Cakewalk disappearing - no errors, just gone. Any advice?

[Roman Bershadsky]

Lately, possibly after one of recent updates, a strange thing keeps happening: when I have a project open, and it just sits there a while, without me even touching my computer, suddenly it's gone. No errors of any kind, no dialogs, just as if Cakewalk hasn't ever been opened that day. This should not happen with any program, it should at least throw an error. So I have no clue what's wrong. And it happens regularly, withot any input from me. Next time I open Cakewalk, the last project is not in the "recent projects" so it does not remember opening it. Usually during mixing and recording it works fine, with all plugins etc. But then again, after just sitting there for a minute or two - it disappears again. That is really bad.

Anyone has this problem? Any advice? What could be causing it? I haven't installed any new plugins in a while, but I have updated BandLab and Cakewalk each time there was an update.

[msmcleod]

Are there any mini-dumps created in %APPDATA%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\MiniDumps ?

You may want to contact support@cakewalk.com and make your minidump available for them to look at. They should be able to tell you what is going on from that.

[Kalle Rantaaho]

To get the picture: All other programs run normally?  My first thought was a hardware failure.

[slartabartfast]

This behavior has been reported with some security software. Constant Guard Security Suite is one. Apparently these security programs constantly monitor running programs and may just shut them down without warning if their behavior is not what the security software expects.

[Lynn Wilson]

Lately, I've been having a similar problem; after sitting idle for a few minutes, CW suddenly loses focus, and I have to click on the program to get it back.  This happened once while it was playing back a song after I'd let it run on for a few seconds past the end of the song.  As I said, it's only been recently that this started happening.

[slartabartfast]

I thought the OP was actually talking about a closing of Cakewalk. If Cakewalk  has just lost focus and not closed as the OP reports, it should still be present in Task Manager. If it has just fallen behind some other window, then pressing and holding ALT and pressing TAB should reveal it and let him return to it again.

[Lynn Wilson]

1 minute ago, slartabartfast said:

I thought the OP was actually talking about a closing of Cakewalk. If Cakewalk  has just lost focus and not closed as the OP reports, it should still be present in Task Manager. If it has just fallen behind some other window, then pressing and holding ALT and pressing TAB should reveal it and let him return to it again.

Yeah, my problem isn't the same and should be a separate topic.  Sorry, move along, nothing to see here...

[Gswitz]

Check the application event log in widows. Right click computer and open computer management then drill into the logs. Check for errors in the system log. Then in the application log around the time the app disappears.

[pwal³]

similar thread?

 

[pwal³]

and another?

 

[Starship Krupa]

Cakewalk: The Vanishing was a known issue and it was investigated. There's another thread about it around here somewhere. I think pwalpal found it.

I was seeing it, but the most recent version seems to have cured it. You say "one of," are you on the most recent build? Make sure you are. Fire up your BandLab Assistant and let it do its thing.

It was pretty chilling. Very unusual behavior for a Windows 10 program, to just disappear like that without throwing an error message.

[Larry Jones]

I can confirm this has been happening recently. Complete without warning crash to desktop, and no subsequent error message. In my case, I tracked it down to one offending audio track in one project. But as pwalpwal shows above, a lot of people have had a lot of this problem.

[Roman Bershadsky]

Thanks for advice. This issue is not similar to the ones that throw errors, because there is no error. Everything else works perfectly, so that's not hardware. I will check logs. Seems like some projects are more prone to it than others. I have one song that does is every time I leave it sitting for more than a minute. Another one was still there after 2 hours. So its definitely a software bug. I wish I knew what triggers it. I see occasional routing buds in some projects. Like I have 2 mono tracks that are routed to separate stereo bus, but they only play hard-panned left and right. If I pan one that plays left to right - there is no sound, and sam with another one. No matter how I try to reroute them - same behaviour. If I create new track and move all audio events to it and route it the same way - everything is fine and pan behaves as expected. But replacing those 2 tracks didn't solve the vanishing issue.