Noel Borthwick

I appreciate that troubleshooting these kinds of issues is very frustrating and laborious. Its an insane number of permutations of things that can cause such problems so unfortunately thats the only way. If you come up with a recipe that we can reproduce we can try and isolate it further and communicate with the developer in more technical terms.

Its not your system. The crash is from the plugin. Only the developer can solve it since it crashes in their code.

The dump file you sent is NOT from the 2022.11 release. In fact its a crash from a 2022.09 build. 
Are you sure that you are running the latest version, or did you send the wrong dump file? Clearly the same crash occurred in 09.

3 hours ago, Cristiano Sadun said:

Two glitches that have appeared - not sure if they are related to the last update, as I've been guest in another studio and haven't worked on Cakewalk for a few months, but here they are:

1. Freezing occasionally causes CW to crash and exit with no warning. This happens both for audio tracks and VST instrument tracks. It seems to happen only when the session has been played a few times (i.e. all the plugins have been exercised), while if I just open the project and begin freezing, all is generally well.
   
   Normally I would chalk it down to some bad plugin effect, but in this project I've used the usual mix of effects that I always use, with one exception (the Vital VST instrument below) - but the crash happens when attempting to freeze completely unrelated tracks too.
   
   I write this after reading (in the CW Facebook group) that other people have had similar sudden exit crashes when freezing.
    
2. On some VST instruments, if playback is stopped while the instrument is playing, the currently note is occasionally "latched" on and keeps playing uninterruptedly , and I have to open the instrument interface and explicitly click the virtual keyboard to stop it (even as the transport is in "stop").
   
   This seems quite random and happens with the Vital VST above - a synth that I recently installed and used in this project.
   
   I was putting it down to a bug in this specific synth but then I read on the CW Facebook group that other people were having the same issue with synths they'd used far longer.

None of this is a showstopper - more a show-slower    once you know it and take care of saving before any freeze attempt, and to make sure the instrument is not playing when you export - but if you guys have worked on the FX chain for plugins, maybe something has gone wrong there? Just guessing.

Thanks!

Re 1.  Please try setting BounceFlushTailsMaxDurationSec to 0 in preferences configuration file and see if that prevents the crash.

Re 2.  Try turning on Send All Notes off on Stop under VST settings

Delete all is new and has a confirmation prompt.

Perhaps post in this section as well.

https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/forum/45-track-project-templates/

You can reset the device and reload the driver's in Cakewalk, by control clicking the reset audio and midi button on the toolbar next to the transport.

Maybe you had a mix of 32 bit and 64 bit plugins with different ID's.  It works fine here.

2 hours ago, marled said:

I have noticed that the quick group feature does not work if I change values with the mouse scroll wheel (volume, pan). If I do the same value change with mouse dragging, then it works as expected. Shouldn't it also work with the mouse wheel?

In theory yes. It was likely not implemented for that gesture.

2022.11 Update 1 has been released. Thanks for your help everyone.

12 minutes ago, Milton Sica said:

Experiencing daw response as "NOT RESPONDING" on AutoSave operation which I have configured to only after 2 changes.

The save, as I noted, seems to have taken place, but has crashed the application.

I had to close and reopen,

Is it reproducible and new to this build? Capture a hang dump file and send a link.

@El Diablo 2022.11 EA build 21 has improvements for app startup on a network when there is no internet. There should be no delay when starting the application now. Shutdown should also be quicker.
 

Note that the EA has been updated to build 21 (see link in main post). There are several improvements and fixes including improvements for slow startup when there is no active internet connection. We plan to release this build tomorrow so if you can give it a quick look.
 

New for Build 28.11.0.021

• Delete All now available in effect bin menus
• Additional support for quick grouping in FX Chains

Issues Resolved in Build 28.11.0.021:

• Crash when quick group bypassing FX Chains when other effects are in the bin
• Quick group support for track effect bin Delete command
• Don't require SHIFT for quick-group recursing FX Chains, if you're invoking from an effect already within ProChannel FX Chain
• Quick group delete (CTRL+SHIFT) FX Chains across multiple tracks fails to remove the plugin instance in the other track FX chains
• Quick group replace/delete (CTRL+SHIFT) effect from track effects bin should also affect ProChannel FX chain
• Improved project load performance
• Show Clip Stretch amount to 2 decimal places
• Incorrect plugin menu behavior
• Quick Group insert FX into ProChannel FX Rack inserts into track bin instead
• App startup can be slow when running on local network without internet
• ProChannel can be empty after inserting a new audio track
   

You said it's a WASAPI wrapper.
If it is doing low latency AND sharing, then it's not using WASAPI shared they are using something other than WASAPI.
 

Well even if they are doing WASAPI they are likely using WASAPI Exclusive mode rather than WASAPI shared. WASAPI shared mode cannot go lower than 10 msec for any USB devices so there isn't anything they could do to enable that. It's at the OS level.

We don't flag the FL studio driver. You can check the current list of flagged drivers in %appdata%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\drivercompat.json

MMCSS is just a mechanism to let all realtime threads run at a very high priority so that other tasks on the PC don't interfere with audio processing as far as possible.
Have you turned off MMCSS altogether in Cakewalk or just MMCSS for ASIO?
If your system has enough bandwidth MMCSS won't help that much.

No, I don't think so. Just watch for anything unusual with load times. Not waiting for the load just meant that the UI could flicker during project load since it would show the UI before all operations had completed.

I've had the RME UFX for a long time and have had no issues with their ASIO drivers. The only thing is the device doesn't work well in WASAPI mode and in ASIO it doesn't support changing latency from the host side - you have to do it via the driver panel. Relatively minor issues.

Not in build 17 I just made those changes today.

Oh I didnt know they added an MMCSS disable in the driver panel, that is good.  He had mentioned it, but it wasn't available at the time.

It's not that surprising that you get worse performance if you turn off ASIO MMCSS in both CbB AND Lynx while leaving MMCSS enabled in Cakewalk, since that means the audio engine is running at a much high priority than the ASIO driver.

The recommended settings are the following:

Use MMCSS   ON
Enable MMCSS for ASIO  ON
MMCSS in ASIO driver panel OFF
 

Use MMCSS   ON
Enable MMCSS for ASIO  OFF
MMCSS in ASIO driver panel ON

NOT recommended:
Use MMCSS   ON
Enable MMCSS for ASIO  OFF
MMCSS in ASIO driver panel OFF

13 minutes ago, HOOK said:

Noel...I switched to Lynx Aurora Thunderbolt because the Universal Apollo x6 was blue screening over and over.  I'm still having to turn off MMCSS in Cakewalk with this Lynx driver.

@HOOK Lynx originally had a problem with MMCSS  on a Lynx E44, where the driver would stop responding when Cakewalk enabled MMCSS.  We had a case open with them and it was solved on their end back in Dec 2019, after I sent them a lot of info on this. Are you running the latest driver from them and if so, what problem do you see when MMCSS is enabled in Cakewalk for ASIO?

In any case this is exactly why I added the ability to disable it from the host level and no longer default to MMCSS being enabled for ASIO drivers.

This is why we advise never installing or using these drivers. What they do is hook into Windows and utilize the audio device via low level WDM.
Since at startup time Cakewalk loads all drivers to check for availability, when we hit this driver, it causes symtoms like you saw even if you never intended to use it. Sometimes it will even change the sample rate of your audio interface as a result of being loaded.
The best solution is to remove these ASIO wrapper drivers from your system so Cakewalk never sees them.

One thing I've been wanting to do is to change how Cakewalk starts up to avoid loading all ASIO drivers once one has been selected by the user. This might help alleviate problems like this. Its a pretty big change so will have to wait for when I have time to tackle that.

31 minutes ago, GreenLight said:

I'm curious - where did you (the Bakers) get the inspiration/idea to work on improving project load times? Was someone having issues or did someone have an "Heureka!" moment? ?

The improvements sound impressive, great job!

A few people had certain projects taking long to load with certain plugins, so we investigated it and found that some plugins can flood the message queue with data when loading.  Since Cakewalk was waiting for all activity to finish at load time, this caused the delay.

I've now also further improved load time on systems with no internet or poor internet speeds. The app should load immediately in such cases in the next build.

14 hours ago, tulamide said:

Ok, a weird issue. I was working on a song and at one point I replaced a synth with SynthMaster 2.9 (newest version). I opened its browser and selected specific patches, one after the other, while listening to a looped section of the song. At one point, I couldn't see any changes in the GUI of Synthmaster anymore (although the changes were made, i.e new patches selected), and part of its GUI was displayed on top of the Cakewalk GUI, far outside of the SM window. Not good. I closed the window, and with a bit of mouse movement and collapsing/expanding tracks, I was able to get rid of the SM garbage on the Cakewalk GUI. Opened SM again, and after a while, the same issue repeated. This time, after cleaning up, the window opened was just white (note, over the whole time, SM audio output was working just fine, reacting to the midi notes). I replaced SM with another synth, but the window again was white, and this time Cakewalk hung for 30 seconds and then crashed silently to desktop. I was able to retrieve a dump file from %appdata%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\MiniDumps.

Dropbox link to dump file

 

I looked at the dump file. The crash isn't in any Cakewalk code and its impossible to decipher from the stack. There are a lot of Sitala threads there but it's not clear if it was responsible. Very possible that some corruption caused the crash. The problem with errant plugins is it can be very hard to track down from the DAW level if crashes are random because they can corrupt memory. Details from your dump are below. Something (not Cakewalk) is basically trying to read from a bad memory address somewhere. 

Based on your description the most likely explanation one of the plugins possibly ran out of memory and had poor error handling leading to this crash. The bottom line is there is nothing any DAW can do to protect from cases like this. If you have consistent problems with particular plugins your best option is to work with the plugin vendor to fix it. 

ExceptionAddress: 00007ffb092812a8 (ntdll!RtlDispatchException+0x0000000000000048)
   ExceptionCode: c0000005 (Access violation)
  ExceptionFlags: 00000000
NumberParameters: 2
   Parameter[0]: 0000000000000000
   Parameter[1]: 00000000000000bc
Attempt to read from address 00000000000000bc

PROCESS_NAME:  Cakewalk.exe

READ_ADDRESS:  00000000000000bc 

ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xc0000005 - The instruction at 0x%p referenced memory at 0x%p. The memory could not be %s.

EXCEPTION_CODE_STR:  c0000005

EXCEPTION_PARAMETER1:  0000000000000000

EXCEPTION_PARAMETER2:  00000000000000bc

FAULTING_THREAD:  ffffffff

STACK_TEXT:  
00007ffb`092812a8 00007ffb`092812a8 ntdll!RtlDispatchException+0x48

STACK_COMMAND:  ** Pseudo Context ** Pseudo ** Value: 3 ** ; kb

SYMBOL_NAME:  ntdll!RtlDispatchException+48

MODULE_NAME: ntdll

IMAGE_NAME:  ntdll.dll

FAILURE_BUCKET_ID:  BAD_DUMP_MISSING_MEMORY_NULL_CLASS_PTR_READ_c0000005_ntdll.dll!RtlDispatchException

OS_VERSION:  10.0.19041.1

BUILDLAB_STR:  vb_release

OSPLATFORM_TYPE:  x64

OSNAME:  Windows 10

IMAGE_VERSION:  10.0.19041.2130

I wrote an article with guidelines for diagnosing plugin compatibility.
Though to an end user it might not seem that way, the vast majority of problems are caused by plugin’s not being fully robust under a variety of operations. The most common problem areas are with following VST3 protocols, loading and saving state, thread safety, and proper separation of user interface operations from actual processing. Bugs in these areas can result in symptoms that vary from user interface problems, audio glitches, problems bouncing, crashes or hangs. 

We capture crash reports when possible and they sometimes lead to a resolution, but plugin issues are one of the most error prone areas in any DAW. You say you don’t see the same issues in your other DAW’s but that in itself doesnt mean anything beyond possibly the fact that the plugin vendor has not tested the same operations in Cakewalk. All DAW’s are vastly different in their internal architecture and a feature that works perfectly in one may or may not work in the other. We take plugin compatibility issues very seriously and if it indeed ends up being an issue in Cakewalk we fix it promptly. In fact even if it isn’t our issue we do what we can to work around it - much more than what some other DAW’s do.