Noel Borthwick

The OP was asking if he needed to sign in and activate before updating to a new version. I was responding to him. If its taking that long its more likely that there is a connectivity problem on the client machine. Activation is instantaneous here. Ive never seen it delay.

Are you sure you read the code correctly? Please post a screenshot or video showing the message and exactly what steps you took leading up to that. You must go to help about and then choose sign in, then sign in from the webpage that appears in your browser. Until that is completed the app cannot activate. This is not new, its been a requirement for over a year btw.

Interesting, is this still happening if you try to go to whats new from the help menu? We're not seeing this. Also, what browser version are you using?

Activation or signing in isnt a requirement to do updates. Just do a check for updates and it should find the new update.

Bandlab assistant hasn't been used by Cakewalk for login for more than a year and a half. It will no longer work for activating Cakewalk. All sign in must be done within the app from the help menu.

Some anecdotal data. Back in the SONAR days in 2015-2017, you may be surprised to know that despite having the annual membership option, the monthly memberships were by far the most popular choice for our users despite being more expensive overall if you paid month to month. Even though that might not be the popular choice for many people on this forum, there are many who prefer to pay a smaller monthly fee because it lets them manage their finances better. Payment choices are good for everyone.

BandLab has a limit to song length (IIRC 15 minutes) and also tracks (16 tracks). If all you are doing is using it for private file sharing, you could achieve the same with any file sharing service. Of course you won’t get the integration, socializing features that BL has. Ultimately depending on demand we may provide access to a more advanced tier for this. The upcoming Cakewalk Next has much deeper BandLab integration, and Sonar as well has been enhanced in this regard.

You can't go by the name. There is a plugin ID stored in the project file. If that doesnt match then the plugin wont load. Use of 32 bit plugins could also lead to issues like this occasionally. I'm not sure what you mean by presets coming up as invalid. Plugin presets are not stored in the project file. Please PM me a link to a stripped down project file that has at lease two tracks one which has the plugin version that loads and one which fails to load. I should be able to tell you why it fails based on that.

The fact of the matter is that we live in a connected world. I understand your perspective and I feel the same about some things esp appliances, but like it or not the world has moved in that direction. Even appliances like phones, and electric vehicles are extremely tied to ever changing software on the back end so you are intrinsically tied to the company whether you know it or not. If google or apple were to go under suddenly, its guaranteed that your phone would not work. If tesla were to tank, your car would certainly develop problems. My point is its pointless fixating on these issues. Its a possibility but unlikely for the reason that if there is indeed an escrow situation, in the vast majority of cases someone takes over and services are restored. You are still using SONAR and its services, more than 5 years after the company tanked aren’t you? If that isn’t a good example I don’t know what is. Bottom line is if this scenario is not acceptable, then you should consider something else that uses the old desktop software model and isn’t connected to web services.

@Chris DeverouxWhat happens if in the same project with the missing instances you add the plugin to a new track, save and reload the project? If you still see missing instances send the project file and I can look at it. There were no changes to VST loading in this release so its very likely that this is a case of vst versioning or a scanning issue.

Because we don't. It has to be officially discussed and approved by the CEO and upper management. Its not my call so please be patient and wait for the due process to be completed.

@Max Arwood we have verified that this issue is specific to saving to a UNC path and its definitely a preexisting issue. We'll fix it in the Sonar codebase but the fix will not be in CbB for this reason.

@Max Arwood sure that its new to this release? Will try and repro.

Cakewalk has supported event based WASAPI since 2008 when it came out.

You can save MP3 excoder settings, if you save an export task. Click the "Add Task to Queue" button and before it saves the task it will prompt you for the MP3 encoder settings. Once you save the project with the task you can recall the same task in the future with the sae setttings.

The cynicism in this forum never fails to amaze me. Why on earth would we or any sane company in our field want to hold users' data hostage? You do realize that we are one of the only DAW's whose project files can be opened in pretty much any prior version of the app? Would we do that if we wanted to hostage projects? If someone really needed to, they could open their projects in any prior product like SONAR 8.5 and get most of the data out. We also plan to have free versions of all our apps so if users needed, they could use the free limited versions if they never owned a Cakewalk product ever. The bigger question to ask is why anyone who cared about their music in any capacity would not want to pay a reasonable fee to support the development of a product they use.

@sreams no changes in this area and it's working fine here. There are two things to check. 1. Only waveforms for unique clip wave files are rendered in parallel. i.e. if you have 100 clips that all come from the same wave file then they will only display when the full wave file has been rendered. IOW parallel rendering is per file not per clip. 2. Parallel rendering is controlled by the aud.ini variable "EnablePicCacheThreads" not the multiprocessing setting. Check if somehow that variable got set to 0. Try importing a bunch of wave files into a new project and then select all and choose "recompute waveforms" from the clip properties. They should render in parallel.

Yes it only hides the VST2 when an equivalent VST3 is available.

And why are you cross posting here? Mark already replied to you and explained that its completely unrelated to the EA. The purpose of any EA is resolve any issues that are NEW or regressions.

Yes this is the simplest solution. No need to use plugin manager.

@Harley Dear thanks for bringing this to our attention. This is the whole point of early access so we can squash any unnoticed issues. Even bug fixes can expose problems so its critical to have a bigger pool of users such as you do final tests. My only request is that rather than making new threads, any EA related issues should always be reported in the main EA thread. Otherwise we risk not seeing it.

So you're saying we need to putrefy Sonar to make it greener. Noted ?

Just to clarify in case some people are confused with all the FUD, what we just released was a good faith early access update for users of CbB, just because of the long wait since its last release. It is NOT Sonar which is a different version that we will release later (most likely as a public beta initially). The implication that this early access was rushed is doesn't make sense. This update has a very small set of changes that were made over a period of almost a year and have been widely tested internally and by beta testers. In my experience most problems that get reported with any new release tend to be either environmental or issues that are preexisting and completely unrelated to the new release. If there happen to be any NEW problems report them in the EA channel and we'll investigate them.

Yes of course. But there will be more.

There shouldn't be any more crashes than the older versions but if you can send across any dump files we'll certainly look into it. Please post any problem reports in the main EA thread. The primary changes to the current version of CbB are bug fixes and Microsoft tool updates, nothing major has changed. Re Sonar I can assure you that pricing will be very reasonable. May be even better than you expect Regarding the integration with BandLab the new Sonar is greatly improved in this regard. It also supports direct project interchange with the new Cakewalk Next product which is natively integrated with BandLab. For example, in Next you can download a project from bandlab and use it exactly as it was with its native effects. Then you can transfer it to Sonar if you so choose for mastering etc.