Noel Borthwick

@Helene Kolpakova we've finally fixed the load issues with your project - both the crashing problems as well as the case where it would load with the multi-dock and console view being non-functional.  It was a complicated issue caused by a bug in the logic auto closing the template while opening the new project. The original bug dates back to 2016 so it's been there awhile. We're glad to finally fix it since it could have been the cause of many user crashes when opening projects, or projects drawing incorrectly after load.

Thanks for your diligence in reporting it and spending the time to collect all the dump files and diagnostics I asked for. Much appreciated. I guess some consolation is you got a crash course in Windbg

Have you reported this to celemony?

Which version of Cakewalk are you running?

We don't do any telemetry beyond at startup and shutdown for some basic things like session start/end. It can also be turned off in preferences.
Does this happen only when opening the app and are you seeing activity past the startup of the app?
Not everything is necessarily telemetry. If you are listing general internet output, it could be a variety of things causing it, including plugins checking for sign-in, check for activation, check for updates. All of these are normal activities and won't happen past startup.

@Milton Sica try this build. It should fix the crash deleting tracks with that plugin.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19lMfagiuU4iostxieU9B_705apfsheFv/view?usp=sharing

On 10/29/2022 at 5:34 PM, Milton Sica said:

Thank you very much. This solves the problem.
It would be very interesting if the application when executing this operation did what you solved.

The engine stopping was just a symptomatic way to isolate it. There was an actual race condition in Cakewalk causing this problem. It's been fixed for the release.
We'll post an updated build with that fix.

Great. I have a fix for the crash in your dump file. Will send you a build shortly.

Thanks for troubleshooting. There may be a false alarm. Some ilok plugins cannot run inside a debugger and we'll force the app to terminate. Which makes them very hard to debug of course!

Your template that you sect me did not have any plugins as far as I saw. Were you using a different file to test?

I'll look at your dump file.

@Mage_et_lent interesting so it was an AV causing the issue? Did the issue start with the 09 release?
If so perhaps the signing caused it to somehow incorrectly flag the app slowing it down due to excessive monitoring of file loading.

@Helene Kolpakova Your template file opens fine here. As far as I can see there is no issue with the template.

The first error 0xc0000005 is a standard access violation.
41d is an error I haven't encountered.  Its description is:

// MessageId: STATUS_FATAL_USER_CALLBACK_EXCEPTION
// An unhandled exception was encountered during a user callback.
#define STATUS_FATAL_USER_CALLBACK_EXCEPTION ((NTSTATUS)0xC000041DL)

One cause is a kernel mode to user mode callback crashing. If thats the case here the issue would be your ASIO driver crashing which could explain why there is no dump file.  Please try switching out of ASIO mode to WASAPI mode and redo your test. If it doesn't crash now this will isolate the problem to the asio driver.

If the app is disappearing then the exception is not being caught by Cakewalk. In some heap corruption cases or low level crashes this can happen. 

Does windows event viewer show any status about the crash? 

You can send a link to the template and we can check if there is a repro. Most likely this is plug-in related.

@Helene Kolpakova do you have crash dump files? Crashes can be the easiest bugs to fix if we have a dump file that shows the cause… Thanks for reporting your issues. 

Thanks for doing the test. You should report this to UA support. This looks like some weird incompatibility with their driver when the app is running its threads in MMCSS mode. 
Other devices don't have this issue and as per this test we aren't changing the driver's configuration in any way. If they have questions, they can contact me.

On 10/24/2022 at 5:23 PM, GreenLight said:

Hm, I think it happened both when playing on the keyboard, a NI Komplete Kontrol S49 MK1 via USB MIDI, as well as when performing transport stops. But I'm not 100% on that...

I've only had one session with 09 so far, so I will report back later this week after some more sessions. If I continue to get stuck notes, I'll do a rollback to 06 and see if it helps.

I'm thankful for your diligence. I should have done a few more session before reporting to you guys, I don't want to cause you unnecessary work with too vague descriptions. ? I just wanted to see if I was alone or not... ?

@GreenLight can you please retest with the new EA build. There is a setting for sending all notes off if needed.

Another EA build has been posted that addresses a few user reported issues.

@HOOK and @Traveler we just posted an EA build that has a new option to enable MMCSS only for ASIO drivers (off by default)
This allows you to enable MMCSS mode in Cakewalk but leave it disabled for the ASIO driver. 
Can you please try this on your machine and report back. I.e Turn on MMCSS but disable the ASIO MMCSS option.

If Cakewalk is crashing it should be producing a dump file. Find it (the crash dialog will link it) and send it to us and we can investigate what caused it.

Lol thats a first. Plugins freezing up the system because they aren’t authorized. Talk about aggressive copy protection

To clarify, its expected that plugin load balancing will result in more CPU use.
Load balancing makes the CPU work harder to parallelize the workload by farming out plugin processing to multiple threads. By using more CPU it can finish the processing faster so it can result in fewer glitches with some plugin heavy projects.

Another way to look at this is that multiprocessing trades CPU use for faster processing. During playback esp at lower latencies the goal is to finish all processing before the buffer size time, otherwise the audio device will cause clicks and pops.

If turning off MMCSS in Cakewalk fixed the glitches this is most likely a driver bug. We’ve seen drivers that don’t properly error handle cases where MMCSS is already enabled by the host. A similar issue happened with the Lynx driver which we reported to them and was subsequently fixed. Drivers should handle the host setting threads to MMCSS.

How many cores does your CPU have?
Setting Mix thread count to 6 tells cakewalk to limit audio engine worker threads to 6 irrespective of how many cores your PC has. This will use less CPU resources for mixing but will also not load balance a project with many tracks as well so you could get overload earlier. A max of 6 tracks or buses will be processed in parallel with that setting.

By default cakewalk uses one thread per core. If it works better after limiting the threads to me thats indicative that the driver is relying on some processing in user mode and being starved. Cakewalk switches all its threads to time critical mode and uses MMCSS by default.  Have you tried disabling MMCSS and plugin load balancing?

@Mage_et_lent are you still seeing the problem? If so send the project file and we can try it on Win 7 here.

Its possible that its exposing issues with certain plugins. See if you can try and narrow it down

@PJH We aren’t aware of artifacts with elastique. If you have a demonstrable problem send a zip of the project that exhibits the issue. 
If its a problem with elastique we can forward it to the developers.

On 10/24/2022 at 12:19 PM, Tez said:

It was temporary, I'll try and recreate it and check if it's consistently behaving as previously described. How do you want it sent?

Update: @Jonathan Sasor  Hi, I messaged you with a project link.

@Tez Thanks for sending the project. We've identified and fixed the issue.
For the record it wasn’t a timing issue but a bug where under certain conditions it would not determine the dependencies of the aux track. So it would render the bounce as if there was nothing sourcing the aux track, leading to silence.

10 hours ago, scook said:

Here is a video showing an imported stereo clip imported and what happens when importing the same clip with Import as Mono Tracks enabled

Yes it splits off the left and right channels into separate mono tracks and hard pans the tracks left and right.
If its a multichannel wave file it will extract each mono channel but won’t change the pan.
With a surround file it will attempt to set the corresponding surround channel if there is a surround bus (IIRC)