Noel Borthwick

On 9/4/2023 at 6:39 PM, Sidney Earl Goodroe said:

Thanks, Will.!! The family here at Cake would surely be missed!! You along with the rest here on this forum have been absolutely the best!

Hopefully,  the price of Sonar will be affordable and all this worrying will have been in vain!

The price would be very affordable so there is really no need for panic. (less than what anyone paid for SONAR platinum)
We expect that most people who actively use CbB today should have no reason not to upgrade to a paid and fully supported product.

To be clear, there will be no more feature updates or bug fixes to the CbB codebase. 
The only reason it's being kept active for now is to provide users time to transition to the upcoming (paid) Sonar product. 
If you do intend to use Cakewalk please consider moving to Sonar (when its available obviously). We also plan on having a public beta release for it soon once the user interface is complete, so you can make up your mind. There is no change from the workflow of Cbb so the transition should be effortless.

If you have requests or bug reports continue to post them but they will only be fixed in the new Sonar release.

On 9/5/2023 at 10:40 PM, james rector said:

Just tried that. The attached pic is what it did.

 

This error typically is caused by timeouts from the browser communicating with the application. It can be caused by external issues like an AV blocking socket communications or a browser issue. If that happens try disabling AV's and restart the PC and try again after signing out and signing back in from within the Cakewalk app.

@james rector its not clear which version of CbB you were running. Which version did you uninstall and which version was installed again?

It is very unlikely that it is a general multiprocessing sync issue in the DAW. It has been extensively tested over decades and if there was even a tiny bug there there would be thousands of users running into it.

The more common problem is with plugins. Do the same test completely disabling or removing all plugins and use that as a process of elimination. You can export audio and choose to not include plugins. Definitely eliminate hardware UAD plugins in your test.

Though less common there may also be a disk throughput issue leading to inability to cache data in time. Some samplers have been known to have issues like this.

On 7/30/2023 at 11:42 AM, tdehan said:

I installed Bandlab Cakewalk on a second PC yesterday and when I go to launch a project I get the message: Cakewalk TTS-1 cannot open registry error.  

I checked that TTS-1.dll is indeed in the Program Files\Cakewalk\Sharred DXi\TTS-1 folder.   How do I fix this?

Thanks

That error is coming from TTS1 directly. I suspect you may have a registry permissions issue where something is blocking write access to the registry.
Have you tried running as an administrator?

EDIT: I see that a reinstall fixed it. Likely something blocked it from installing properly. (AV perhaps)

On 7/4/2023 at 4:01 PM, HOOK said:

I'll be damned.  That was it.  VST2 installed and the whole problem is gone!  Thanks for the heads up.

Many plugin vendors simply wrap their VST2 plugins and make them behave like VST3, and also poorly handle some VST3 requirements.
This is the one source of such problems. We can try and reproduce this. If you can PM me a recipe with a specific SoundToys plugin we can try and repro it and contact them if its indeed a plugin issue.

This was done because many or most VST plugin’s don’t automatically flush tails and as a result when exporting you could get leftover tails from the last playback. By force flushing we purge any residual tails left over in the plugin buffers, prior to starting the export.

It's almost always plugins isn't it lol. A plugin should never block the UI that long for seconds at a time or it will block the UI from updating since Windows messages will be backed up. All UI drawing occurs on a single thread so performance issues like this result in choppy UI.

if a plugin needs to do an activation check it should be doing it asynchronously.

On 7/2/2023 at 9:37 PM, Stanool said:

I'd love to hear what you would consider a pitfall! The only one I can really think of related to architecture is not being able to route a single MIDI track to more than one device.

I was speaking more generally from a software architecture perspective rather than referring to specific features. 
Sonar is a very rich  product but due to it's legacy, maintaining  certain areas can be challenging.

Next takes a more modern lightweight design approach, thereby making it easier for us to expand on in the future.

15 hours ago, urock said:

That's what I was thinking as well.   It seems like given the 5 year building of Next that was mentioned in the locked thread that perhaps the approach was:  given our framework/experience as longtime SONAR/Cnb developers, if we started from scratch to build a cross platform DAW knowing what we have learned over the years, catering to the current market, and fitting within the Bandlab ecosystem, what would want to include?  Hence some of new stuff from CbB (like the arranger) and new stuff from competitors (like the lyric track).  In that environment, I expect we will see lots of SONAR/CbB approaches "ported" to Next, similar to how Studio One started out a bit Cubase-esque because where its developers came from.  

In a sense yes. We started from scratch to build a cross platform DAW but with a different focus from SONAR, which is heavily production centric.
One way to describe it is that Next’s current focus is more “creation centric” and its designed to be simple and fluid to get your ideas flowing. But yes, the focus for the last few years has been to build shareable features that are cross platform where possible. As you can see Arranger was one such feature.
We have a lot of experience building DAW’s so we took design hints from many of the strong architectural features from SONAR such as multi core scalability, background plugin scanning project backwards compatibility, and many more. We also learned to avoid some the pitfalls from SONAR 

On 6/30/2023 at 4:26 AM, Lord Tim said:

Just to be clear about that, what Noel was saying was Next is still only Windows and MacOS - there's isn't a mobile app version, but you can use the Bandlab app (which is a separate thing) to do your sketches on the run with iOS, Android, etc. and Next will be able to open the projects with the same effects as the app and web has once you get back to a PC/Mac.

Yes Next is a desktop application only. It will not run on mobile devices. It will open projects created from the BandLab mobile apps and also be able to export to the users BandLab library to share with the BL ecosystem.

On 6/30/2023 at 11:13 AM, pwalpwal said:

i guess next is the desktop version of the mobile/web bandlab app?

Not at all. Next was designed as a next generation DAW from the ground up. It has some visual theming similarities to unify it to the BandLab ecosystem and it has deep integration with BandLab effects and content. However it is a desktop DAW first.

@John Downing were you able to resolve this? If it still hangs in CbB please capture a dump file and send a link. That may shed light into the cause of the issue.

Also, you can use the BandLab app on your iPad and record or edit a project. Then you can continue the same project in Cakewalk Next or even CbB and continue from there. Next will additionally allow you to open the project with all the BandLab effects intact, since it supports BL plugins natively. I.e you can freely transition back and forth between mobile and desktop platforms during the music production process.

On 6/18/2023 at 1:12 PM, Eugene Blanchard said:

Today, I got a pop-up that Cakewalk is Not Activated (20, 800b0100) and because it is deactivated, I can't save. It says to Contact Support and clicking on it, sends me to the Cakewalk web page where I have to create an account but account creation is disabled.

If I go to the Help menu - Refresh Activation, it works but still Cakewalk is Not Activated. The Help menu shows that I am logged into Bandlab.  Under Help menu - Check for Updates, it says I am up to date with version 28.11.0.21 with the option for updating the Help menus and Demos. I updated Help and Demos. Still no activations

I shut down Cakewalk, (losing my latest work ? ) and now it requests that I login into Bandlab first. Did that, Cakewalk opens and says Not Activated. Refreshed Activation and back where I started from Not Activated and can't save....

Post an exact screenshot of your error and your about box as well.

45 minutes ago, Keni said:

Maybe some, but more so because it's GREAT!

Exactly. Free doesn't equate to high engagement. BandLab has more than 70 million users and is obviously free but their user engagement metrics are not close to ours.

Pitch Shift is not a Cakewalk plugin installed by us. It appears to be a Magix direct X plugin. It's probably badly installed on your PC. 
Try using other plugins other than this one.

This is what I see for pitch shift on my PC

5 hours ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

We are extremely lucky to have had access to such a professional tool for the past 5yrs free of charge.  

Whatever they decide to charge going forward, the value proposition will differ greatly between users. Cakewalk projects record how many hours and minutes are spent working on them. I wonder if that stat is fed back to Bandlab and they can see who uses it the most ?  You would probably find a massive disparity betwen casual, pro and semi pro users. Does anyone know how many tracks they've completed over 5yrs of using the free CBB ? 

Analytics data is anonymized so we can’t see individual usage. However our overall user engagement is very high indeed. Average session times are quite high and we have tons of active users per day.

1 hour ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

I feel that although some of them are a bit obscure, many of the CAL scripts address gaps that should be added to the core midi funtionality - Humanize for example  is native to most DAWs 

Agreed that these should be native functions. At some point we also intend to replace CAL with a modern scripting language. We're a small team and as you might imaging juggling two full DAW's has been a challenge the last few years

On 6/10/2023 at 8:07 AM, Destiny said:

So, when i click on the track view or anything that's below the top menu of Cakewalk (where it has File, Edit, Views, Insert, etc) when I press play, the track goes through at like 30 fps however when i press play and then click on one of the options at the top that opens a drop down menu like File or Edit, the fps goes to 60 on the track view until i click on it again. I've seen the issue before and it's kind like clicking off an application the fps goes down for performance reasons, so I feel like it's linked to the fact that cakewalk kind of uses these windows and it's not registering me being on the whole application. Idk, has anyone else had this issue and has a fix? 

I havent seen this. Which menu are you clicking that results in this slow drawing?

34 minutes ago, Michael Richards said:

Still on the workflows topic, I would really like you guys to produce some of your own videos on tips, tricks, and better ways to streamline the workflow process. As it is I am sure there are many ways of doing things that I don't do because I am writing music and (for me) writing music consumes all my brain power. I learn almost everything I know from this forum, but videos speak  in volumes.

@Morten Saether is working on several video's for Next. We also may do new videos on Sonar.

11 hours ago, Michael Richards said:

If you add Repeat, I will buy it. I’ll probably buy it anyway, but so many times I would like to repeat many things that I wonder why we don’t have that function. It  would make my workflow much quicker. A quick example would be lowering or raising the pitch of a midi file in one instrument and then selecting any other midi clip and selecting Repeat without having to go into Transpose. Same thing wit an audio clip. Same thing with quantizing. 

Say you apply a specific delay for a guitar track and want to apply that very specific delay to a piano track. Repeat can do this.

Quick grouping handles most of the commonly used operations like changing track or plugin parameters over multiple selected tracks.
I see your request however.

I have a trunk full of full licenses ready. Only available on floppy disk ATM.

40 minutes ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

. I'll be interested to see how it works in Next and hopeful that it will make it's way to the new Sonar in due course.         

Thanks for your thoughtful reply and we are def interested in any workflow changes that enable more efficient production. You can check out Next today by signing up for the beta eval. 

In next there is also track bounce in place. Doing that in Sonar just requires choosing bounce to track with the same destination track but I hear your point about streamlining this.

If I add bounce tracks in place to sonar will you buy it? ?