Noel Borthwick

@AdK Studios thats great to hear! We’ll defnitely make this more seamless and adaptive since the end user should not need to adjust these settings. This is most noticed when you are automating for percussive timing dependent sections where automation needs to be very tight rather than typical mixing applications which is why this hasnt been reported very much. Of course in electronic music this is an important device so we’ll improve this for next release. Once I have a build with the improvements I can share it with you to try. There are also areas that we can further improved this to make it more sample accurate. BTW did you you try the change with sharp cutoffs like you show in your video? Does it resolve the issues you saw where mixdown would be different from what you were hearing as well? Let me know if there are any remaining problems you notice with automation. Again thanks for reporting these issues directly to us and working with us on a resolution. In most cases we’re able to address problems very quickly, because we have rapid release cycles compared to most other DAW’s. Having reproducible cases from users is key to getting a quick resolution since many issues can be very workflow or system specific. Perhaps once you get a build with the improvements you can do another video showing how you use CbB in your electronic music productions PS: Its good to see more Indian music creators/producers using our product.

@AdK Studios I spent some time testing with your project. There are a few things I found that could lead to the inaccuracies you are seeing. The main source of problems in the test project is that when you have a linear ramp it is subject to how often the ramp is being sampled. By default Cakewalk is set to sample automation points from the ramp at a frequency of 50 msec. This is likely too low frequency for your use case. Please try lowering the AutomationDecimationMsec in prefs to something like 5 msec and try your test. For me it renders almost exactly like the other examples in your project. Of course there are minor differences in all the DAW's since the way they render automation is different. See attached screenshot with the setting. After changing it restart CbB and retest your project. You should hear that in during playback you won't hear aliasing problems with the filter sweep. This is also likely the cause of the accuracy issues you saw when doing rhythmic filter cutoffs in your video. Let me know your findings. I am also considering some changes that should make it independent of the decimation frequency for a future update.

To add to this - the original crash issue has been fixed for our next release.

As I said some people have found it to be useful in specific cases. Maybe certain hardware or drivers work better with it. From a technical point of view I see optimizing for background potentially problematic since it allows the OS to favor other programs. I wouldn't want Windows favoring the web browser or some random process over the current active process. So YMMV. I have never turned this on for any DAW I have had in the last 20 years and have never had an issue.

You have never needed to do this. Its folklore propagated by some misinformed people based on very specific cases.

You don’t need yet another wrapper. What is your audio device? If you send screenshots of the audio playback devices it may be more evident. Cakewalk supports WASAPI natively. Do you have an audio interface or are you using onboard audio?

Then there likely is no major difference for your use. If you run a browser or other activity in the background and stress the system by activity you may notice that with MMCSS on there are fewer interruptions. In simple terms you can think of MMCSS as a layer of extra insurance against dropouts. Its OK to leave on even if you don’t have obvious issues which is why its recommended as the default in Windows audio applications. Windows 10 has improved over earlier OS’s where there are fewer contests for time critical threads but every system is different and has different processes running.

Under ideal conditions no, but background processes such as network activity can also interrupt audio.

There might be a temporary workaround. In the import audio dialog, try setting the import bit depth to 32 and see if that works. If not set it to 64 and retry. Let me know if that works.

@William Burke I know right? It was a long year, hard to believe its over. I looked at your new dump and I can see the problem. Its a bug in our code that is leading to the crash. It happens with multichannel 32 bit wave files > 24 channels which is prob why we didn't catch it earlier. Your file has 32 channels. I'll fix it for next release. Can you please share one of the wave files so I can verify the fix? thanks for reporting it, Noel

Multimedia applications use the "Multimedia Class Scheduler" service (MMCSS) to ensure prioritized access to CPU resources, without denying CPU resources to lower-priority background applications. This is a mechanism to allow realtime applications to have a degree of guaranteed performance even under system load from other background processes. This is on by default in CbB and when enabled all engine threads are marked as prioritized for Pro Audio. We also support custom MMCSS Task profiles. If you want to read more about it here is a thread from the old forum.

@William Burke why are you running a build such an ancient build from Feb 2020? The Cakewalk version is 26.01.0.28 which is not the latest release. Did you attach the wrong dump file by accident? The crash in your dump is not even in Cakewalk but your ASIO driver. [Frames may be missing, no binary loaded for AvidElevenRack_Asio64.dll] Annotated Frame > AvidElevenRack_Asio64.dll!00007ff97ad81f22() Unknown Non-user code. No matching binary found.

Yes unfortunately the current implementation ties future updates to a unique ID for the cakewalk project. So even save as doesnt help. One workaround for now would be to create a new project and copy and paste the data from the original project to that and then save. That should now be treated as a fresh project as far as bandlab is concerned. This won't be an issue when we have the improved integration.

Yes we plan on doing it when we have time. The thing is we don’t want people uploading thousands of duplicate dumps and we’d need to pay for server space to store them or infrastructure to dedupe. We had something like that at Cakewalk in the past and it was quite tedious to manage.

fixed sorry

You misunderstood my statement about asio4all. Cakewalk want does NOT require a pro audio interface for rendering accurately. It never has. I was referring asio4all itself having a lot of compatibility issues because off the nature in which it operates. I'll have a better answer about the real source of your problems once we test and reproduce the issue.

Yes we used to have a test project we used several years ago. But I’m more interested in real world feedback of whether there is a perceptible improvement with fewer glitches in this version.

It bears repeating, if you are having crashes and don’t report them with dump files to allow us to analyze them there is a low chance of the issues being fixed because the chances of us guessing are next to zero. If you have an issue that is system specific or intermittent then capture the crash dump and submit it.

This is impossible. Cbb and BA have no connection to prior versions of Cakewalk.

If its crashing once per session I can almost guarantee you that its a plugin related problem. Have you submitted crash dumps so we can verify the cause?

Right the reason DAW’s dont provide it is because its not the traditional use of stems. Stems by definition are in isolation. You basically want the equivalent of a track solo and bounce macro. As far as your audio setup goes we don’t actively test or support ASIO4All. It is not a native ASIO driver and is simply wrapping WDM. I suggest getting a pro audio interface with good ASIO drivers. There are many inexpensive interfaces available such as those from Focusrite.

Hi we’re working on a major revamp to the BandLab integration for a future version that will make this more intuitive and flexible.

>>Therefore, if I may ask, will it be possible to just represent something to differentiate between the individual MIDI clips. Don't want the other MIDI clips to disappear. Just a means to understand the boundaries of each MIDI clip. It will be great for drum programming, or anything that has a "loop" nature. We’ll look into it for the future as well a mode to filter to selected data. CbB’s PRV is already very powerful to filter appropriate data if you show the pane on the right. >>My Cakewalk buffer size is 512 Samples (10.7msec). It does change from that value <Under driver settings> >>Number of Buffers 64 <Under playback and recording> >>Driver Mode = ASIO Number of buffers can’t be 64. For ASIO mode there is always a fixed number of 2. Can you post some screenshots of your audio settings in preferences? We’ll look at your project file. Regarding your export requirements, you basically want a macro to export single tracks but through their destinations. In general automating this gets more complicated since tracks can route through many tracks via aux tracks and correspondingly tracks can be sourced by other tracks as well as sidechains. So its not as simple it may seem on the surface to provide this functionality. I’m curious why this is such a common requirement for your workflow - i.e. to export individual tracks through buses?

Hi @eric chevrier, Is this an 8 physical core 16 virtual core PC? Can you provide some more detail on what you saw before this update? Are there fewer missed buffers at lower latencies? Also try with plugin load balancing off and on. @Blades, @Glenn Stanton do you see any difference in this release?

Which automation problem are you referring to? Can you provide a project file or a step by step recipe?