Noel Borthwick

Were you also running at a higher bounce buffer size? Mp3 does not report bit depth so that's a red herring.

Very interesting I wasn't aware of any limits with mp3 but perhaps the encoder has limitations. We'll look into this. Perhaps we should lower the max buffer size to 256ms

Which version of Cakewalk are you running. We have not seen any issues with the VST3 version of Kontakt. In fact we worked with NI on ensuring compatibility for the 2021.06 release.

A new early access release is available with several new features. Please check it out and comment in the thread. This is a massive update so any testing and early feedback would be appreciated.

Can you share a copy of the project that has the issue? Include the audio data.

Some perspective from my viewpoint. Best by definition is going to be subjective, because even though Cakewalk is an incredibly deep and powerful DAW with its 30+ year lineage, there are other simpler DAW’s that may be more appropriate to some workflows because of their genre bias or other reasons. Live is a great example - if your primary interest is beatmaking you would be hard pressed to find something better for that workflow. If you leave behind very personal preferences or workflows, to the original question I would say that IMO Cakewalk has by far the deepest feature set of any free DAW out there. Its mature and has decades of experience baked into it which few other DAW’s including many paid ones have. Of course we have our share of quirks and bugs (that arguably others have too) but it has been our highest priority to solve the more serious issues since the last 3 years. To the last point I want to say that since day one our approach has never been “this is a free DAW now, so lets do the minimum to support it”. To the contrary, we have used this generous opportunity to obsessively make this as good as we can for our users. The effort that has gone in the last 3 years has been more than ever in the history of Cakewalk, to focus on improving stability as well as building truly usable and useful features. None of us have a free lunch mindset here - we do this because we care for the product and users and want to excel. As far as users cutting us slack because its free, while some more casual users might, we have thousands of professionals who make a living with this software, where the fact that its free makes no difference - the need to efficiently get their work done. We often work one on one with many users to ensure that our tools are robust and meet their needs as far as possible. The next release has a huge new feature directly based on feedback from many users working in exacting production environments with deadlines. All this to say that its as much of a pro product as anything out there and its being constantly improved with fixes and new features even more than some paid choices. Don’t let the free price tag fool you.

This is completely normal behavior. What you see when drawing is just a preview of the mouse drawing nodes. The actual recorded automation removes redundancy nodes but the net effect will be the same with fewer redundant nodes because they are converted to curves. There is no reason to have extra nodes and they would use excess CPU.

To be honest we are not paying any attention to win 7 anymore. There is zero testing being done on it and we only have a small number of users running it. The latest version of cbb is not installing the edge runtime because of an independent issue but we may use it again in the future.

That's great. Yeah I got a message from them last week and was going to post and mention that it had been fixed by them. Its nice when companies are proactive to work together and resolve problems. It benefits everyone. This is what they told me: "We just released a round of updates for almost all plugins. Those include the fixes for the problems with parameters not being recalled correctly in large Cakewalk projects, as well as the crashes when reopening projects that used our VST3 effect plugins. The only plugins not updated yet are Filterscape, MFM2, TyrellN6 and Uhbik. Those will receive updates later this year, or early next year. All others are now save to use within Cakewalk, after installing the current version."

Can you share the project file in question for us to look into?

Have you read this thread? The point of this new installer is to replace BA.

To be fair unless they tested it in Cakewalk with other synths in a project they wouldn’t have seen a problem. Technically though its not normal for instruments to change output counts its not disallowed in VST, but because of the way we handled port routing in Cakewalk (since the 2000’s really) this affected the port numbering. I’ve changed the code to adapt to changes in outputs now so this shouldn’t happen in the future. Of course older versions of Cakewalk software will still have the issue.

Hi @Creative Sauce it should be live soon. The delay is primarily in updating the website to link to this instead of BA where some stuff needs to be worked out. We also wanted to get more feedback and testing on the tool before releasing it. Thanks for the update regarding the help. Yes that article needs to change as well, because as you point out activation is automatically handled from within Cakewalk itself by virtue of signing in.

Mix recall is fully confiigurable and you can save snapshots of the faders and recall them at will. If all you need is A/Bing two different mix settings this is the ideal feature to use and switching scenes should be very fast if you do not choose to recall the FX settings.

@jsg we’ll investigate this thanks.

This thread is for issues specific to the latest release. Please make a different thread for other issues. Thanks..

Its about 5-10 gb on disk depending on what components you install. I would start by installing just the program using the web installer from here. That way you don't need to install BandLab Assistant. Just install the basic program without any addons to start. Let us know how it goes.

Hi @Jerico Sicat we're aware of this. It is a new problem caused by Google who are now blocking google authorization from our webview. It caught us by surprise because they changed it before schedule. We are working on a different mechanism to bypass this issue and will release a new update with the fix soon. If you sign in using your bandlab credentials instead of using google auth it should work however.

The new plugin menu's do not use Windows common controls any more. We have plans of extending them further as we go along and an embedded search filter was also discussed. I don't have a timeline for when this will happen since there are other higher priority features in the pipeline before that.

Yeah I'd like to know how he gets it to consume 100% on his machine. Maybe he knows something I don't lol.

@CeaYou cant be sure of the cause until we look at it. Please send the project file and also follow instructions to get a crash dump. Under preferences | Initialization file you can set the ExceptionHandlingSeverity to 7 and it will capture more errors if you don't get a crash dialog.

Sure as I said if you want to control energy use then you can do that. Turning off the engine manually could also help. Additionally if you enable the "suspend audio engine when cakewalk is not if focus" feature it will automatically stop background engine activity when you switch focus away from Cakewalk.

Im not sure why the cpu use is a concern when not playing, unless you are trying to conserve battery power. Using the CPU doesnt cause any harm. In fact irrespective of this setting when you start the transport it will use the plugins.

Not at all. Export is SUPPOSED to try and max the CPU by design. This is how it can do it as fast as possible. There will be zero artifacts due to this because the audio driver is not involved. In practice it almost never hits 100% because there are other factors that gate performance such as the hard drive speed. Disabling stream audio through FX will not utilize the effects unless the track is streaming audio through the effect. Its not on by default because tempo based effects will not respond to changes in transport position unless the transport is rolling. Among other things.

Yes that is the option. Regarding exporting why are you concerned with the CPU meter? Its normal for Cakewalk to use as much CPU as possible when exporting because its doing the export faster than realtime.