Noel Borthwick

BandLab assistant is not developed by Cakewalk. Were working on a standalone bootstrap installer that will install Cakewalk independently. Since Cakewalk can now activate itself BandLab assistant is no longer required for this.

The CmdArgs registry string is used to specify the arguments to the external tool. Its definitely used in CbB and and its how we pass command line arguments to the Plugin Manager exe. Note that this is only used for the generic tool type. Look in the registry and you will see how Plugin Manager is set up. For plugin manager its set up like this: CmdArgs --- "/ParentWnd$ /VSTInventoryRegKey$" When Cakewalk launches plugin manager it expands the /ParentWnd$ variable to the window handle of Cakewalk and /VSTInventoryRegKey$ to the appropriate registry key. Other flags present in CmdArgs are passed through unmodified to the external process. Its easy to test this. Make a batch file that echo's its arguments and set up a tool that executes the batch file.

Thats impressive with just 8GB RAM

@Bob Greaves which version did you install when you ran into this problem? 24.4 is obsolete. We’ll contact you tomorrow with more instructions,

I have the multiple accounts wired to my NAS not pc. It allows me to have a hybrid storage solution.

I have wrk files from Cakewalk Professional 1 that open in CBB

Did you just try and update or was this done a week ago? Which version of Windows are you running and did you update from within Cakewalk or from BandLab assistant? Please see this thread which includes a link to an updated installer. However if you updated today from Cakewalk that installer should already be delivered to you.

This should explain why you need to activate. Regarding the error this is may be system specific. What OS version are you running?

The catch is 1TB per user. Its relatively simple though just create multiple users under the plan to expand the storage.

If hell freezes over maybe.

You would be better off brushing up on your Brit English. Meng grew up and studied at math at Cambridge, England. He speaks really fast with a Brit accent

I use OneDrive for my home cloud storage. They have the most cost effective cloud storage at about $99 per year for the office 365 family plan. You get 6 TB of data and also all the office apps included. I also have multiple NAS's for local storage. The NAS connects directly to OneDrive to backup.

Background mode raises the thread quantum which is how long it is allowed to run before being task switched. This could generally be bad for low latency audio performance on multithreaded machines when you have other multithreaded processes running, because another thread could be blocking the engine from processing in time. Its another one of those tweaks that happened to work for some system configuration and gets propagated on the internet as being the truth.

Indeed while its not unique to us, its particularly bad in our industry because many folks have a herd mentality to follow by recommendation rather than by exploring needs. We have had our share of problems in the past so some flak is deserved, but I still see quotes of completely out of date information from decades ago that has long since been addressed. Products with a legacy as old as Cakewalk are bound to have baggage that a newer program won’t have (although the new program will also have bugs, just different) The “professional” tag is downright snobbery perpetrated by biases, whether it be Mac vs PC or other factors that equate cost vs value. We’ve even had people who said we weren’t professional because for the longest time there was no copy protection. The free aspect is also a factor since free can be associated mistakenly with unsupported freeware. The bottom line is user base demographics have been changing. Its not all about how many esoteric features you have anymore but how usable and inviting the product is and new users today have different expectations now than they did 10 years ago.

Not intentionally sorry Two hours isnt long enough to cover 30+ years. I missed a few steps haha. Here is a post about GMPI from 2004. It was an MMA working group and many high level industry professionals were part of the group. Its too bad that it never materialized since it we genuinely a forward thinking cross platform spec for plugins. with support from both DAW and plugin vendors. But we all know that merit doesn’t drive adoption necessarily.

It's past 30M as of today ? With BandLab the user acquisition growth is exponential. Of course that's looking at the mobile user base which is obviously massively higher than desktops. Cakewalk has also grown by many orders of magnitude of course, but not close to that ballpark. Were adding deeper BandLab integration however so we will continue to grow as more people learn about Cakewalk.

Indeed we were in favor of open standards rather than being tethered by any particular vendors direction that's why we went with WDM KS at the time.

I couldn’t afford to get my own PC until 92 so by the time I started using DAW’s it was already at Cakewalk V1 for Windows. I only used hardware synths prior to that, or 4 track tape lol.

Yeah WASABI was an open low latency spec for writing drivers for Windows to get around the latency problem with MME (caused by Windows KMixer latency). Martin Puryear from Microsoft was involved in that project and it ended up being replaced by the WDM kernel streaming API (KS) which was released publicly. Another very cool open source project that never took off was a plugin specification called GMPI (Generalized Music Plugin Interface). There was a discussion group with many leading plugin and DAW developers participating and it went pretty far with the specification. I still have the posts from that mailing list archived. Its a shame that it didn’t take off since it was ahead of its time and more sophisticated than VST - besides being vetted by industry pros. Both those projects were led by Ron Kuper who pioneered the first Pro Audio version of Cakewalk.

Designer was after my time there. I left in 97 to start working with Cakewalk on Pro audio 7. Corel had some interesting if schizophrenic products. I peripherally worked on a product called The Art of Playboy, that was a multimedia CD-ROM (remember those?) showcasing art and illustration from the Playboy catalog. I helped the project lead to build a simple playlist engine to trigger the background music to the slides and my wife and I composed and sequenced the music in CWPA 3. That was a fun little side project. Wav file playback was still not an option in those days due to storage limits and spotty spotty support on off the shelf PC’s.

I recently participated in a fun discussion with Principal PM @Pete Brown from Microsoft and Vin Curigliano of AAVIM Technology, who has been doing DAW benchmarking for a long time. We talked about a bunch of stuff, including the history of Cakewalk from the early years to now, our intersections with Microsoft’s technology over the last 30 years and lots of technical details about DAW development. You can listen to the podcast here. If you are a DAW geek and get through listening to all two hours of it, you win a prize. We’ll give you Cakewalk. Oh wait... ?

Steinberg just announced end of elicenser so perhaps it wont be an issue in the future

The issue is more than just allowing the external insert to support inputs. Its complicated by the fact that Cakewalk supports other driver modes that have stereo channels so it makes it harder to do. Its not that we don't want to do this but it requires some rework of routing to support. This is why it hasn't been tackled yet and has been lower on the priority list.

Here is the original article from 2017 where we evaluated game mode.

It looks like his project contains missing audio files. You can't save a bundle until you find and delete all clips that reference missing audio files.