Noel Borthwick

@Barry Seymour exporting tracks captures the output of the tracks and NOT the buses so you will not hear bus effects. If you want bus effects export with source category set to buses. Then solo the track you want and export. This is the only way to do this presently.

Its not related to the last update. Have you signed in to BandLab via Cakewalk before? If not your activation may be more than 6 months old and require renewal. Here is a FAQ on activation since this item seems to come up often.

This FAQ answers common questions about Cakewalk activation. What is activation? All Cakewalk software requires an activation process to unlock full use of the software. Activation is a process that links the software to your BandLab account. Activation is required before you can use the software and is a seamless process that typically only takes a second after you sign on to your BandLab account from within Cakewalk. Why is activation required? Activation ensures that you are running genuine Cakewalk software obtained from our servers and that you have a currently supported version. Running an updated version ensures a better user experience, by getting the latest features and fixes to the software. It also guarantees that your software stays activated, because you get a fresh activation lease every time you install an update. Note: Backend changes to the BandLab services may periodically require the software to be updated to remain compatible. Why do I get a sign in message when I start my Cakewalk application? Normally activation is an automatic process if you are signed in to your BandLab account from within the application. If the activation lease has expired and you are not signed in, you will be prompted to sign in to activate on startup. Occasionally, saved sign-in credentials may occasionally expire requiring you to sign in again. This happens very infrequently (every few weeks) and is a normal part of the single sign on security process. How do I sign in to BandLab Sign in is prompted automatically only when needed, such as when the application is in a deactivated state or when you try to use feature that requires access to BandLab services. You must sign in to BandLab using the same credentials that you used to create your BandLab account. You may also use any one of the alternate sign-in mechanisms such as using your Google, Apple, Facebook account info as long as you have associated those with your BandLab account. If you aren't prompted to sign in via a notification, you may also choose to sign in manually by selecting Sign In to BandLab from the Cakewalk Help menu. On choosing to sign in, a web browser window will open displaying the sign in page below. How to activate Cakewalk software Cakewalk applications must always be activated by using in-app activation or via Offline activation If your PC is online, activation is done automatically and seamlessly. The first time you install and run Cakewalk, you will be prompted to sign in to BandLab, using the same credentials you used to create your BandLab account. Once you sign in successfully, Cakewalk will will be automatically activated. In-app activation/refresh Cakewalk is normally activated automatically directly from within Cakewalk. When starting Cakewalk for the first time, you will be prompted to sign-in. After signing in, Cakewalk will automatically activate itself. Under normal circumstances, activation will require no manual user intervention going forward, beyond the initial sign-in. Offline activation If your DAW does not have an active internet connection, offline activation is also an option. Offline actication, is presently unavailable but an activation utility will be made available soon. How long does activation last? If you are signed in to BandLab and your system is online, the application will stay permanently activated without any user intervention. If your system is offline, however, the activation lease can last from 1 - 3 months, after which you will need to reactivate to continue using it. When this happens, an activation required notification will be displayed . Activation may occasionally be required if you make major changes to your system such as installing a new OS, changing the motherboard, etc. Reactivation normally occurs automatically and seamlessly when you launch Cakewalk if it's needed. However, if you don't have an active internet connection, you will need to enable it or follow the offline activation steps. Do I always need to be online for Cakewalk to work? No. You only need to be online in order to update the software to the latest version or when activating it. If you choose the in-app activation method, under normal circumstances, activation will require no manual user intervention beyond the initial sign-in to BandLab. An internet connection is required to activate as described above but is not necessary for general Cakewalk usage. Does signing in to BandLab or reactivating Cakewalk transmit information about my usage to BandLab? The only purpose of activating Cakewalk is to register the software with BandLab and verify validity of the program. No other user data is transmitted during this process. The sign-in data is used to verify your BandLab user account identity during operations such as refreshing activation, or when using BandLab specific features to upload or download BandLab projects. No other data is transmitted.

Track solo and bus solo work independently from each other but bus solo overrides everything since its soloing the destination of tracks. When you solo a bus you are telling the system to only listen to inputs for that bus. I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve. If you want to hear tracks that are not routed to that bus you will have to additionally solo the corresponding bus that those tracks go to. As Max says if you want to solo different groups of tracks then you can either use groups to solo the group of tracks simultaneously or you can use aux tracks and route your drums to the aux.

Bug fixes breaking other features mostly occur because its very difficult if not impossible to test for regressions in all dependencies, rather than something irreversibly broken by a change.

Im not sure how you get to that assumption. We are in touch with most of the major players whenever there are issues reported. We can’t control what other companies put on their websites or their marketing. Mostly that is governed by how many paid users proportionately they have for a particular DAW. Most vendors I have been in touch with are very appreciative when we contact them about issues and promptly fix them.

What files? Cakewalk doesnt write any files besides the minidump generated by Windows.

@Craig Reeves as I mentioned before bug fixing has been our number one priority since 2018 and we’ve addressed thousands of issues. While we have had our share of being dinged for stability issues in the past and still have a way to go, at this point we are a lot closer to being normal as far as our share of bugs go (whatever that means lol). Maybe I missed your posts earlier but this is literally the first thread that I’ve seen from you reporting issues directly. Did you ever contact support via the official support channels? If so please quote your ticket numbers so we can follow up on those as well. These peer to peer forums are great becase other knowledgable users can often help find solutions to problems, but they are not very efficient for troubleshooting actual bugs that requires developer feedback. While we do check the forums we can’t possibly read every post and things may get overlooked. I understand your frustration however, and it is jarring when issues get in the way when all we want to do us get on with making music. I havent had a chance to check out your reports, but I’m sure that the issue you you are encountering are real issues. We’ll take a look at them next week. If you would prefer to communicate directly rather than via the forum you can log support tickets and we can follow up that way. I’m sure most of your issues can be resolved. In the meantime, lets all take a deep breath and calm down a bit We all want the same result

@Dr Morsikas Can you share a link to the specific project file and also the minidump for the crash that you encounter. This may help us reproduce it.

Nobody likes bugs interrupting their workflow but if you think that other programs dont have similar bugs you likely havent used them for very long periods of time or your workflow doesnt expose similar issues. Regarding fixing bugs, it has been an utmost priority for at least the last 3 years. Have you looked at the changelog? We’ve fixed over a thousand issues besides all the optimizations and new features. We are a small team and we do the best we can. Cakewalk is an enormously complex application and can be used in thousands of different ways so a bug that affects one user may never be seen by another. This is the main reason why one person may have flawless performance and another might not. If you take the effort to provide detailed steps most of the time we are able to resolve issues rapidly. CAL is an ancient legacy feature that we hardly ever look at so I’m not surprised that there may be a few issues there. Ultimately we plan on replacing it. We’ll look at the other issues.

A hang on close can be ccaused by multiple reasons. Capture a dump file and it will reveal the culprit. For example plugins with thousands of parameters like Waves Omnichannel could previously cause this. Its been addressed in the January release.

@Yudaidhun Which instruments specifically are you using that have latency? By definition VST instruments are not supposed to have lookahead delay since it will be impossible to play in real time. Cakewalk has traditionally assumed that instruments do not have delay so this is not new to CbB.

Great article. This sums it up 😛 I've been at Cakewalk over 20 years and have worked on every single version of Cakewalk SONAR as well as several new products that started from scratch. Guess what - the new products didn't have a smaller bug to feature complexity ratio. Its flawed thinking to to assume that something new must be better and is something mostly propagated by inexperienced engineers. To take a somewhat tangential parallel from architecture, a lot of Europe doesn't throw away their old buildings, they maintain and renovate. Why? Obviously in large part its because they see art and value in it but its also because they have strong foundations and value. The fact that we have been releasing high value updates almost monthly for the last 3 years should be enough to convince naysayers that we're actively improving the product and its not "legacy code" whatever that is.

@Peterf & Leon I'm not sure if there is much I can do to solve this since based on your last dump file the fault is within Kontakt. It is internally crashing when we try and open its UI for you. I suspect something specific in your configuration causes this crash since we can't reproduce it. I suggest logging a case with NI and send them the same dump file. You can tell them that Cakewalk asked you to contact them. I can also forward the crash to NI in case they can see what's wrong.

@Peterf & Leon sent you a PM.

I'm sorry but that article is so full of misguided nonsense I'm not even going to bother commenting. For one I'm not sure when it was posted since the information is completely out of date and speculates on things the author clearly has no knowledge about. I will comment on the commonly quoted reference about "old code". Developers don't rewrite code unless it makes sense to do so. Cakewalk is continually being refactored and new features being added while actively improving the existing features. I wish people didn't write stuff they have no understanding about Here is a link to an article that mentions all the achievements since BandLab acquired Cakewalk. The link Scook posted covers in detail all the improvements and updates to existing features.

@Peterf & Leon Thats strange. We can't repro any crash with Kontakt so I think that is unrelated. What ASIO driver are you running? I sent you a build to try. Can you install that and turn the option back on for "Suspend Audio engine" and see if the problem still happens?

@Peterf & Leon are you sure you sent the right crash dump -what are the steps you performed before it crashed? Its a strange crash. The app is being activated but the engine has been unloaded so it crashes. Are you switching away from the app in the middle of inserting a synth or something? Try turning off "Suspend Audio engine when Cakewalk is not in Focus" in preferences | audio | playback and recording. See if that prevents the crash. Also do you get any message displayed by Cakewalk prior to the crash?

@scook All VST3s are not equal. Many VST3's are just VST2 plugin ports that dont implement sample accurate automation. So even though Cbb sends them the data they discard all the intra buffer points. The easy way to test it is artificially run at a large buffer size (use MME or Wasapi exclusive to set high buffer sizes). If the automation is quantized to the buffer size you know that the plugin doesnt support it. I'm not hearing glitches when drawing automation here. You may need to send a project to repro it. Envelopes are rebroadcast while editing however,

The file type is determined by reading the header so the extension probably not used.

Send a link to the minidump file for the crash and we can see whats causing the crash.

This would hardly be a game changer However we plan on doing it at some point. Its mainly a UI change but not that trivial to do.

Aiff files should import fine into cbb. You can also import raw files with no header. Btw cwp and. Wrk files are completely different. Cwp is a more modern format that supports backwards and forwards compatibility which is how we are able to pull off making changes to the format so easily while still retaining project file compatibility. Welcome back to the future btw

@AdK Studios I have implemented changes to automation that greatly improve the sample accuracy of plugin envelopes during playback and bounces. The following is new: VST automation rendering now directly handles all the automation curves natively. Irrespective of the setting of AutomationDecimationMsec it is guaranteed to be buffer accurate. For VST3 plugins Cbb sends intra buffer changes to the plugin when automation curves intersect with the buffer. Depending on the plugin this will be sample accurate. AutomationDecimationMsec default has been reduced to a default of 5 msec. The permissible range is now 1-30 msec. For the greatest accuracy you can set it to 1 msec (it will come at a minor CPU cost) These changes should also improve accuracy of automation for DX plugins. VST3 plugins will have the most benefits (with plugins that actually fully support sample accurate VST3 automation). The Plugin in your test project doesn't support sample intra buffer automation so it will only be accurate to the buffer boundaries. Known VST3 plugins that support sample accurate automation are those from Fabfilter. Also the Kilohearts plugins support this. I have tested with a massive audio buffer size of > 300 milliseconds and the plugins still render sample accurate automation. So filter sweeps will sound smooth independent of the buffer size in VST3. Here is a build (updated to build 102) that has these changes. Could you (and anyone who has an interest in testing this) check it out and let me know if it solves the problem. Please report any issues specific to this if you notice anything. Thanks.

I checked the reason why its disabled. Is because you have set it up for "Allow arm changes during playback/record" but you have "Exclude synth inputs" checked. If you either disable allow arm changes or uncheck exclude synth inputs it will allow you to change inputs while playing. This is by design. See below.