Noel Borthwick

Hi folks, There are a lot of new exciting features in this release. A reminder to please also take some time to also evaluate the new integrated BandLab library capabilities. Not only can this feature be used to publish to BandLab and collaborate with other musicians, you can also use it to save stem mixes of your project and play them anywhere, which can be very useful when testing mixes or trying to get opinions from other folks on your mixes such as in the songs forum. This is much more powerful than posting a stereo mix to your song, because if you additionally provide stems others can offer more constructive advice feedback on your mixes. (there are options to provide a full mix in addition to individual track/bus stems)

@Milton Sica we will look into your issue but keep in mind that this issue is not related to the EA release and should be posted in a different thread. As per the details in the main post: Please keep responses specific to problems or comments on this release. Unrelated bugs or feature requests should be posted in other threads or the feature request channel.

Actually bundles are not so susceptible because the bulk of the data is the wave data which is at the start of the file. Any small corruption there wouldn’t prevent the bundle loading typically. The CWP is tagged on at the end. That’s the dangerous bit.

Do you hear the distortion even when you freeze or render the track? Looking at the rendered wave may give you some clues. Also check if the gain is clipping in your signal flow.

Your status bar says “Saving file”. Were you saving the project or do you have auto save enabled?

You can upload the zipped dump to any sharing service like google drive and send a link.

Its in the bus compressor. Is this reproducible? If so please PM me the project file and steps.

Knowing patches is not possible because that is managed by the plugins preset management directly. Cbb doesnt know what patch is selected. Im not surprised that you corrupted the file haha. The data structures are quite complex and there are sizes stored for chunks so if you are not careful you can corrupt the data very easily. I had some rudimentary XML extraction built in a long time ago that could output a file that had the basic track properties but you wouldn't be able to get patch names. We can consider having some basic text extraction for the project for documenting whats in the project without having to open it.

If this same a bundle file make sure that you can open it successfully from the bundle. Any file can get corrupted on disk and since a bundle is a single file there is a risk of the entire file getting corrupted. Hence the recommendation you save both the bundle and the actually project file with it's audio.

A bundle file is a multi chunk RIFF wave file. The compacted audio data for all regions is stored first (per wave file format - stereo/mono/32 bit/24 bit, etc) followed by the CWP chunk. This is why if you rename it to wave it will play because media players ignore the subsequent chunks. As long as you download the file in entirety from google drive you can save as with the CWB extension and it will load fine. FWIW there is nothing wrong about saving as bundles. All known previous issues have been addressed a long time ago and yet people keep repeating the same incorrect info. You should always additionally save as CWP with external audio since its a lot more efficient to load and it provides a secondary backup. Bundles are convenient when you want to collaborate or simply store a single file.

I'm saying that the the user interface load (drawing clips, scrolling, etc) can also have an impact on streaming because it consumes CPU resources and in some cases can also affect DPC latency. Some applications have less going on in the user interface than Cakewalk and so performance can be affected because of that as well. Additionally plugins can have load that can impact different DAW's differently such as plugins that do OpenGL graphics. My point was without investigation you can't easily draw an assumption that the issue is directly related to the audio engine. There are many moving parts in a DAW besides the engine itself. We can investigate it further if you send us the sessions. As part of our ongoing efforts, we continue to try to improve performance in various areas of the DAW.

Let me know if it happens again in the next release. I’ve prevented the actual crash from happening.

@Andres Medina I tried to look for cases where this issue would occur and was not successful. Does this crash only occur with the Listento receiver and is it a reproducible problem? Also I see you are running a behringer audio interface. Did you notice any particularly odd behavior when loading templates with this plugin? We also tired making a template with the plugin and it does not crash. I've added code to prevent the crash itself but the cause is a mystery.

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.