Noel Borthwick

Ironically I have a macbook here also used daily. The macbook needs to be rebooted at LEAST once a week or audio goes wonky on it. My Windows development PC stays online without a reboot sometimes for months and it gets a LOT of abuse. Not to say Windows doesn't have problems but stability these days isn't a major issue.

Guys you absolutely do NOT need to be connected to use Cakewalk! I think you are misunderstanding what activation does. 🤯 You can run cakewalk anytime anywhere without internet. The bandlab integration features are completely optional and those do need an internet. Even activation can be done without an internet connection from the PC you use Cakewalk with.

@bertus weyers Have you reported these issues to NI? Also did you send crash dumps to us? If so what is your case number? We have a good relationship with NI engineering and can forward any issues if any,

@Keni You sent the dump file to support?

Please capture a hang dump file if you get the not responding error and send a link to us. Instructions are in the FAQ for problem reporting. As far as Ozone goes thats something you will have to follow up with their support. Please attach a sample project file that has the issue so we can double check it.

Leaving it on doesn't automatically help us. Its up to you to follow up and report the issues or contact the vendors concerned.

There is no manual reactivating required. It all happens automatically and transparently. The only time you will ever get this prompt is if your PC has been offline and it needed reactivation AND if you have not updated for 6 months. If you have updated ever within the 6 month period you will never see the activation prompt. As mentioned above one requirement is to keep the software up to date. If you follow these simple steps activation is a non issue.

The music industry is full of people with biases. I doubt this was Korg’s policy but coming from someone in support who was a Mac user. The same thinking goes around in some educational institutions like Berklee unfortunately. I wonder what musicians would feel if a company told them that if they were a serious musician they would use a Gibson instead of a Fender lol.

Your version works because the model back then was you needed to purchase a full license for around $500 to get a permanent unlock. However even with your SONAR license if you install it on a new PC you still need to activate it and need an internet connection or offline activation. No change there. If you don’t have permanent internet, you can connect to a mobile hotspot and activate in seconds. Or use offline activation which is also simple. I really don’t get this paranoia about continuity. Did anyone lose anything when the product shifted hands 3 years ago? No, in fact the situation is much better than it was there with the product being free. If something happens in the future it seems logical to assume that whoever has the product is not going to leave customers high and dry.

We you running with 5 earlier or 7? If so your crashes were real, we’re just the messenger reporting them. If you don’t want messages and prefer to potentially crash silently and randomly set it to 1

MacOS is simple and intuitive and audio traditionally was given a focus so things “just worked” out of the box for end users without twiddling. Most musicians want to make music not spend time fiddling with their systems. Also Apple from the get go were “pro creators” even way back in the 80’s, a mantra that only picked up on much much later with the Surface line of products. This is the real reason for the stigma that Windows has dating back from the 80’s. It was not taken seriously by music professionals, because Microsoft didn’t market Windows to them at all or even try to make it better for musicians. Old habits and biases die hard in the music community even more than other industries, because a lot of it goes around by word of mouth leading to a herd mentality more prevalent than in other industries that are more merit driven.

Sure but only a tiny fraction of users are offline permanently. And we have a solution in place for them called offline activation. As for requiring bi annual activation here is the reason from the activation FAQ. Its not unusual at all to require the version to be updated occasionally. Otherwise we are inundated with support requests from people running outdated versions. We can only offer efficient support for the latest version since we are constantly fixing issues. Why is activation required? Activation ensures that you are running genuine Cakewalk software obtained from our servers and that you have a current version of CbB is actively supported by us. Running an updated version ensures a better user experience by getting the latest features and fixes to the software. Additionally back end changes to the BandLab cloud may periodically require the software to be updated to remain compatible.

We have needed registration since the SONAR days. Nothing has changed. It allows us to know how many users we have and keep the software up to date. As of releases this year, activation is completely automatic and once you have signed in to your BandLab account (from within Cakewalk) there is no manual intervention required anymore. It should automatically refresh itself whenever needed without needing any user intervention or the need for BandLab assistant. Most other products require registration or worse, dongles. I think our system is as non intrusive as it gets for modern software. So I'm curious why you perceive this as being risky.

Cakewalk 2021.04 Update 1 Release Candidate [build 170] is now available! Please sanity check this. It contains several new fixes and improvements for recording. Thanks for your assistance so far in helping us make it a stable release. It will go live early next week.

Cakewalk 2021.04 Update 1 Release Candidate [build 170] is now available! Please sanity check this. It contains several new fixes and improvements for recording. Thanks for your assistance so far in helping us make it a stable release. It will go live early next week.

Thanks for the next build I've changed it to default to 1 so it will be opt-in for now. I really don't see why this would make any difference unless some plugins are throwing thousands of exceptions. Its a bit of a shame since in general we want errors to be flagged otherwise they will never get fixed. I recommend running with level 7 for troubleshooting since that is the most strict. We are already finding many previously undetected plugin issues.

Sorry I don't follow. When do you see the difference - loading or playing?

@u-u-u You can upload as a revision to an existing project. Here are two ways to do it: 1. Upload a new project from Cakewalk. Once you have done that any subsequent updates to the SAME project will upload as revisions to the BandLab project. i.e. The Cakewalk project will store a reference to the uploaded BandLab project and tracks changes from that point on. 2. Download a project created on BandLab to create a NEW Cakewalk project. Once you do this any changes to this project will upload as revisions to the ORIGINAL BandLab project. Similar to 1 the Cakewalk project stores a reference to the BandLab project and tracks changes from that point on.

Thanks do you see overhead only when loading the project or when playing it?

@Milton Sica With which plugins specifically? If you can provide a test project for us to verify it will be useful.

As I clarified in my PM there is no one size fits all solution. There are known cases with major vendors where running vst2 and vst3 versions side by side cause crashes. So the default is set to favor VST3 migration. Note that migration ONLY occurs if it is explicitly supported by the vendor so it the vendor doesn't want this to happen they should not allow it. This is not a new behaviour and has been in place since 2013

>>5 - Unhandled errors and heap corruption is detected (Default) @Colin Nicholls What is your exception handling level set to? In 155 it defaults to 5 if you haven’t set it. You can try setting it back to 7 to catch even more unhandled exceptions.

I don’t follow. It is already optional if you uncheck the box…

@Milton Sica Are you sure about this? There is no cost unless of course an error occurs. Have you tried it with a setting of 5 instead of 1? 5 will at least detect heap corruption. Please check and let me know if you can actually demonstrate a slowdown by timing it or posting a video. I’ve not noticed any slowdowns with many plugins.

This is the most likely culprit. Did you recently reformat your hard drive or disable short file names in the file system using some “optimizer”?