthwick

@Ronny.G Was the offline activation process successful and are you actually running the latest EA version of Cbb on the offline machine? Please post a screenshot or video showing the issue. Edit: We think we know why you ran into this. Your version of Cbb has likely never been signed in ever. This was an unexpected workflow. Will look into it and see if we can handle this through product center. Offline use in apps like this takes a lot of extra handling to make it work properly.

If you don't get a crash logged try capturing a dump from task manager while the app appears hung.

We're working on a 3d visualization Craig Anderton version. When you are tired of mixing you can zone out watching your faders move in 3d on a virtual mixing board and your waveforms flying around the screen

Yeah AFIK Ableton was vector from the get go. Most modern application use SVG vector graphics for art or a hybrid approach when bitmaps are really needed. In CbB all graphical elements are bitmaps including simple things like buttons. In such cases, the downside with bitmaps are they are much bigger than equivalent vectors leading to slower load time and memory bloat. Additionally applications that run at high DPI have to store multiple resolutions of the bitmaps to avoid leading to even more bloat. Otherwise you get major aliasing and fuzziness as seen in CbB when you run on high def displays. In Sonar almost all resouces are now vectors and very fast to draw since they are typically simple button graphics.

Not at all. As stated we havent seen any performance downside. It was never implied that Cbb would be indefinitely made available only that it would be kept active during the transition period to Sonar. Its not going to be affected in the short term.

I'm running sonar on a 10 year old pc with a very average graphics card and I don't see any performance degradation compared to cbb. The graphics look vastly cleaner rendered as svgs compared to bitmaps (no aliasing) and text looks much sharper too. This is especially evident if you are running at higher dpi resolutions like 2k or 4k. We have been paying attention to performance and have not seen any hit so far. In fact we've made other optimizations to rendering. Btw for those thinking they can’t upgrade without new hardware, my old almost 10 year old DAW PC is running with no issues on win 11 even though there's no TPM chip add the CPU is out of spec. There are ways to get windows 11 installed on older hardware

You can send us dumps from any version within reason. We prefer dumps from the most recert version since it's thr easiest for us to access. Also issues from old builds may have already been fixed.

Can you share a project that is in this state?

Check the new build in the early access forum. https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/topic/74284-cakewalk-202402-early-access/

What activation issue? In my experience, if you cannot sign in at all using the standard web based auth then that is caused by some system side incompatibility with traffic being blocked from the browser to the app. For such cases there is an alternate sign in mechanism using password flow that uses an in-app sign in process.

It refers to using it in the short term. Cbb will be available for some time to give users time to transition to Sonar which will be the only product supported going forward. I think we've all learned that lifetime messaging can be ambiguous right? 😉 The bigger question to me is why anyone serious about using our products want to use an old unsupported product, when a much better (and affordable) version is made available. If you want to see this product developed further, it's only fair that we ask for you to support us in turn. I don't think anyone expected that cbb would be indefinitely free forever. In the future there may be a free version (with some limitations) however.

Hi @tdehan thanks, if you can please send a dump file it will help is figure out why it hangs for you. We'll obviously fix whatever is causing that. We're also considering throttling the prompt so it won't pop on each launch. As mentioned, this was a first cut that was put in a very long time ago (even before the last release) so it hasn't been refined at all. I understand your use case of the product and it sucks that you had to experience this problem live. We'll find a solution but please send a dump ASAP since thats the quickest way. You can PM me directly. >>unless we have all been hiding under a rock we are all aware that CbB will be transitioning You might be surprised to learn how many live under rocks - we still get people contacting support trying to buy products from 2015 😜 >>With that said, it has also been my understanding that the last final updated version 29.09.0.075 would keep running without further updates. It may be updated but not with feature updates. We cannot guarantee that it will keep running indefinitely but certainly during the Sonar transition period. See Jesse's post here - if there is any planned change it will be communicated clearly in advance. Also as mentioned earlier all prior builds of CbB will stop working at some point since they use services that are deprecated.

@tdehan can you confirm that you are running build 29.09.0.075? If it hangs you can capture a dump file while the app is hung and send a link to me to investigate. Here are some details about how to capture a hang dump This is always the quickest way to diagnose such issues. Regarding the experience with this, we'll continue to improve on it but it was put in as an initial placeholder attempt for the announcement many months ago. FWIW Its very common for free apps that have an upgrade path to display such messaging. (As you know CbB will be transitioning to a paid fully supported product)

Pretty unlikely. Once the app is activated it doesn't retry until the lease expires which is quite long. Check whether you have some backup script or something that is restoring some state when you reboot. If so, that might explain why Cakewalk is not activated again after a boot.

This is likely due to some specific settings you have for the start screen that is referencing the cakewalk.com domain that doesnt support the older apps. What is the version of the startscreen exe you have? We may update the Startscreen and change its references to Cakewalk.

Yes. If you are not a steam user who had purchased legacy SONAR, this article doesn't apply to you.

The OP's issue was solved. Most likely temporary connectivity. Your issue is some weird web browser bug where sometimes it won't open the web page if another page is open with the same URL. The old page is stale and no longer communicate with the app. That's why it works when you close it. For SSO it's generally best to close the browser before signing in so it starts clean. The www is a POS 🙂

The product center will only handle current cakewalk applications not legacy ones.

Would have to check what scalar is doing. It's very unlikely that the problem is in cbb. The plugin may be blocking audio processing when you drag in midi.

We already have full cross platform project transfer to and from Sonar <==> Next using our own new transfer format. It goes beyond what this does and supports tracks, buses, auxes, plugins, instruments, routing, automation, arranger track, folders and more. Since it's our own interchange format we have full flexibility to rapidly grow as the need arises.

@Klaus M Old versions of SONAR will always open newer files but without any new feature content. This is because we support backwards and forwards compatibility. Did you try renaming the file back to cakewalk.exe and trying. If it doesnt work then something is still blocking the Windows services somehow. As mentioned, there are other apps that install hooks or tamper with Windows for nefarious purporses leading to issues like this.

This is the wrong forum to post information on Next

Error 20 means something on your PC is tampering with the system used to check the digital signature of the app. Most likely caused by running cracked software or your PC has been hacked by something. Look in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options Check for a value DevOverrideEnable set to 1 for that key. If its there delete it and reboot your machine and try again. Also sheck if cakewalk.exe is listed as a sub key underneath there with a value "debugger" or similar. If so, delete that as well.

@limpet if you cannot sign in then activation will not work. There have been zero changes to sign in for this release. Close your browser first and then click sign in in the help menu. If that doesn't launch a browser window then something on your system is blocking that (likely an AV setting) and you will have to resolve this issue first.

@Shinjiman did you try signing out and signing in again from the Help menu? After you sign in do you get any error message or does the web page accept your sign in? Please turn off any AV that could block the web page communicating with Cakewalk.