Whole Cakewalk is extremely BUGgy, unworkable. Can't take it anymore.

[pulsewalk]

The "buggyness" of Cakewalk has gone so far, that I'm considering switching to another DAW.

Am I the only user that have so much problems?

It has been soo much the past months, couple of years. And now just today, I got to the stage that I feel this is just un-workable.

I have a quite large projects and today, the whole project seems to be just going down the drain. It's not possible to freeze certain trakcs, it not possible to unfreeze certain tracks. If you unfreeze a track, then suddenly another track goes un-unfreezable (not-unfreezable). If I do it in another order, than yet again an other track is just playing constant white noise. So I will have to close the project and restart the entire DAW to be able to start over and make it in another order. When I do that something else happens. It's just buggyness the whole way through. I've not mentioned a tenth of all the things that just happened this evening. Yesterday, there was other things. The day before that, other things too. And so on, all the way back a couple of years.

I can't imagine professionals can work like this, so I guess it's flawless for everybody else, or they just wont touch this DAW, I don't know. But for me, this for sure won't work for much longer.

Smaller projects can be quite ok, with only a few bugs, but the larger ones are almost impossible to work with.

I have a fast PC with lots of RAM, so computing power is not an issue what so ever, neither is the audio interface.

I like the Cakewalk workflow, so I'm not so keen on switching DAW's, but when it becomes un-workable, I'm afraid I'll have to get used to some other DAW instead, no matter how much I'd like to stay with Cakewalk

Does anyone else experience much "buggyness" or am I the only one?

Edited March 25, 2023 by pulsewalk

[pulsewalk]

For example, its almost like a chain of bugs... let's say you have 10 tracks, and all is OK but track 9. So you want to do something with track 9. Maybe freeze, or unfreeze, and when you do that, track 3 and 5 suddenly goes not-freezable or not-unfreezable. But when you, after alot of work, do a workaround that, by maybe importing the unfrozen clips from an older version of the track, and then delete track 3 and 5 to get rid of these buggy tracks, then track 2 and 7 get corrupted instead. If you do the same with 2 and 7, then 8 will go corrupt. If you fix that one, some other track will bug out.

It's like a chain of events. If you with lot of work fix one thing, another thing goes bad. Quite frustrating. This well, the entire project just goes down the drain.

[Lord Tim]

Look around the forum, if it was this bad for most people here, this place would be on fire. I know I wouldn't be here, I rely on this software to just work, and if it was anything close to the stuff you're experiencing, I'd be gone. I'm a working professional, I need the tools to be reliable.

Not saying there isn't bugs - all software has bugs, and I've reported my fair share of Cakewalk bugs over the years too - but I'd actually call Cakewalk some of the least buggy software I've used, especially lately.

Clearly something is not right on your end somewhere. I've never seen anything like what you're saying though, so there's no precedent of advice I can give you. Are you able to grab a screen recording of what's going on so we can see this in action? It might provide some clues as to whatever you're doing that might be causing this weirdness. (Not pointing fingers here, just working methodically to narrow down possible causes so we're not just taking blind shots in the dark)

[chris.r]

My most recent experience is with comping. I have couple takes, put them onto take lanes in a track then "split" them into portions with the comping tool. Select best portions and voila the master take is ready, so far so good. Actually not yet, I need to extend or shrink one or two portions, I don't mean slip-edit but actually change the audio length, maybe also slide only the audio content inside other portion forth or back a tiny bit. And here's where the problem starts, you can't save project like that cause you'll loose the edits, on reopening it will be a mess. Either bounce the track instantly while it's still playing fine or you'll have to redo the whole track after saving project. Glad I remembered most of it but it was an unexpected one. Maybe Cakewalk wasn't meant to save the edits very reliably, I hear people here often advise to bounce, but if so then I think it just should.

Haven't had problems with freezing like yours although I remember a few times when freezing wasn't available for some tracks and I couldn't figure out the reasons, but I didn't give much enough attention to it at those times.

Overall I try to keep my projects not too big, save often and check if everything's fine after reopening once a while. Beside that I'm getting casual crashes with some plugins, mostly Amplitube.

Edited March 25, 2023 by chris.r

[Heinz Hupfer]

HI:)

Never seen those problems with freezing, but I had a lot of Problems with Midi+PRV, Transform Tool isn't working always, CC Data arise in other tracks they should not, Midi Data refuses to send to synths, can't copy CCs to other lanes a.s.o 
Greatest problem with midi the bugs, they are not reproducable:( Many other Users do have the same problem! Can't send any project to the bakers, doesn't make sense, every time on restarting CbB the problems are gone!

So after more than 30 years working with Cakewalk I decided to switch to Reaper, with a heavy heart, cause I love Cakewalk. I'm staying in the forum and will see, perhaps someday the problems are gone and I will switch back;)

Bassman.

[Bristol_Jonesey]

I've never seen any of the problems alluded to by the OP

I guess this is the point where we ask you to list your full  system spec

[Lord Tim]

Just to add to what I was saying earlier, I don't want this to come across as me being a Cakewalk apologist who is putting my fingers in my ears and going "LALALA not happening" or anything. If you guys are experiencing this horrible stuff, don't get angry, get it fixed.

The more info you can give, the more demonstrations of the problems, the more crash dumps, reproductible steps, etc, the better chance you can give this info to a Baker and they can actually solve the problem, or at least point you in a direction to fix something that may be environmental that's making these problems happen.

Like I said, I'd be gone if it was anywhere near this bad for me, so I totally get where you guys are coming from! Let's try and fix it

[pulsewalk]

Okay, so here's an update before I reply to your answers.

1. So, after a lot of work I recreated the tracks that were buggy, and deleted them afterwards. And then I played the project. Yep, then came ANOTHER bug instead. A bug that was never there before. It is a bassline. I'm just hearing that it sounds really horrible, very out of rhythm, so I check it out. It is an already frozen track, and I've not touched it what so ever, so why is it out of rhythm? The clip has never been moved.

2. So I zoom in on the wave form and it looks just fine! It plays out of synch / out of rhythm, whatever you want to call it, but the waveform looks just fine visually.

3. So I decide to unfreeze the track to look at how the MIDI is aligned. I click unfreeze, the blue unfreeze button turns to grey and not-freezable again. Still, I cannot see MIDI, I still see the "frozen" waveform. So then I'm thinking that I duplicate the track with Events ticked, and the track is duplicated. What do I get? I get a MIDI track instead! I'm duplicating what seems to be a frozen track visually, and get a MIDI track instead.

4. Okay, so I zoom in on the MIDI, it looks just fine, it's aligned! Also it plays just fine, in synch and all. So, i'm thinking, alright minor bug, it works now, so lets freeze it again. But I can't freeze it, since the freeze button is greyed out, doesn't matter if I click it a million times, nothing happens.

5. So then I'm thinking, alright, let's recreate this bassline-track by inserting a new instrument and just move the MIDI clips into the new one, and then delete the old buggy track. So I create a new instrument track with Serum and then I open up Serum in the buggy track just to see the settings, preset used and so forth, so I can recreate it in the newly created track. But of course, when I open up the old instance of Serum in the buggy track, the whole VSTi seems initiated and it also says - init - in the preset window. And for sure the sound is no init sound! So next step is to go back, I don't know how many versions, and open up old saved versions of the project till I see one where the track has NOT been frozen yet, so I can open up Serum and save the settings as a preset. I find it, and I do that. Then back to the buggy project again.

6. So back in the newly created instrument track and Serum, I open up the saved preset and voila, at least that works.

7. I play the track as it is, with the working preset, which is now playing the MIDI clips which I copied from the buggy "frozen, but still unfrozen" track. And what do I hear? The preset sounds weird, like double tones or something. So I check the preset again on the piano roll and the sound plays just fine. But as soon as I play the copied MIDI clips it sounds really bad.

8. At this point I'm just double checking if deleting the notes and creating new ones solves the problem. IT DOES! Alright. So why is it playing double out of sync? Is it double notes on top of each other? I'm checking, it's not. Everything seems fine, it just plays weird but seems ok visually. I know now that I will have to redo all the notes manually probably. I'm also exhausted at this point and just ending my session to go to bed.

 

Alright. Anybody see a certain pattern here? It's exactly as I described in my #2 post in this thread, that it seems almost like a chain of bugs that appear one after the other as soon as one buggy track has been deleted. And this is what I have to deal with from time to time.

Restart of Cakewalk, or the whole computer, does not help one bit, no difference at all.

I'm seeing the same type of serial bug evens also with automation lanes, here's an earlier thread from me with videos included with the bug:

 

Edited March 25, 2023 by pulsewalk

[pulsewalk]

9 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Clearly something is not right on your end somewhere. I've never seen anything like what you're saying though, so there's no precedent of advice I can give you. Are you able to grab a screen recording of what's going on so we can see this in action? It might provide some clues as to whatever you're doing that might be causing this weirdness. (Not pointing fingers here, just working methodically to narrow down possible causes so we're not just taking blind shots in the dark)

Trust me, these are bugs. There's no logical reason why it would do such things as I describe. I've been working with DAW's since the 90's, so I'm not new to DAW's and music production. CWPA was just fine back in the days compared to this. I'm not saying I'm without faults or that I'm the biggest Cakewalk expert on earth, rather the opposite and I probably know like 1% of Cakewalk. But since I've worked with computers practically all my life, tons of different software, not least DAW's, I must say I cannot see one logical explanation for the Cakewalk to turn perfectly working tracks into buggy tracks just because I delete another buggy track, that could somehow be explained with user error. Just look at this older thread of mine, there's no logic in it:

It seems rather like that Cakewalk, somehow, and for some reason, wrongly links track information between tracks it should not. Or something like in that direction. So when I touch one track, something happens with another, which should NOT happen.

 

[pulsewalk]

5 hours ago, chris.r said:

Haven't had problems with freezing like yours although I remember a few times when freezing wasn't available for some tracks and I couldn't figure out the reasons, but I didn't give much enough attention to it at those times.

Yes! And this has happened to me too a lot of times! And just as you, I just didn't give it much attention, I just let it be!

However, now, when I've discovered that these problems just keeps building if I try to correct those errors, which you also describe, I'm starting to understand there are underlying problems. It feels like Cakewalk is "connecting" or "linking" information between tracks, which it should not. So when you do something to one track, certain things like freezing, automation work etc., then another track is affected for some weird reason. And when you try to fix that newly affected track, then ANOTHER track gets affected. A link of never ending bugs, which might be lying there latent as long as you don't try to fix them.

[pulsewalk]

5 hours ago, Heinz Hupfer said:

So after more than 30 years working with Cakewalk I decided to switch to Reaper, with a heavy heart, cause I love Cakewalk. I'm staying in the forum and will see, perhaps someday the problems are gone and I will switch back;)

Bassman.

Yeah! Seems like a good choice. Reaper is what I'm thinking also, not least since it can import CW projects as I've heard. So I'll try Reaper out soon enough here. 👍

[pulsewalk]

4 hours ago, Bristol_Jonesey said:

I've never seen any of the problems alluded to by the OP

I guess this is the point where we ask you to list your full  system spec

Sure, why not. Not the fastest computer on earth nowadays, but it's certainly not slow:

Windows 10 Pro 64bit on Intel i9-10850K running stock speed 3.60GHz.

64 GB 3200MHz RAM

RME Fireface audio interface.

Cakewalk version 2022.11 (Build 021, 64 bit)

My system is extremely stable. No memory errors and all other software are running just perfectly, other DAW's too. Video editing, yeah what ever I run, it runs just fine, except for Cakewalk that is. Re-installation of Cakewalk does not make any difference. Reverting back to a clean OS install and then re-installing Cakewalk does not make a difference. I'm like out of options here.

I would be so happy if I was the one doing something wrong. Because in that case, it would easily be possible to fix. But it does unfortunately don't seem that easy. Just look at this other thread of mine (see below).. also bugs that cannot be explained with user error. Also, please have in mind, I have similar problems with other projects too, although, I haven't tried to correct them as much as I've did in this project, so the bugs have not had a "chance to spread" like in this project.
 

 

Edited March 25, 2023 by pulsewalk

[pulsewalk]

One solution of course is to NOT delete a buggy track, but to instead archive it, and thus "containing" the bug so it won't "spread", almost like a "virus" . It can be done in situations where a huge project needs to be finished in the same DAW (Cakewalk) because it would be too much work to move it to another DAW.

But this is of course no permanent solution, but only a solution to salvage what can be salvaged from a "buggy hell", so to speak.

[pulsewalk]

My guess would be that a project gets corrupted somewhere along the line and these corrupted issues lay latent until some portion of those are touched. And this for some reason involves that some sort of "links", that should not be there, are created between certain tracks. And when you delete one such track, that link is jumping back to whatever track that comes "next" on this chain. It seems like it here at least.

I don't know how else to explain that perfectly working tracks suddenly go corrupt and buggy, just because another buggy track is deleted. There should not be any links between these tracks at all. And then you delete that one, and the bug jumps to another track, and then the next one, and next one. A seemingly never-ending link of bugs where in the end the whole project is so corrupted it's not workable.

How this could be explained by user error is beyond me

Edited March 25, 2023 by pulsewalk

[msmcleod]

The issues you describe definitely sound more like project corruption than bugs.

If it's a bug, it will be for the most part repeatable every time.  And for us to fix it we need a recipe to follow, because not only do we need to see what happens when a project is in a particular state, we also need to know how it got into that state in the first place - and that "how" is usually the bug.

Before I joined the team, I was a beta tester, and I spent far more time trying to reproduce bugs from a fresh project than actually finding the bugs themselves.  If the dev team can follow the steps and reproduce the issue, then there's a > 95% chance we'll be able to fix it.  It's also much quicker to identify an issue in a project with one track, than debugging a project with 20 or more tracks in it.

Project corruption is a different scenario though.  Sometimes a project becomes corrupt due to bugs, but this is very rare - the code is littered with checks to ensure this doesn't happen, and also every user would be experiencing the same issue.

So that leaves plugins... We all know that some plugins crash with a 0xc0000005 error - this is when a bug in the plugin tries to write to memory it doesn't have access to.  However, the plugin is running in the same processor space as Cakewalk, so it has access to all of the memory Cakewalk is using.  So what happens when it writes to the wrong part of memory, but this time it's memory it does have access to? Well, chances are that memory is your project, and it'll end up either corrupting the project or the state of other plugins.

If you can, try to reproduce the issue in a fresh project with steps that are repeatable every time - then send that recipe to us.

[Lord Tim]

^^ Mark pretty much nailed what I was trying to get at. I definitely wasn't suggesting user error got a project into this kind of mess, or that anything you're seeing wasn't real or serious or anything, but *something* is going on to cause this corruption. If we can work out how it got into this state, there's a better chance someone will be able to fix it.

[pulsewalk]

14 minutes ago, msmcleod said:

The issues you describe definitely sound more like project corruption than bugs.

If it's a bug, it will be for the most part repeatable every time.  And for us to fix it we need a recipe to follow, because not only do we need to see what happens when a project is in a particular state, we also need to know how it got into that state in the first place - and that "how" is usually the bug.

Before I joined the team, I was a beta tester, and I spent far more time trying to reproduce bugs from a fresh project than actually finding the bugs themselves.  If the dev team can follow the steps and reproduce the issue, then there's a > 95% chance we'll be able to fix it.  It's also much quicker to identify an issue in a project with one track, than debugging a project with 20 or more tracks in it.

Project corruption is a different scenario though.  Sometimes a project becomes corrupt due to bugs, but this is very rare - the code is littered with checks to ensure this doesn't happen, and also every user would be experiencing the same issue.

So that leaves plugins... We all know that some plugins crash with a 0xc0000005 error - this is when a bug in the plugin tries to write to memory it doesn't have access to.  However, the plugin is running in the same processor space as Cakewalk, so it has access to all of the memory Cakewalk is using.  So what happens when it writes to the wrong part of memory, but this time it's memory it does have access to? Well, chances are that memory is your project, and it'll end up either corrupting the project or the state of other plugins.

If you can, try to reproduce the issue in a fresh project with steps that are repeatable every time - then send that recipe to us.

Your explanation sounds as the most logical and realistic this far! I'm sure your correct in your analysis.

This is a very old project with "endless" versions and saves, so I would have to go very far back to see what happened. This task would be practically impossible really.

And since I have similar issues in other projects, it's not unthinkable that a certain plugin(s) are causing this in the first place. But which one of all the many ones I use is impossible for me to say at this point. Because the thing is, that by the time I discover these "corruptions", I'm a very long way from the instant where the corruption began, so it's like impossible to know what caused it in the first place.

And I guess it's not possible to analyze a project file in an understandable way where it's opened up in a certain editor or viewer and one can see all the connections with plugins and all the settings etcetera. This way maybe one could find that error that are causing it but I guess there's no such "viewer".

Also, I guess there's no "error correction"-feature that checks the entire project for errors and corrects them?

Edited March 25, 2023 by pulsewalk

[pulsewalk]

13 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

^^ Mark pretty much nailed what I was trying to get at. I definitely wasn't suggesting user error got a project into this kind of mess, or that anything you're seeing wasn't real or serious or anything, but *something* is going on to cause this corruption. If we can work out how it got into this state, there's a better chance someone will be able to fix it.

Oh I'm sorry. I misunderstood your first post, the below cited quote to be exact. My english is not that good I'm afraid Sorry.

11 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

It might provide some clues as to whatever you're doing that might be causing this weirdness. (Not pointing fingers here, just working methodically to narrow down possible causes so we're not just taking blind shots in the dark)

I also think Mark is correct in his analysis and that means that probably some plugin I use does not work well with Cakewalk, causing corrupted projects. This is of course a big problem for me since I use tons of different plugins and I have not the faintest idea which one that might be causing this. Not least because these corrupted tracks are different from each other, with different VSTi's, different VST FX or some even without any VST FX at all, where the VSTi (instrument) used is not even the same as the corrupted track that made the now corrupt track, corrupted. if you know what I mean. So I cannot see a connection even there.

Maybe the corruption moves and are "spreading" with moved clips, I don't know that either. This project is huge with around 200 tracks for like a week ago, which I managed to shrink to just below 150 tracks. There's some more I could delete, but not many. Not with ease anyway, because then I'd have to rely on alot of automation instead and so forth, which only would give me a headache. It's sometimes easier to spread out vertically with track count, than horizontally by combining many clips from several tracks and taking care of them with automation. Of course, that does only work if the clips are played serially. If they're played parallelly (at the same time) with different settings, that is more or less impossible to achieve if you want different automation/settings on those parallelly played clips. So, hence the many tracks in this currently around  8 minute project, which will be probably at least 9-10 minutes when I'm done with it. If I ever get that far concerning all the newly discovered corruptions in the project, that is

[Lord Tim]

Sorry, I probably wasn't as clear as I should have been in my first reply. Got to love text for communication, right? 😕 Glad we're on the same page with it now

[pulsewalk]

Now two more tracks are corrupted. They won't play. One of them also have a greyed out freeze button. Maybe even more tracks are corrupted that I don't know about... sounds like several other things are missing too, so I'm not sure anymore.

Is it even possible to stop this chain reaction of endless corruption or is my entire project now completely f*cked??? About 150 tracks as of now and lots of work behind it. The project is like 2 years old. Of course, I've not been working on it constantly for that long, but it is lots of work behind it anyway.

Edited March 25, 2023 by pulsewalk