Noel Borthwick

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?

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.

@Michael Reynolds you share a reference test project that has this problem with instructions on how to reproduce it? Also are you running the latest version of Cakewalk?

Ironically I have a macbook here also used daily. The macbook needs to be rebooted at LEAST once a week or audio goes wonky on it. My Windows development PC stays online without a reboot sometimes for months and it gets a LOT of abuse. Not to say Windows doesn't have problems but stability these days isn't a major issue.

Guys you absolutely do NOT need to be connected to use Cakewalk! I think you are misunderstanding what activation does. ? You can run cakewalk anytime anywhere without internet. The bandlab integration features are completely optional and those do need an internet. Even activation can be done without an internet connection from the PC you use Cakewalk with.

There is no manual reactivating required. It all happens automatically and transparently. The only time you will ever get this prompt is if your PC has been offline and it needed reactivation AND if you have not updated for 6 months. If you have updated ever within the 6 month period you will never see the activation prompt. As mentioned above one requirement is to keep the software up to date. If you follow these simple steps activation is a non issue.

The music industry is full of people with biases. I doubt this was Korg’s policy but coming from someone in support who was a Mac user. The same thinking goes around in some educational institutions like Berklee unfortunately. I wonder what musicians would feel if a company told them that if they were a serious musician they would use a Gibson instead of a Fender lol.

Your version works because the model back then was you needed to purchase a full license for around $500 to get a permanent unlock. However even with your SONAR license if you install it on a new PC you still need to activate it and need an internet connection or offline activation. No change there. If you don’t have permanent internet, you can connect to a mobile hotspot and activate in seconds. Or use offline activation which is also simple. I really don’t get this paranoia about continuity. Did anyone lose anything when the product shifted hands 3 years ago? No, in fact the situation is much better than it was there with the product being free. If something happens in the future it seems logical to assume that whoever has the product is not going to leave customers high and dry.

MacOS is simple and intuitive and audio traditionally was given a focus so things “just worked” out of the box for end users without twiddling. Most musicians want to make music not spend time fiddling with their systems. Also Apple from the get go were “pro creators” even way back in the 80’s, a mantra that only picked up on much much later with the Surface line of products. This is the real reason for the stigma that Windows has dating back from the 80’s. It was not taken seriously by music professionals, because Microsoft didn’t market Windows to them at all or even try to make it better for musicians. Old habits and biases die hard in the music community even more than other industries, because a lot of it goes around by word of mouth leading to a herd mentality more prevalent than in other industries that are more merit driven.

Sure but only a tiny fraction of users are offline permanently. And we have a solution in place for them called offline activation. As for requiring bi annual activation here is the reason from the activation FAQ. Its not unusual at all to require the version to be updated occasionally. Otherwise we are inundated with support requests from people running outdated versions. We can only offer efficient support for the latest version since we are constantly fixing issues. Why is activation required? Activation ensures that you are running genuine Cakewalk software obtained from our servers and that you have a current version of CbB is actively supported by us. Running an updated version ensures a better user experience by getting the latest features and fixes to the software. Additionally back end changes to the BandLab cloud may periodically require the software to be updated to remain compatible.

We have needed registration since the SONAR days. Nothing has changed. It allows us to know how many users we have and keep the software up to date. As of releases this year, activation is completely automatic and once you have signed in to your BandLab account (from within Cakewalk) there is no manual intervention required anymore. It should automatically refresh itself whenever needed without needing any user intervention or the need for BandLab assistant. Most other products require registration or worse, dongles. I think our system is as non intrusive as it gets for modern software. So I'm curious why you perceive this as being risky.

This is the most likely culprit. Did you recently reformat your hard drive or disable short file names in the file system using some “optimizer”?

Thats not far fetched. We should throw a warning to confirm if export length exceeds some reasonable size.

@Alvaro Diez Cakewalk is not extending the project duration. Some event such as a tempo event or an envelope node got added (likely a bug) as a result of some operation. If you send your cwp file we can tell you what the issue is and how to fix it.

This is unlikely to have anything to do with updating. Have you checked what the duration of the project you are uploading is? The exported region is shown in the dialog title bar. Sometimes projects have an automation node or event far in the future causing it to try and render a very long file.

If it fails to open (or close) capture a dump file from task manager and send us a link. That will show why its hanging. Instructions for capturing a crash dump manually are in the FAQ and my signature.