Noel Borthwick

I'd be curious to take a look at the project files for both the Cbb and Ableton project. We're always trying to improve performance so if there are obvious issues we can investigate further. Its very difficult to compare two vastly different applications because there are millions of variables. Its not just the audio engine that gates performance, there are many factors such that can impact workload. User interface is one of the main areas that can cause glitches for example.

@Andres Medina Its a crash in our code where its doing something unexpected when loading a track template. I'll fix it for the new release. Thanks for sending this dump since it allows us to find and fix issues we would not know about otherwise. Although it happens when loading the Listento receiver the crash is not a plugin fault from what I can see.

In any discussion about usability you have to look at different user personas. Power users or experienced DAW users are always going to want more visible and newcomers who don’t necessarily have a lot of experience will get overwhelmed with showing all controls. Both types of users will get confused by different things so its not a simple solution. The general guidelines for modern UX is to show context specific or workflow specific controls to reduce visual overload. There is no perfect solution but our defaults try to provide a balance to allow people to get started quickly without getting overwhelmed. This is why workspaces were invented. If you are the sort of user who wants to see the kitchen sink its not for you. This is why our onboarding process asks you upfront to choose a workspace. I personally find keeping the interface focused on workflow more streamlined (tracking vs mixing particularly)

I can contact them and ask about it.

Out of curiosity what are the fields you would like to see if there were a text dump?

This is unfortunately the nature of the beast with heap corruption.

This is definitely something internal to the plugin. They should be able to solve it if you give them this information.

Please double check that this file is the correct version. C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Shared Utilities\CW130Auto.dll If you check the file properties it should be 27.1.0.98 - i.e the same version as Cakewalk. If not the file was not updated properly and you should rerun the Cakewalk installer.

This has been discussed in multiple threads. Here is the Activation FAQ. What do you mean by "bandlab does not take my credentials"? Are you referring to sign in via the Cakewalk application or from BandLab assistant? Are you running Windows 7?

Its all about demand. We had a working partnership with Softube when we were selling SONAR. Now that its free perhaps its not such an attractive business justification for them. If enough customers ask for it they may reconsider it. We do plan on introducing some more prochannel modules in the future but like everything its gated by time I also plan on making a new VST3 prochannel specification to allow VST3 plugins to expose PC functionality (today it is VST2 only) If any developers are interested in writing custom prochannel modules contact me and I can share the specification.

Absolutely! Its very common for plugins to share common state across all instances. In fact this is likely the root cause of the bug so you should pass on this information to SSL. We are also in touch with their engineering so if there is any thing they need from us you can ask them to contact me. Yes VST plugins are nothing but dlls and individual instances live in the same dll. With Waves you can have a single dll (the waves shell) hosting all their plugins. Its less likely that different plugin types will share common state but its really up to the manufacturer to how they implement it so its not far fetched that if a channel strip stopped working an open bus compressor may have the same issue. Since you are a developer you know that if there is global state shared and that state is modified unexpectedly it will affect all clients that use that state. Does the problem only affect already open plugins or does it also affect newly inserted plugins of the same type?

@Jacques Boileau I doubt that its related to your install. If the plugin UI stops working after playing for some time it looks like an internal bug in the plugin (memory leak, or some overflow condition maybe). You should report this to the plugin vendor with any steps you remember and perhaps send them a project file for diagnosis. Only they can help with this issue since it is unlikely to be related to Cakewalk.

Yes that is confusing and someone else also reported this. As mentioned we'll consider it for a future update.

@Andres Medina I looked at all your crash dumps. The Amplitube crash is fully caused by the plugin. Cakewalk is in fact idle when the crash occured. Unhandled exception at 0x00000000723A6AE3 (AmpliTube 4.vpa) in TyC 0205 Patiamigos v3 1-7_04052021_191813.dmp: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0xFFFFFFFEDABCC328. The second file is a crash in the prochannel bus compressor on one of your buses. I'd like to investigate this further, so if you can reproduce this please let me know. Its hard to say what caused the crash just by looking at the dump file but the plugin's internal state is corrupted so its possible that heap corruption caused the issue. Unhandled exception at 0x00000000471E5CB7 (PCS-BusCM.dll) in TyC 0205 Patiamigos v3 1-6_04052021_171612.dmp: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0xFFFFFFFE47227160. All your other dump files in the public.zip are caused by you running with an old automation dll. Are you using an old version of @scook utilities to load the application? Perhaps you have already fixed this since your other dump file doesnt have this issue. If not reinstall Cakewalk since you have a wrong dll there which is going to cause crashes. The dump shows that you have a different version of cw130Auto.dll. Unhandled exception at 0x000000000DFF0E88 (CW130Auto.dll) in _03202021_103005.dmp: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x0000000000000000. CW130Auto.dll CW130Auto.dll *C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Shared Utilities\CW130Auto.dll N/A Yes No matching binary found. 121 26.11.0.99 11/25/2020 11:25 AM 000000000E840000-000000000E88F000 _03202021_102636.dmp In the next release the application will validate this on startup and display a warning message.

@ET440 its not a driver issue. If the app is exiting after changing patches its most likely some plugin is corrupting the heap. unfortunately these issues are very hard to pinpoint and it may affect different apps differently since its corrupting memory randomly. You should definitely report this to the plugin vendor as a memory corruption issue. If this is reproducible please let us know and we can also follow up.

>>If I go thru the bug fixes in the last couple of releases, then I also see that many fixes are related to the new features! This is completely normal to the way we work. When we release a new feature we continue refining and making it as solid as possible before moving on to the next area. We also tend to fix issues by category. In every release we tackle areas like Plugins, editing, UX, workflow, performance and stability. So there is something there for everyone and the product gets better in every release. I’ll be the first to say that we still have plenty of room for improvement despite the fact that focus has been very high on making the product more stable since 2018. We look at the forums social media groups but the best way to get attention to problems and solve them quickly is to write specific and demonstrable reports of problems encountered, include a project file or video demonstrating the issue (if necessary) and include dump files if the issue is a crash or hang. And of course send the case to support and get a ticket to follow up. Following these basic steps has a much greater effect than making general statements like “I run into issues on every project”, etc. Not everyone has the time to do this, but if you care about getting issues fixed this is the only way.

@Andres Medina its working as expected, source category tracks today only captures the output of tracks. To capture the destination it would have to do the tracks one by one and capture the output bus. Some others have also requested this behavior so we’ll consider it as a future option.

Actually the realtek onboard audio chipset itself works fine. It works great with WASAPI. The issue here is the poorly written ASIO driver. We did some research on this a day ago with a Realtek ASIO driver that ships with ASUS laptops and it doesn't even pass the host test from the ASIO SDK. The driver returns a sample rate of zero and fails when Cakewalk queries it for all supported sample rates including 44.1. I have no idea how this driver could work at all!

Um you are speculating. We don't need help to "rebuild the DAW" and building from scratch isnt a solution to any engineering problem. And your point that it crashes in X but not Y has no meaning. A crash is a bug in the plugin whether it doesnt happen in another DAW or not.

Thanks David, What version of the Generic ASIO driver do you have currently? I’d like to report this to Steinberg for investigation as well.

If every mix you do uncovers a bug then most likely there is a recurring theme of something common in your workflow and plugins, that exposes these issues and the only way to to isolate it is to log specific cases and follow up with us to help us diagnose the cause. This isn’t the normal experience for tens of thousands of users who use Cakewalk daily. I understand your frustration and we want to help, but making assumptions that all your issues are cakewalk problems without going through a proper troubleshooting process, is not going to be productive to solve them in itself. I’ve written at length about how most plugin issues are caused by lack of testing by plugin developers in multiple hosts (many only test on Mac DAW’s). About 70% of the issues we find are bugs in the plugins that are host specific. When we isolate them I report them to the developers and they normally fix them promptly. In other cases when possible we implement workarounds in the DAW but that isn’t always possible. Are you running the latest updates to Fabfilter? We use those plugins routinely and never have crashes. There were known crashes with it that the developer fixed in an update. Like us they are very proactive about fixing crashes. The bottom line is if a plugin crashes its almost certain that the root problem is unexpected code in the plugin. Always send all crash dumps for investigation. If the crash is in the plugin the dump should also be sent to the plugin developer since they are the most obvious candidate to fix the issue. The fact that a plugin crashes in one daw but not another only means that the plugin was not tested enough in that DAW. Please read my article on diagnosing plugin problems in the FAQ where I go into further depth on this issue if you want to learn more about it. Many users would differ with you on this. Ripple editing is a fundamental editing feature that is used under the hood in a variety of operations which is why it needs to be robust. We can’t possible please every user with every update, but we do but we try to cover a broad area of stability and workflow fixes in every release. One of your reported issues is already in the next update. I realize that it takes time to report issues, time that you could be making music, but if errors encountered are not reported there is little chance of them being investigated. The use cases in a DAW are enormous so many others may never encounter the specific problems you see. We take every reported case seriously even if we don’t get to fixing them immediately. If you are willing to work with us, you may find that most of your problems can be solved quickly.

The Realtek ASIO driver is the culprit here. You can use WASAPI mode (exclusive or shared) if you dont have a different audio interface. WASAPI works well with Realtek devices.

@David GovettThis is not a focusrite issue. Most likely your issue is the "Generic Low Latency" ASIO driver that is installed on your system. If you freeze frame your video you will see that the pop ups are emanating from that driver. Look for this driver on your PC and uninstall it. I know some old versions of Cubase or their plugins installed that. Let us know what the manufacturer of that driver is by looking at the file properties when you find it. I'm pretty sure that once you remove it you wont have this issue. Cakewalk doesnt need this driver since WASAPI mode is sufficient and preferred for accessing soundcards that don't have ASIO drivers. If you can't easily find the driver and uninstall it you can do this: Go to this registry key in regedit and look for "Generic Low Latency ASIO Driver" HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ASIO Then copy the CLSID value search for it. You should find it embedded under the CLSID key below HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\ For me it looks like this HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{52EBAE30-47E4-483F-B87B-770314306005} Then under that key's InprocServer32 value you will see the path to the ASIO dll. Go to that path and rename the all dlls in that path with a .bak extension or something else. Restart your PC and now that ASIO driver should no longer be loaded by Cakewalk.

Soon, its a big release and we're still finalizing and cleaning up some issues.

My response was to your comment that there was no official channel to report bugs, when there has always been one. I apologize if your issue was previously reported. To clarify: reported issues go into a backlog and are prioritized based on user impact. We’re a very small team and your issue likely got missed somehow. The problem dates back to 2015 and isn’t something newly introduced so its not completely unexpected. Bug fixes remain a priority but that isn’t all we do. PS: I looked at the 5 cases you logged with support. The plugin reorder issue is now fixed for next release. The waves reset issue was fixed in early 2019. The other WAVES and autotune issues were 3rd party problems. Re UAD we presently don't have a way to validate those in-house. Regarding your comment about ripple editing and arranger I'm confused - are you referring to bugs you are encountering that are not fixed? If so what are the case numbers.