Noel Borthwick

What audio interface and driver mode? Do you have Cakewalk set to share the audio device with other applications?

Let me know if you can get a reproducible case with a project and we can follow up with NI.

Unfreezing reloads the synth into memory. If he app spontaneously shuts down it could be memory corruption from the synth.

You are mistaken. Plugin categories have nothing to do with activation. The categories not showing properly were because the database couldn't load the data. Cakewalk can be in a deactivated state and plugins will show fine. What did you do to fix it. If you reinstalled that was what solved the issue not anything else.

I'm not sure what your post has to do with activation. In the video cakewalk is fully activated. You are getting a database error. The most likely cause of that error message is either you don't have a good install or something on your system is blocking the database updater. Look in this folder C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Shared Utilities\Database\Updater You should see 2 files there. Also there should be 3 dlls in this folder. C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Shared Utilities\Database If you don't see that then something has removed those files on your PC and you will need to do a full installation again.

Glad you could solve it. In asio mode you must deselect both inputs and outputs before picking a different device. This could be more intuitive.

The problem is something on your system blocking writing files to your audio folder as the message indicated. Check that you don't have an antivirus program blocking writing to the project audio folder. Also if you are using one drive don't use the same folder that one drive is scanning.

BandLab assistant is not developed by Cakewalk. Were working on a standalone bootstrap installer that will install Cakewalk independently. Since Cakewalk can now activate itself BandLab assistant is no longer required for this.

Most likely somehow launchpad ended up partially copying some files because the program was still running or had not exited. It should check before doing anything if the program is already running. Running our uninstaller would not have caused the issue you had.

Im not sure what launchpad is - if you use 3rd party tools to run old versions then we have no way to solve problems with that. The cakewalk installer always updates the correct automation dll. Its likely that the external utility caused the issue. The installer doesnt ask to delete files so Im not sure what you mean. Mixing and matching different versions of the program will cause crashes and unexpected behavior. Always use our official rollback installer if you need to go to a prior build.

The CmdArgs registry string is used to specify the arguments to the external tool. Its definitely used in CbB and and its how we pass command line arguments to the Plugin Manager exe. Note that this is only used for the generic tool type. Look in the registry and you will see how Plugin Manager is set up. For plugin manager its set up like this: CmdArgs --- "/ParentWnd$ /VSTInventoryRegKey$" When Cakewalk launches plugin manager it expands the /ParentWnd$ variable to the window handle of Cakewalk and /VSTInventoryRegKey$ to the appropriate registry key. Other flags present in CmdArgs are passed through unmodified to the external process. Its easy to test this. Make a batch file that echo's its arguments and set up a tool that executes the batch file.

@gmp you have a bad install which is why its crashing. The version of cwauto130.dll is from an older installation and has a version 26.5.0.39. The version in the Jan release paired with the release you have is 27.1.0.98. Are you restoring files manually? Please re-install the latest version of Cakewalk using our installer and it should fix the crashes.

Thats impressive with just 8GB RAM

@Bob Greaves which version did you install when you ran into this problem? 24.4 is obsolete. We’ll contact you tomorrow with more instructions,

I have the multiple accounts wired to my NAS not pc. It allows me to have a hybrid storage solution.

I have wrk files from Cakewalk Professional 1 that open in CBB

Updates are handled in app now. If you update from within the app it only downloads the changes from your last installm so its very fast to update. Once the installer runs it automatically restarts the app. You can chek the version you have from Help / About. 2020.01 is the latest.

Did you just try and update or was this done a week ago? Which version of Windows are you running and did you update from within Cakewalk or from BandLab assistant? Please see this thread which includes a link to an updated installer. However if you updated today from Cakewalk that installer should already be delivered to you.

This should explain why you need to activate. Regarding the error this is may be system specific. What OS version are you running?

The catch is 1TB per user. Its relatively simple though just create multiple users under the plan to expand the storage.

If hell freezes over maybe.

You would be better off brushing up on your Brit English. Meng grew up and studied at math at Cambridge, England. He speaks really fast with a Brit accent

I use OneDrive for my home cloud storage. They have the most cost effective cloud storage at about $99 per year for the office 365 family plan. You get 6 TB of data and also all the office apps included. I also have multiple NAS's for local storage. The NAS connects directly to OneDrive to backup.

Background mode raises the thread quantum which is how long it is allowed to run before being task switched. This could generally be bad for low latency audio performance on multithreaded machines when you have other multithreaded processes running, because another thread could be blocking the engine from processing in time. Its another one of those tweaks that happened to work for some system configuration and gets propagated on the internet as being the truth.

Indeed while its not unique to us, its particularly bad in our industry because many folks have a herd mentality to follow by recommendation rather than by exploring needs. We have had our share of problems in the past so some flak is deserved, but I still see quotes of completely out of date information from decades ago that has long since been addressed. Products with a legacy as old as Cakewalk are bound to have baggage that a newer program won’t have (although the new program will also have bugs, just different) The “professional” tag is downright snobbery perpetrated by biases, whether it be Mac vs PC or other factors that equate cost vs value. We’ve even had people who said we weren’t professional because for the longest time there was no copy protection. The free aspect is also a factor since free can be associated mistakenly with unsupported freeware. The bottom line is user base demographics have been changing. Its not all about how many esoteric features you have anymore but how usable and inviting the product is and new users today have different expectations now than they did 10 years ago.