Lord Tim

If you import your mix back into a new Cakewalk project and it sounds fine, the problem lies outside of Cakewalk itself, likely - as was said - some other sound "enhancement" that your system has on it. Check for spatial audio, Waves MAXX and other EQ adjustments in your sound settings or your MP3 player.

This forum is for Cakewalk by Bandlab - a PC application, not the Bandlab DAW. Try checking their Help section here: https://help.bandlab.com/hc/en-us

Ha, as soon as I saw this thread I thought "paging Erik!" 😛

The mention of price and a competitor's product in every post is starting to sound like an ad, honestly. There's a lot of things wrong with those replies in general, but we're fairly cool about leaving comparisons and chat about other DAWs on here, if for no other reason it can add perspective to the features that Cakewalk has and dispell a lot of misconceptions too when the devs come into a thread and explain things, like they have here (although this advice is being entirely ignored). But if this devolves into something that looks like there's an agenda, this thread will be removed or locked.

Try this: Export both versions, then load them into any DAW of your choice, Put one on Track 1, the other on Track 2, starting at exactly the same spot. Then flip the phase on one of the tracks. Things like modulation and some convolution reverbs aside, which will change each mix no matter what, if any difference is well under -100dB then it's practically identical and you know it's your brain playing tricks on you.

Saying that this DAW is not being maintained is completely untrue. Another update is currently in the works, and a whole new evolution of the product line is about to be launched. If these problems were as widespread as you say, there would be a lot more than one thread on here complaining about it, right? The CTO replied to the post earlier - like the guy who knows the code and how it actually works rather than speculating - and had other opinions regarding what you're seeing. If Studio One works for you, that's great - it's a fantastic bit of software and if the workflow suits you (which is the #1 thing people should be concerned about) then more power to you! But your experience isn't typical for most users here.

I'd just let it choose, honestly - go with the defaults it suggests. That should get it working. Then if you need to do anything funky, like moving the libraries to other drivers or whatever, then you can do things like directory junctions and that kind of stuff (it's a bit advanced, so let's endeavour to just get it all working first).

You're confusing what Cakewalk sees and what the plugin sees. Cakewalk ONLY sees that there's a plugin installed - LABS. It doesn't know anything else beyond that. LABS itself looks for the libraries, so as far as Cakewalk is concerned, it's done its job by finding LABS, but LABS is now not seeing the libraries, so the problem lies there. What I would recommend, rather than trying to solve where everything else, is just uninstall LABS entirely and then reinstall it from scratch, paying careful attention to the installation paths. Make sure Cakewalk is closed before you do any uninstalling / reinstalling, and definitely let it scan for new plugins (if it's not set to auto) after LABS is all back in and installed properly.

Yeah, if you delete it (or rename it to aud.OLD so you have it there as a backup) it'll automatically be rebuilt when you start CbB next. You might need to go back and double check your preferences in places in case something you customised was changed back to default but it won't break anything if you do this.

I think what the OP is asking for is like a preview bus where the effects aren't included in the export, so if you put on any room EQ correction software, etc. then it won't be a part of the mix. This is all doable now, but you have to set your project up right and make sure you choose the correct export options to ignore the bus.

There's no right or wrong way, honestly. This is all entirely subjective, that's kind of what I was getting at - sorry if that came across as glib or unhelpful! To me, I might hear a crossfade and think "you know that feels a bit short" and then the next person hears it and thinks it's perfect. There's not really a definitive answer here, it's going to come down to what you think sounds good, the opinions of other people on the actual mix itself (the Songs forum is a great place to get feedback on this kind of thing), and really experience as you grow your mixing and listening skills.

It's kind of uncharted waters for some now that we haven't had an update in a while because that handled the reactivations automatically like was mentioned, so more people will be getting these notices. There's some hold-up on the server side of things that's stopping the next update of CbB being released apparently, so in the meantime I'm wondering if there should be some kind of pinned post or something about this?

Yeah, definitely a great resource here! I consider my Cakewalk (and general computer and recording) skills as pretty solid but I'm constantly learning stuff from this forum. Even getting a different perspective can sometimes head your thinking off down a path that you wouldn't have ordinarily considered and give you a major breakthrough. It's a bit sad about forums in general. We just shuttered my band forum after... wow, how long was it? We had a Perl based one in the 90s, switched over to a PHP one in the early 2000s and eventually ended up on vBulletin. In the mid-2000s it was actually one of the biggest metal forums in Aus and we had to have a team of mods looking after it. Fast forward to 2022 and even the tumbleweeds would rarely roll through anymore - the entire userbase had migrated to social media, which was fine because they were still very active on our socials, but I think we lost a lot of that community when forums like ours started to die out. Community-wise here, the Coffee House downstairs is still pretty jumping though, for a forum that's mainly focussed around problem solving like this one is, and so is the Songs forum. Not sure how many people here venture down to those parts but there's some great music and some spicy takes! But I do agree, even if you're not a regular visitor here, having this even as a resource that people can share to their socials is super valuable. The troubleshooting of problems here have often led to bug fixes and new features added, and it's a lot more permanent than a chat in the comments section of a Facebook post. But getting back to the spam, it's being managed. We WILL have rare days where the holes in the cheese slices align and the spam slips through because every mod is unavailable for a while and the forum spam detectors get tricked, and it stays up longer than we'd like, but I'm typically seeing times between 10 to 25 minutes at worst for any spam floods, usually even much less if one of us is actively here keeping an eye on things. It's not ideal but the system is more or less working at the moment until we can work out other sensible options that don't inconvenience anyone or potentially bring in other problems.

The problem with that is if the post is limited, suddenly you get 10 spammers sign up and each do 5 posts each. Meanwhile, the poor dude having issues with getting a driver conflict resolved that's asked for 5 questions to help troubleshoot the issue (not everyone is savvy enough to give the right info back unless coached) gets locked out. Like I mentioned earlier, sometimes it's just the one spammer and if nobody is on for 45 minutes or something while everyone is off eating/sleeping/working, etc. then that can balloon to a lot. But what can also happen is within the space of 10 minutes you get 10 - 15 new signups after the initial test posts and they just go ham on every damn forum. The (I assume) AI flags that the posts were successful and they keep at it. IP bans are hard too. I can see other forums (good example, the REAPER forum) banning VPN based addresses, which is an inconvenience if you use one as a general smart internet practice, as I do. It's not that hard to rotate out an IP or tunnel though other legit sites either. I think the solution really is a better CAPTCHA (although they're finding bots are cracking that easier and easier now), and possibly a verification e-mail thing after signup to slow down account creation. As I said, there's robust word filters in already which catches a hell of a lot of stuff and auto-flags/hides it, but a doorman is a good idea. Invision has a few more spam fighting tools rolling out now too, so this new software update we got not long ago should help things along quite a bit in regards to those. There's no simple answer, unfortunately. For now, we have a handle on it for most of the day. It's a bit of work for all of us, but it's doing the job until the admins can work out better solutions.

It's at the top of the topic list:

Ha, and like magic here they all are having a red-hot go at it. Caught 5 so far. Bring it on, Broseph! I'm watching

Yep, that got moved to the top of the threads list for Desktop but was broken for Mobile and Tablet view until a few days ago, but it should all be back now

Yeah this is a very good point ^^. This current wave of garbage we're getting is mostly nonsense and looks AI generated, and is very obviously spam (I can only assume they're using it as some kind of SEO thing to flood forums and raise results in search engines because nobody would ever look at this stuff and go "hey you know what, I DO have a problem with my Norton! I'm going to call that number that's inside all of those emojis- it totally looks legit! 😃") but you'll also get the sneaky ones where it looks like a proper reply to a thread and in the post is a "I can only recommend using.... [link to phishing site]" It's not all AI though too, some of these spam accounts do a couple of "hello?" posts before they unleash, checking to see if any mods or security stuff will catch them before they set it to bomb away. Like I said, I definitely agree there should be someone standing at the door checking IDs before it lets them into our club here, but we need to be careful what kind of bouncer that guy is or it'll impact the experience negatively. The admins are aware of the concerns, though, and are on it.

I'd be curious to see what it does. We have no access to the filters or config of the software as mods - that's an admin thing - so I can't tell you for sure what it does, but I think I do remember seeing stuff in the queue that looks like it got an auto-flag from lots of negative reactions.

I have a memory if it originally being 50ms which was far too large and definitely caught me out when I was doing automation - I couldn't work out why automating things like gate thresholds weren't catching things until this was brought in and I realised it was actually too slow to keep up. My memory is telling me this was taken down to 5ms or so? Someone please take me to school on this, though! The trade-off is if you make it super small then you can overload the engine with too many events, which kicks up the CPU usage, so it's a balancing act.

Yep, that's there already. Basically if the forum software thinks something looks sus then it will hide any threads made by that poster, and then we have the ability to go in and flag that account as a spammer when we see it next, which bans them. So it's not ideal, but at least it's not dumping crap everywhere if the software catches it out. I also suspect that a good amount of thumbs down reactions would trigger the software to hide threads too as potential spam, so that might be an option too if you guys see it.

Yeah, just one or two is generally fine - it's usually between 1 and 5 accounts doing the work, usually just the one but we do get waves where there's a big batch one after another that makes it hard catching them all. But if we get an alert that something is up, I know I'll go through and just do a check overall of the moderation queue and any posts that the forum software has hidden by default. I actually do agree that there should be some kind of forum gatekeeper, and probably some more robust deletion tools, but it's a balancing act - how do we stop the spammers without making hard for legit new users to get on and ask questions without them getting annoyed, flipping a desk and threatening to "GO TO ABLETON!!!!!!11!!" The forum update did add a lot more useful tools for this though. Ultimately that's up to the admins, as mods we have the power to clean up spam, ban spammers, and the usual mod things like keep the peace and keep the forum clean and running well, and I've personally passed on a few suggestions regarding this stuff. In the meantime, cheers for the reports, guys. Like I said, sometimes this catches us when we're off working or eating or just between timezones and can take a while to sort out, but we'll get onto it as soon as we see it.

AutomationDecimationMsec in the Prefs / ini file is what you're remembering

I took down a good 4 or 5 pages worth earlier in the day myself. I checked the posting time and they'd only been active for about 7 or 8 minutes, so it definitely doesn't take long to make a huge mess on the forums. I'll usually have the forum open on a second monitor while I'm working and catch them on their first or second post, and the spam filters usually work out that something is sus pretty fast and hides the threads from regular users, so we can get in and clean up the mess without it being horrible for everyone. I've been away from the machine for a while today so it looks like it's been keeping everyone on their toes! For anyone wondering, there are some pretty robust spam filters in place and we just added a bunch of terms to it, which definitely worked well... for a while. It's really like a game of whack-a-mole. Definitely report the spam if you see it, the mods are spread over a bunch of different time zones which helps when each of us are busy with work / life (every mod is a volunteer), and one of us will get onto it ASAP.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen Cakewalk itself freeze (crash, sure! I don't think I've met software that hasn't crashed at least once). If it ever gets to the point where it freezes and you can't get control back, I'm sure the devs would love to see a crash dump to find out what's causing it: https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/topic/3865-better-problem-reporting-how-to-capture-a-crash-dump/