I was getting crashes on a new installation of V2020.01(Build 28, 64 bit) on a Windows 10 system when I simply created a new midi project, added a few events and started and stopped it twice. It was a hard crash that took 5 or so minutes to clear out of the Task Manager after doing an End Task but quite repeatable. It only crashed after starting and stopping playback so I was able to try different changes to try to smoke out the problem. It took me days and 20+ tests but I finally traced it to the Preferences - Project - MIDI - "Zero Controllers When Play Stops". Once I disabled that on a project the crashes went away and everything worked fine.
The project I was loading was from Sonar 8 so I initially figured it was an issue with one of the missing plugins but the problem persisted even with the new test project which seemed to rule out dangling assignments. The computer has a generic USB-to-MIDI cable, a MidiMan Oxygen8 keyboard (USB) and a TASCAM US-1800 connected to it so there are several drivers it might be trying to zero out but the interfaces all seem to work fine otherwise.
Now here's the rub. As I was writing this post I went back to confirm the bug and was surprised to find that the app no longer crashed with "Zero Controllers When Play Stops" enabled. I even created a new project with some notes in it as I did before but no crash. My hardware configuration hasn't changed (that I can think of) and I rebooted the computer at least once during my initial test to confirm that is wasn't some lingering driver issues but still got a crash. Now its fine. I had confirmed the crash with a new simple project but it's worth noting that in the course of working on the mix I came across midi tracks that were configured for the now-missing virtual synths. They weren't producing sound but they also weren't crashing the app. I don't know how that could affect a completely separate nearly empty project but I figured it was worth mentioning since it had something to do with midi.
Other than the initial crash problem I've really been enjoying the new version and found I could get back to my normal work-flow pretty quickly. Though the last version of the app I used was Sonar 8, I've been using Cakewalk since before Microsoft had a GUI so I'm happy to see it live on with BandLab's help. I posted my first song created with the new Cakewalk a couple of days ago on YouTube under the title "Bob Sellon - Better Than Me audio" if anyone wants to hear what I came up with. Everything is stock (Sonitus) except for a Valhalla Plate for the verb.
