Noel Borthwick

The forum has absolutely nothing to do with in app sign in. The only thing common is that there is a web page Sign in provides a handshake with bandlab to get the user credentials per application. This is also required for activation. Similar to how you must sign in to access the online version of bandlab. It's not related at all. Additionally sign in for Web services relies on tokens that expire periodically for security reasons. Tokens are auto renewed when possible but there are situations where the sign in is necessary. The same happens in all applications that use this sort of protocol. Eg check your typical banking app that uses a web protocol.

Slows down? I've not seen anything like that. It opens pretty much instantly for me when the app starts. Which tab are you opening it with set to? If it defaults to the online library then of course it will take a second to populate but all other tabs are instant for me.

That is a gross understatement to say it's a change in look. While there was a lot of thought that went into the redesign both from our graphic artists and product management, the bulk of the work that went into sonar was a rearchitecture of the UI framework. This was necessary for future work and to support modern displays. It is also much more efficient. In fact in the next update you will visibly see that the time display and meters response is smoother. Besides the UI there are tons of changes beneath the hood of the app as well as hundreds of bug fixes over a period of a year and a half that we don't list. If you find nothing of interest that is obviously going to be a subjective opinion any one could have about any software update. It depends on ones use and workflow for the app. There is no way we can could ever satisfy all users likes and needs. Also this isn't the end of the feature set. There is more coming this year.

Keep an eye on it. I run with a mixed config 2K display and 1080P and have never seen the quick start show up like that so far.

If you want to start using Sonar right away, backstage pass (which includes both Sonar, Next as well as other bandlab perks) is the only available option right now. There are plans for other purchase options but there isn't a known timeline just yet. Today you can get it monthly or get an annual BSP license upfront which is cheaper.

An in app sampler is planned soon. It will be similar to whats in Cakewalk Next (XSampler) so you can check it out there.

It would appear that there may be some issue with your actual bandlab account. When you requested offline activation did you enter exactly the same user name as the one you used when you signed in from within product center? If you PM me your account details I may be able to see whats going on.

Its always available as a download even if it has been installed. The green dot means its installed.

It shouldnt matter whether its installed from Cbb or from product center.

This is expected. It will only pick up products that have been installed using Product Center or one of the new installers since the old installers don't communicate with product center.

Your issue has been resolved in the latest update.

@flangad I sent you a PM. Please respond and we can follow up. Also please try the latest build we posted yesterday since there is a change to some tokens.

Did you try the solution to use Password based activation? What OS are you running? Set BLLoginFlow to 0 in the registry and retry sign in using your bandlab user id and password. If you are still stuck after trying that send me a message and I can try and troubleshoot it with you. If that doesn't work something more fundamental on your system is preventing sign in from working. Also try on a different PC if you have one since that may help you eliminate the problem.

Its still EA but barring any issues it will likely get publicly released tomorrow. There are quite a few fixes to app startup, offline activation and product center so give it a try. Additionally the login screen now shows a confirmation instead of going into BandLab.

@Ronny.G Was the offline activation process successful and are you actually running the latest EA version of Cbb on the offline machine? Please post a screenshot or video showing the issue. Edit: We think we know why you ran into this. Your version of Cbb has likely never been signed in ever. This was an unexpected workflow. Will look into it and see if we can handle this through product center. Offline use in apps like this takes a lot of extra handling to make it work properly.

If you don't get a crash logged try capturing a dump from task manager while the app appears hung.

We're working on a 3d visualization Craig Anderton version. When you are tired of mixing you can zone out watching your faders move in 3d on a virtual mixing board and your waveforms flying around the screen

Yeah AFIK Ableton was vector from the get go. Most modern application use SVG vector graphics for art or a hybrid approach when bitmaps are really needed. In CbB all graphical elements are bitmaps including simple things like buttons. In such cases, the downside with bitmaps are they are much bigger than equivalent vectors leading to slower load time and memory bloat. Additionally applications that run at high DPI have to store multiple resolutions of the bitmaps to avoid leading to even more bloat. Otherwise you get major aliasing and fuzziness as seen in CbB when you run on high def displays. In Sonar almost all resouces are now vectors and very fast to draw since they are typically simple button graphics.

Not at all. As stated we havent seen any performance downside. It was never implied that Cbb would be indefinitely made available only that it would be kept active during the transition period to Sonar. Its not going to be affected in the short term.

I'm running sonar on a 10 year old pc with a very average graphics card and I don't see any performance degradation compared to cbb. The graphics look vastly cleaner rendered as svgs compared to bitmaps (no aliasing) and text looks much sharper too. This is especially evident if you are running at higher dpi resolutions like 2k or 4k. We have been paying attention to performance and have not seen any hit so far. In fact we've made other optimizations to rendering. Btw for those thinking they can’t upgrade without new hardware, my old almost 10 year old DAW PC is running with no issues on win 11 even though there's no TPM chip add the CPU is out of spec. There are ways to get windows 11 installed on older hardware

You can send us dumps from any version within reason. We prefer dumps from the most recert version since it's thr easiest for us to access. Also issues from old builds may have already been fixed.

Can you share a project that is in this state?

Check the new build in the early access forum. https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/topic/74284-cakewalk-202402-early-access/

What activation issue? In my experience, if you cannot sign in at all using the standard web based auth then that is caused by some system side incompatibility with traffic being blocked from the browser to the app. For such cases there is an alternate sign in mechanism using password flow that uses an in-app sign in process.

It refers to using it in the short term. Cbb will be available for some time to give users time to transition to Sonar which will be the only product supported going forward. I think we've all learned that lifetime messaging can be ambiguous right? ? The bigger question to me is why anyone serious about using our products want to use an old unsupported product, when a much better (and affordable) version is made available. If you want to see this product developed further, it's only fair that we ask for you to support us in turn. I don't think anyone expected that cbb would be indefinitely free forever. In the future there may be a free version (with some limitations) however.