Noel Borthwick

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.

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)

Look at this video around 6:15. Read about audio snap.

Yes mine has a vesa mount like other monitors.

Yes

@Kvancho there is a build with a fix for this issue.

This is unlikely to be related to your project file. Meters going into the red are a sign of the plugins generating garbage floating point data or denormals. Most likely caused by bugs or corrupt data in the plugins themselves. Some plugins also intermittently misbehave when the double precision engine is enabled or with Plugin load balancing active so you can experiment with disabling those options.
If the issue persists contact the respective plugin vendor to troubleshoot further since its not a host problem.

Its, not clear what you were trying to do in the video.  It seems you were confused by the default audio and midi track that are pre created in a new project.
The dialog for insert synth is the advanced dialog that happens when you insert a synth manually from the browser.

There is an easier way to insert an instrument track. Click the big + button at the top of the tracks view. In the instrument tab pick the instrument you want and click Create. Thats it - the synth routing is all set up for you and you can immediately play the synth.

I have the Keystep32 running here and there are no issues with MIDI from the keyboard.
Make sure you have their latest MIDI drivers installed from the MIDI Control center. 

Have you tried record enabling a MIDI track and testing recording from the controller?
BandLab support won't necessarily be able to assist you with configuring third party hardware controllers.

@Mage_et_lent Cakewalk no longer actively supports Windows 7. If you continue to use it, it's up to you to ensure your Windows 7 has the latest fixes from Microsoft. As things are bound to break.

Not sure if this is related or not but the latest update has code signed dll's using SHA256. Windows 7 did not have SHA256 support by default so if you don't have a fully patched version you may have incompatibilities. This article has some further info.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/2019-sha-2-code-signing-support-requirement-for-windows-and-wsus-64d1c82d-31ee-c273-3930-69a4cde8e64f

Again I'm not sure if your issue is related or not. We're not seeing any problems in our Windows 7 test. Without seeing your project file there is nothing we can do further.

14 hours ago, noynekker said:

@Noel Borthwick . . . Hi Noel, thanks for the tweak . . . I'll surely give that a try, and report back here.

Here's a WeTransfer Link with a few recent dumps if you want to have a look:

https://we.tl/t-AqW3hX3CIR

Nothing in the dump file other than the line that says its heap corruption. I would try disabling the flush tails setting.

Unhandled exception at 0x00007FFB7662F6A9 (ntdll.dll) in Cakewalk.exe.2592.dmp: 0xC0000374: A heap has been corrupted (parameters: 0x00007FFB766997F0).
 

Not quite as crazy as Lord Tim's deep but I have a 35"curved screen LG that I use. The curve is subtle so it doesn't bother me. 

I wouldn't have been able to fit that on my desk if it wasn't curved.

6 minutes ago, Scott Wheeler said:

We do, but the symbols file for the VST managed to not get checked into our repo for build artefacts (just the standalone symbols got checked in, which isn't useful here), so don't have function names.  We sent the user a debug build from the same tag, but didn't hear back.

Ah yes without symbols you can't find much. Hopefully he replies. Let me know what operation caused the crash in case you find out.

It has nothing to do with cakewalk not being able to process large projects tracks. 24 tracks in itself, is tiny. People are running literally projects containing 500 tracks.
Even on a powerful machine if you put a single plugin that is expensive on a track, it can block processing for longer than the allotted time and lead to late buffers.
This is because a buffer will be delayed even if a single tracks processing is late. Raise your buffer size and it will reduce or eliminate late buffers. Plugin load balancing can also help.

Like others said if removing a particular track or tracks stops the late buffers, then something in that track is taking longer to process than the buffer quantum. If it takes longer than the time allotted playback will continue but you might hear clicks from your sound device because it is being starved.
The late buffers is just a metric to help users diagnose why glitches occur.

Try deleting the plugins in the tracks to diagnose. 

16 hours ago, XBaker said:

When I choose Insert Instrument, the default Instrument is TTS-1. Is it possible to make a different instrument the Default? I searched the Help, this forum, and poked around Manage Plugin Layouts, but no joy.

Thanks for any help!

@XBaker Hello Tom ?

No, today the "default" instrument is hardwired to TTS-1 and its primarily there provide a default routing when opening MIDI files.
However, the add track dialog remembers the last used instrument for the duration of the app session, so if you pick a different instrument, it will remember it. It just won't be listed under the default category.

For what it's worth, try turning off this setting by setting its value to 0.
Some plugins don't behave well when we try and flush them prior to doing a bounce. 
Also please attach the dump so I can have a look at the stack.

On 9/26/2022 at 4:50 PM, GCizza said:

Many thanks. I've sent the developer the dump file. 

Good. Hopefully the developer knows how to debug using dump files. It's always surprising to me but many plugin developers don't even know how.

Edit: I see that @Scott Wheeler is the developer ?
Scott if you need any information from our end or find that it's an issue related to Cakewalk don't hesitate to contact me.

Unlikely since that seemed to be the only issue in that project. Once I skipped that missing wave file name the rest of the project opened without errors.
If it were disk corruption or badly saved, then there would be far more errors. In any case the fix I made will allow such projects to load properly. Of course, any clip with the missing data will be orphaned.

On 10/11/2022 at 4:40 PM, sjoens said:

Thanks Noel, I did a few days ago and fixing the Runtimes was one of their options.

@sjoens Sorry for the late reply. I looked at the dump files and both crashes are in your soundblaster driver!
Cakewalk isn't even doing anything at the time of the crash. This is purely in the driver.
I suggest uninstalling their driver or troubleshooting what causes it to crash with the vendor. This is not related to the latest update.

Unhandled exception at 0x000000006A800598 (CtHdAs64.dll) in Cakewalk.exe.21944 - Copy.dmp: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x0000000000000008.

If you google CtHdAs64.dll you will see that it is from Creative Labs. This is the data on the file that caused the crash. 
CtHdAs64.dll    *C:\Windows\System32\CtHdAs64.dll    6.00.100.2059    3/1/2016 4:34 AM