Noel Borthwick

@HOOK Lynx originally had a problem with MMCSS on a Lynx E44, where the driver would stop responding when Cakewalk enabled MMCSS. We had a case open with them and it was solved on their end back in Dec 2019, after I sent them a lot of info on this. Are you running the latest driver from them and if so, what problem do you see when MMCSS is enabled in Cakewalk for ASIO? In any case this is exactly why I added the ability to disable it from the host level and no longer default to MMCSS being enabled for ASIO drivers.

This is why we advise never installing or using these drivers. What they do is hook into Windows and utilize the audio device via low level WDM. Since at startup time Cakewalk loads all drivers to check for availability, when we hit this driver, it causes symtoms like you saw even if you never intended to use it. Sometimes it will even change the sample rate of your audio interface as a result of being loaded. The best solution is to remove these ASIO wrapper drivers from your system so Cakewalk never sees them. One thing I've been wanting to do is to change how Cakewalk starts up to avoid loading all ASIO drivers once one has been selected by the user. This might help alleviate problems like this. Its a pretty big change so will have to wait for when I have time to tackle that.

A few people had certain projects taking long to load with certain plugins, so we investigated it and found that some plugins can flood the message queue with data when loading. Since Cakewalk was waiting for all activity to finish at load time, this caused the delay. I've now also further improved load time on systems with no internet or poor internet speeds. The app should load immediately in such cases in the next build.

I looked at the dump file. The crash isn't in any Cakewalk code and its impossible to decipher from the stack. There are a lot of Sitala threads there but it's not clear if it was responsible. Very possible that some corruption caused the crash. The problem with errant plugins is it can be very hard to track down from the DAW level if crashes are random because they can corrupt memory. Details from your dump are below. Something (not Cakewalk) is basically trying to read from a bad memory address somewhere. Based on your description the most likely explanation one of the plugins possibly ran out of memory and had poor error handling leading to this crash. The bottom line is there is nothing any DAW can do to protect from cases like this. If you have consistent problems with particular plugins your best option is to work with the plugin vendor to fix it. ExceptionAddress: 00007ffb092812a8 (ntdll!RtlDispatchException+0x0000000000000048) ExceptionCode: c0000005 (Access violation) ExceptionFlags: 00000000 NumberParameters: 2 Parameter[0]: 0000000000000000 Parameter[1]: 00000000000000bc Attempt to read from address 00000000000000bc PROCESS_NAME: Cakewalk.exe READ_ADDRESS: 00000000000000bc ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xc0000005 - The instruction at 0x%p referenced memory at 0x%p. The memory could not be %s. EXCEPTION_CODE_STR: c0000005 EXCEPTION_PARAMETER1: 0000000000000000 EXCEPTION_PARAMETER2: 00000000000000bc FAULTING_THREAD: ffffffff STACK_TEXT: 00007ffb`092812a8 00007ffb`092812a8 ntdll!RtlDispatchException+0x48 STACK_COMMAND: ** Pseudo Context ** Pseudo ** Value: 3 ** ; kb SYMBOL_NAME: ntdll!RtlDispatchException+48 MODULE_NAME: ntdll IMAGE_NAME: ntdll.dll FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: BAD_DUMP_MISSING_MEMORY_NULL_CLASS_PTR_READ_c0000005_ntdll.dll!RtlDispatchException OS_VERSION: 10.0.19041.1 BUILDLAB_STR: vb_release OSPLATFORM_TYPE: x64 OSNAME: Windows 10 IMAGE_VERSION: 10.0.19041.2130

I wrote an article with guidelines for diagnosing plugin compatibility. Though to an end user it might not seem that way, the vast majority of problems are caused by plugin’s not being fully robust under a variety of operations. The most common problem areas are with following VST3 protocols, loading and saving state, thread safety, and proper separation of user interface operations from actual processing. Bugs in these areas can result in symptoms that vary from user interface problems, audio glitches, problems bouncing, crashes or hangs. We capture crash reports when possible and they sometimes lead to a resolution, but plugin issues are one of the most error prone areas in any DAW. You say you don’t see the same issues in your other DAW’s but that in itself doesnt mean anything beyond possibly the fact that the plugin vendor has not tested the same operations in Cakewalk. All DAW’s are vastly different in their internal architecture and a feature that works perfectly in one may or may not work in the other. We take plugin compatibility issues very seriously and if it indeed ends up being an issue in Cakewalk we fix it promptly. In fact even if it isn’t our issue we do what we can to work around it - much more than what some other DAW’s do.

That message means the plugin was previously flagged as failing. If you have changed things, then change the VST scan preferences to “rescan failed plugins” and try scanning again.

@tulamide try capturing a video while you stop the transport. That will show the exact message being displayed. Most likely this is autosave which if you have a big project will take a second to save the project. Perhaps one of your plugins is causing the project to get modified while playing.

Do you have auto save enabled? If so it's likely trying to save your project. Try disabling that.

The slow start issue your reported should be solved in the early access build. Your other issue on stopping the transport was also solved in the 2022.11 release. By default Cakewalk doesn't send all notes off messages now which was the cause of the delay with some instruments and plugins.

It's probably not windows itself. Same issues on Mac. I don't think the OS knows if there is no Internet without actually attempting a connection. I was hoping it would return a cached state immediately but apparently not.

It so turns out that there is no Windows API to reliably detect no internet when you are going through a network/router. The known API's report a valid connection even when the router actually has no internet! Likely because from the point of view of Windows it is "connected". I actually tested the API's and they report internet connectivity even though its dead. Windows itself actually pings the microsoft servers to check for internet. See this article. https://blog.superuser.com/2011/05/16/windows-7-network-awareness/ So in a nutshell the only way we can prevent this lag while checking, is by doing the check asynchronously. I'll look into this for a future version...

Please attach or PM the crash dump file for analysis. You can also try turning off flushing of plugin buffers in Preferences Configuration file. Some plugins misbehave with that setting.

How long is the timeout? It's probably doing the check for updates and timing out. It's quite fast when there is really no Internet but perhaps when it's on a lan with no Internet it's less efficient. I've now changed the API to check for an internet connection so perhaps it will improve. How do I test your use case - just have a lan connection with no Internet?

Not responding is shown when the user interface is busy for a long time. Again this is most likely mainly due to plug-ins talking a long time on destruction. See if manually closing plug-in UI before closing the project makes a difference. Are you using 32 but plugins? This will also slow down further in this case because of bitbridge overhead.

That's good. Do you have an lot of open plug-in windows in your projects? Most likely some plugins are doing excessive message activity when their UI is opened the first time, resulting in slowing down the project open. If you close the plug-in UI before saving the project is it still slow to open? We initially were waiting for all UI activity to finish before showing the project to prevent flicker. Now we only wait for our drawing to complete. Is the load time better than prior releases as well or the same as it was in 2022.09 now?

Are you seeing a change in speed loading your projects?

@tulamide since you are the only one reporting this issue can you please try the latest build we posted. There is a change that may resolve the issue you were seeing where some plugins could slow down project load times.

It's odd because there are no plugin related changes in 2022.11 compared to 2022.09. There are a few completely unrelated features that would not change this behavior and we don't observe this behavior. Is this happening with all your projects or only a specific one. Please try and pare down your project to try and troubleshoot it further and find what tracks/plugins specifically are causing the slowdown. Then PM me a link to a zip file with the project that exhibits the problem and we can try and replicate it here if possible. Also if you have a second PC to try the same test it would be useful. This article has some details on troubleshooting plugin related compatibility issues that might be useful.

Have you actually tried the rollback process to the prior version (2022.09) or are you speaking anecdotally based on what you observed after install. Also its important to note which version you were running BEFORE you installed 2022.11. If you had a much older version that you aren’t comparing apples to apples. Most of the time slowdowns like this are caused by AV programs or other tools interfering with the process of loading dll’s by aggressively checking them. Comparing other apps is meaningless because they are not loading 3rd party dll’s Another thing to try is to run the FULL installer which is linked on the release notes post, then reboot your system make sure other apps are not running and try again.

Maybe you added it by accident to an FX bin at some time. Or perhaps Melodyne itself creates the folder even though it doesnt need it. People copy projects with Melodyne all the time. I doubt that the separations folder is necessary and is likely used for internal temporary data. You can prove it for yourself by moving a project to a different machine or by temporarily renaming the seperations folder and opening an existing project. I bet the separations will be regenerarated from the existing project data.

I think there is some confusion about this. When using Melodyne in ARA mode the Melodyne Transfer folder is not used because the audio comes from Cakewalk's project audio folder directly. All assets are managed by the DAW. If you do not use ARA mode and capture audio in Melodyne then it will create a "Transfers" folder beneath our Audio folder. Cakewalk gives the plugin access to the project folder for this correctly. I've no idea what the separations folder is used for but it is not per region data managed by the app. Its specific to Melodyne and not handled by the DAW. I suggest talking to Celemony about how to manage the data in that folder.

Try deleting the target project on bandlab before uploading, or upload to a new project.

We do pass the project file location via the vst3 api and also another API. I'll have to check but Cakewalk itself doesn't create the melodyne sub folder. There must be some interop confusion. I can check with them..

@ku7431This is almost certainly the issue then. I'll send you all that you can test which should resolve the problem. Look for a pm from me. Edit: I've sent you a zip with the new file.

This would be a question for Celemony support. We don’t manage where Melodyne stores transfers.