Noel Borthwick

You do need melodyne to do audio to midi conversion. However, even the lapsed demo version (I.e. free limited version) will continue to handle this.

Yes in theory you can uninstall BA now. Although there is no harm leaving it since it is still used for a few things such as offline auth if needed. The reason for the one time log in is because the new release tries to renew your activation state (as a courtesy). Since you had never connected CbB to your BandLab account it asked you to log in. It shoudn't prompt you again now that CbB saved your login so its a one time nag. This is described better in the activation FAQ

No you should use Cakewalk. Everything you need is in the app. I suggest reviewing the updated activation FAQ which should cover all related questions going forward.

If you are that paranoid and mistrustful of software its on you to enforce your requirements, not the companies making the software. Its simple to set up a firewall block that prevents internet access to a specific program. Learn how to do that.

@RBH The activation actually is completely independent of analytics. It doesn’t report any significant data back to Cakewalk. Its a one way street - all it does is make a request to activate the software for that machine and provide a new lease for the software whenever it is needed. We just improved it so that the user is not caught be surprise needing to activate when they are busy at an inopportune time. Now every update of the software will auto renew itself. I’ve installed on 3 of my PC’s and oneof them hadn’t been updated in months. It instantly was renewed for a new lease so I wouldnt be greeted with a timeout the next time I tried to use it.

Lets say that If there ever comes a time that this is needed permanent licenses will be made available. For now there is absolutely no need for this.

No when we refer to logging in we mean using the signin prompt within Cakewalk (where you enter your BandLab user id and password). Different apps have their own sign in so the data isn’t shared. For example signing in from BandLab assistant is different from signing in via the web vs signing in within Cakewalk. Though the credentials are the same there is no sharing between the apps today.

@Toy thanks for the report it has been fixed for a future release.

@brandon Refresh activation is in the help menu in CbB. Everything is handled inside Cakewalk now. There is no need to use BandLab assistant. Please update to the latest version since its not clear what version you previously had. If you cannot sign in to BandLab from Cakewalk, check if you are using the same credentials used to log in to BandLab from a web browser. Try entering your user id and password. I use google sign in so the credentials are the same that I use for google. If you aren't receiving a message when you refresh activation in Cakewalk you likely have notifications disabled. You should either get a notification or if you aren't signed in you will get a sign in prompt.

Im referring to the posts about tempo changes. We had a long window where we were responding to feedback which is the purpose of the early access program. We'll continue to respond to feedback but any changes will only occur in the next release.

We had early access on for over two weeks and non of this was reported. It will now be addressed in the next release.

MPC beats has a problem that we reported to AKAI months ago. You can forward the crash dump and we can verify if its the same issue.

@User 905133 are you sure that you don't have the gaps in your original project on Bandlab? The gaps applied only to MP3/M4a files. Wave files wouldnt have this problem. We already fixed issues related to MP3 files last year. Regarding track 4 is it possible that you uploaded with the track hard panned? Does it sound stereo in the bandlab project?

You saw what - a sign in prompt? Its mentioned in the first paragraph of what's new. "Cakewalk will auto check and renew your activation status whenever a new version of the application is installed and run for the first time, and when you sign in to BandLab from within Cakewalk." If you saw a sign in prompt it is because you have never signed in from CbB ever so it was not cached. Users who have signed in at least once would get a one time "activation refreshed" message and that would be all until your next update.

If it wasn't already clear there is no need to ever use BA once CbB is installed. Everything is now handled in app including uploading and downloading from BandLab. We are also going to debut a standalone Cakewalk installer soon and allow add ons to be installed from within CbB. IOW BandLab assistant will be deprecated soon.

This is a good way to look at it. If you were getting close to the timeout and happened to be online the lease renewal would happen automatically. That behavior has been in place since we added in-app activation. However you do need to log in to BandLab from within CbB at least once or Cakewalk can't activate automatically.

I'm not sure what you mean by "every time I launch; it needs to be updated". Nothing is being updated every time you launch. Where did you see that?

I think it has to do with conversion from M4A when importing. Microsoft is adding some padding to the start of the loop. I solved a similar issue with MP3 recently but M4A is a bit more opaque since we rely on the OS to handle the import. We'll look into it and see what can be done.

@NoelBrutonMusic your concerns are unfounded. You do not need bandlab’s permission every time you use the application. Where did you read that information? This is how it works: You sign in to BandLab to activate the software once when you first install it Activation is required generally once every 6 months unless something drastic changes on your system like you changed the version of windows or something. In the latest release it refreshes your activation lease automatically when needed to save the user from unexpected discovery of a timeout The lease is automatically renewed when you log in to BandLab, when you install a new version of the software and of course if its about to expire. This only happens if there is an internet connection available. If you don’t want your system to be online you have to handle activation manually using the offline activation workflow. Previously BandLab assistant was used for activation. This changed in the 2020.11 release and everything is done inside CbB now which makes things much simpler for the user. Now users only need to sign in ONCE to Cakewalk and from that point activation is handled automatically when needed as long as you don’t sign out of BandLab of course. Its as unobtrusive as it gets and very standard to how everyone in the industry does this. The changes were in fact made to improve things for users who got the activation timeout messages.

Cakewalk currently doesnt support surround VST’s so only the first two channels will be utilized from the plugin. 3 instances will be used each utilizing the first two channels.

Welcome back! BandLab volunteered to fulfil the lifetime membership responsibility so there was effectively no change for lifetime members

Does anyone on the planet read release notes?

@Andres Medina thanks we'll investigate it. did you hit the delete key after selecting all? If you can share the project file before the crash.

Freeze basically saves a snapshot of the clips state and then renders the clips to audio. On unfreeze it restores the original location of the clips. I don't think it has anything to do with moving the frozen audio dive it should still restore the clips if you unfreeze. If you send a project we can investigate

This is an interesting case. You were running in build 144 which had the strict error checking enabled by default. It turns out that you have a shell extension that ends up generating a read access violation when displaying an icon. Our handler caught it and reported it. However it seems like the Windows shell handles this problem internally and thus the end user would normally not see this issue. Its a few issues like this which are the downside of doing the strict error checking so I disabled it by default from the main release. In the next release we may consider logging issues like this rather than reporting them via the crash dialog since its impossible for us to tell whether a given access violation exception is benign or not. Some are not and can cause the app to shut down and lead to data loss! In any case you shouldn't see this in the latest build anymore. Unhandled exception at 0x00007FF860764B89 (KERNELBASE.dll) in Untitled_05182021_133526.dmp: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x0000000000000000. KERNELBASE.dll!RaiseException() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. [Managed to Native Transition] Annotated Frame [Frames below may be incorrect and/or missing, no binaries loaded for kda.dll] Annotated Frame [Frames below may be incorrect and/or missing, no binaries loaded for kda.dll] Annotated Frame [Frames below may be incorrect and/or missing, no binaries loaded for kda.dll] Annotated Frame [Frames below may be incorrect and/or missing, no binaries loaded for SharpShell.dll] Annotated Frame [Native to Managed Transition] Annotated Frame shell32.dll!CFSIconOverlayManager::_GetFileOverlayInfo() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. shell32.dll!CFSIconOverlayManager::GetFileOverlayInfo(unsigned short const *,unsigned long,int *,unsigned long) Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. windows.storage.dll!CDrivesFolder::_GetIconOverlayInfo(struct IDDRIVE const *,int *,unsigned long) Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. windows.storage.dll!CDrivesFolder::GetOverlayIndex(struct _ITEMID_CHILD const *,int *) Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. windows.storage.dll!CRegFolder::GetOverlayIndex(struct _ITEMID_CHILD const *,int *) Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. windows.storage.dll!CIconOverlayTask::DispatchTasks() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. windows.storage.dll!CIconOverlayTask::InternalResumeRT() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. windows.storage.dll!CRunnableTask::Run() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. windows.storage.dll!CShellTask::TT_Run() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. windows.storage.dll!CShellTaskThread::ThreadProc() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. windows.storage.dll!CShellTaskThread::s_ThreadProc() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. SHCore.dll!ExecuteWorkItemThreadProc() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. ntdll.dll!RtlpTpWorkCallback() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. ntdll.dll!TppWorkerThread() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. kernel32.dll!BaseThreadInitThunk() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded. ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart() Unknown Non-user code. Symbols loaded.