Problems saving work using Cakewalk on a school network

[Mr Manson]

Hi there

I've been using Cakewalk /SONAR for 20 years in the music department I run in the UK and I love it. Since SONAR X1 was discontinued I looked for a replacement commercial program for ages, thinking we would need to eventually switch. I can't find anything that suits my needs as well as SONAR X1 however and we are still using it. 

But as it will probably at some point stop working I thought we will need to switch eventually - so recently I thought, why not switch to Cakewalk by bandlab, which I have on my home computer. So we trialled this at school and everything works well EXCEPT - I can't save the files! When you go to Save or Save As something very weird happens where it creates a new folder as soon as you start typing and then won't let you save in that folder. 

Can anybody help / give some tips for my IT guys at school (who are great) as to whether we can sort this? Is Cakewalk set up so that it won't run in a network environment? 

Cheers

Donald Manson

[Lord Tim]

Kevin is on the money here - Cakewalk won't allow you to save to UNC drive shares, but if you map a drive letter to it, it'll work fine if you save to that letter.

EDIT: Just to elaborate further, if you go to your network shares inside Windows File Explorer, you'll see \\scfc\shared$ in the Network places. Find the folder you want to save to in that share. Right-click on that and do Map Network Drive and choose a letter (eg: Z: )  And now you'll have a new "drive" in your computer called Z:   In Cakewalk, you'll want to navigate to that drive letter rather than \\scfc\shared$ to save your projects. It'll save to exactly the same place but it'll just appear to be a local drive to Cakewalk and work correctly.

Edited August 23, 2022 by Lord Tim

[Xoo]

Are you using mapped drives or UNC paths?

[Mr Manson]

Hi Kevin

That's beyond my level of knowledge. I will check with the IT guys but they are away until Thursday. I suspect the latter , my drive at school is labelled \\scfc\shared$

I notice also that its not that I can't save at all - I can go to File / save and it will save in the Cakewalk projects folder. But I want the students to save in their own home drive so they can open the file on any computer, and projects folder is local. So the problem is going File - Save as and trying to search for a folder to save in

Donald

[Xoo]

That looks UNC - I don't have a network to try that on (easily) but my guess is it's related to that, and that you can't browse over a UNC path.  That said, the folders CbB uses are per user, so it should be possible to set that up to the user's home directory (batch script if necessary on logon), so that is a base location rather than the local projects folder.

[John Vere]

Tutorial # 4 explains how the newer versions of Cakewalk handle saving projects.  You might be interested in the whole series to bring yourself up to speed using the new features .  The basic stuff hasn’t changed that much but enough things have to require a refresher course 

 

[Mr Manson]

Thanks for all the advice, that's great. I'll run some of those tips past my IT guys later in the week

[Starship Krupa]

What you need to tell your IT crew is that the program needs a mapped drive letter. They should be able to take it from there. Depending on how your school network and accounts are set up, they might be able to do the mapping automatically, or at the least, give you a small script that you can run before starting Cakewalk.

You can try it yourself by typing the command "Net use u:  \\scfc\shared$" in a command prompt. That will map your network folder to the drive letter U: and you should then be able to save your Cakewalk projects to that drive.

The "net use" command, typed by itself, will show you if there are already any drive letter mappings.

Needing a drive letter in order to save files is an old throwback (this is the first time in over 20 years I've heard of a Windows program needing it). There are some dusty corners in the Cakewalk code and I guess this is one of them.

[Mr Manson]

Hi everyone

Thanks for all your help. Problem solved!  Pupils it turns out can navigate to the H: drive which is actually the same as their home drive, but not their usual way of getting there- usually they would use Documents icon but that uses a URL

I passed on some of your comments and IT found them useful

 

 

[Starship Krupa]

6 hours ago, Mr Manson said:

Pupils it turns out can navigate to the H: drive which is actually the same as their home drive

Your IT people are sharp. If each user who logs on to the network gets an H: mapping to their home directory, that means that they're using a group policy or a logon script to map it automatically. What's more, they have that folder mapped to the users' Windows Documents folder. This means that anything they drop in Documents is accessible from any system in the network and it's probably backed up nightly. So if someone slips and deletes or overwrites important classwork, they can go to the IT department on bended knee and plead to retrieve an older draft from the backup. Very nice.

The look of relief and gratitude from the user when you can pull that one off is one of the rewards of being a network jockey.

Most programs these days will be able to deal with UNC saves and shares, but, it's still good to have a home drive mapped in an organization. To people who have been using networked computers for 30 years, they still probably think of their network home directory as "my H: (or U: or whatever) drive."