Lord Tim

Yeah, this. ^^ The dev team is small but would have automated tools for testing regressions, etc. as well as them being experienced and doing their own manual testing as well. Then the beta team gets it to try on their various different kinds of hardware and their own workflows, usually as part of their regular use of the software. I have no idea how big the team is, but there's no way they could pre-empt the literally thousands of combinations of hardware, software installed, driver versions, different ways of doing things, etc. that the wider userbase could come across, which is why there's the Early Access program. There will ALWAYS be bugs in complicated software like this, no matter how good the devs are, no matter how on the ball the beta team is. If this was a small or very closed ecosystem, you might have a better chance of it being lessened but even looking at Apple for example, with a very locked down ecosystem and a far smaller market share than the PC market, just looking at Logic Pro as a single random example, why is that at version 10.7.9 instead of just "new version 10?" - bug fixes and feature updates. Just like CbB has, and Sonar will have. The other thing to keep in mind is everyone's experience is unique too. I see some of the "this is unstable, what are the devs doing?!" posts and go "well I'm not seeing that" and once we dig in it turns out it's a software environment thing, or a rogue plugin, etc. and yes - in some cases, since ALL software has bugs - someone's done something in their own workflow that has uncovered a Cakewalk bug that gets put into the system to be addressed when they can. I'm personally not going to see something in, say, Matrix View because I'm not a heavy user of it, whereas someone who lives in that part of the app would have a much greater chance of coming across any bugs. I agree with Craig, I've used a lot of software and for me CbB is among some of the most stable and "bug free" software I've used - for MY combination of hardware, software and workflow. If anyone is seeing anything differently, it's absolutely your call if you want to angrily upturn a table and go to other software (and it's not a religion - you know you can use multiple DAWs or NLEs or whatever, right?), but if you enjoy working in Cakewalk and the workflow works for you, then working out the issue by showing repeatable steps to diagnose the problem to either discover the cause of this problem or have it uncover a legitimate bug that can be reported to the Bakers is something that we will all benefit from.

Please name one bit of complex software you own that has no bugs or will never require updates (that could also potentially have bugs), especially one where the developers address those bugs for no pay. I'll wait.

There is NO software out there that does this. All software has bugs, and saying "if there's bugs then it should be free" is a good way to send a company broke. I don't think anyone could name a company with complex software like this that hasn't released updates to address problems. Have a look through the change list since 2017 and the bug fix list is massive. Just look at the Early Access release and the bugs fixed between 2022.11 and now - even that is substantial. Ongoing work means ongoing staff that need to eat, right?

I seem to recall EA releases being advertised in the toast before though. Was this not always the case? ?

Let's be a little mindful of the tone of the replies here. I'm sure @Bass Guitar didn't mean any offence by his question, and I've seen otherwise good threads start to go off the rails in the past due to how things were presented.

I got this Damn it.

This is likely due to the server being changed over to cater for the upcoming product launches. Looks like some teething pains while this is getting switched over. Shoot support a message: support@cakewalk.com - they'll be able to sort it out for you, like the toast message says.

Nothing has changed. The last update of Cakewalk by Bandlab is currently in Early Access. Cakewalk Next is for people needing to get ideas quickly down and take advantage of the Bandlab ecosystem by the looks of it. Cakewalk Sonar is CbB with an overhauled UI and ongoing features and fixes. Both of those things are still being worked on, so there's no public information about them, or their intended pricing structure. That's basically it. I would suggest even to take the screenshots on their product pages with a grain of salt because by the time they're released, since they're still in development, things could change before stuff goes public. I think we're starting to run a little in circles here. Let's wait to see what the Bakers announce. It looks like the next thing out the door will be the final CbB so they'll be working on that particularly at the moment. Going to lock this thread for now since I think its all run its course.

I remember using Premiere Pro for the first time and finding it extremely weird that S wasn't used as "split track" like most of the other NLEs and DAWs I used. It was CTRL+K. I learned that from the manual. I guess K is for ... Kut? And CTRL because why not? Cakewalk follows a lot of other Windows conventions though, like CTRL+C / X / V for cut/copy/paste, so it makes sense when you look at it like that. When everything switched over to the Skylight interface back in the day, they re-thought out all of the keyboard shortcuts and the priority was obviously to the most common/important tasks, so M for Markers for example made more sense than Mute note, and was consistent with other similar software. There's absolutely no reason people can't get in and modify the keyboard shortcuts though. I was constantly hitting E instead of R when I was going for a take and bypassing audio effects (that was the default). I just remapped that to Stop - I'd rather it stopped recording and not give me a "oh you thought you were recording? Lolz" "take" and all of my synths and effects go away on me. It's very customisable software, make it your own.

Yeah, absolutely - just drag some other folder onto the top of an existing one and it'll nest inside it. There's also right-click context menus that will allow you to move things in an out of folders as well.

Which version of Cakewalk are you using for a start? Some server stuff has been changed over recently to cater for the upcoming release. You can get support at support@cakewalk.com if this stuff isn't getting you to them.

If you've used per-project audio (which is the default) then it is indeed just that simple. In fact, anything you do to projects will have no effect whatsoever on the Cakewalk application or Windows itself - it's simply a document that has all of your edits and data in there that references a bunch of audio files that are usually contained in the same folder. So, for example, you have a project called MyProject, which will likely be saved somewhere like C:\Cakewalk Projects\ Inside that MyProject folder, you'll likely find your actual project file: MyProject.cwp and some subfolders, one likely being one called Audio, which contains all of the related recordings and imported WAV files. This is all its own thing. If you delete the MyProject folder and everything in it, the project is gone. You might still see a reference to it in Cakewalk's recent documents when you click the File menu, but the actual project and associated files are definitely gone.

Rather than replying to a 2 year old thread and threatening to go to a different product, perhaps continue to work with the other thread you opened about not being able to download Cakewalk. Your experience isn't typical and people are there trying to assist you, if you indeed did want help.

No, Mark didn't say that either. 2023.09 will connect to the new server to authorise. Any prior versions will need to update to this version to continue to work past their authorised period because the server they used to connect to doesn't work anymore.

Guys, let's keep this thread on topic with discussing any issues you have with this particular Early Access release. Any talk about future plans or price or anything outside of this particular release is only going to muddy up the thread. Please start a new thread in the main forum for anything outside of this.

Bitmap graphics are problematic in general in different resolutions. I think we'd all prefer a nice crisp UI at 720 and also 6K rather than some blurry or blocky mess, or something that just won't shrink anymore and starts cutting off parts of the application once it runs out of space. You can do an awful lot with vectors, including some pretty cool 3D looking work, so let's see how it all comes together. The biggest issue I think, as I mentioned earlier, was keeping things consistent with earlier versions. Even when we switched over to Skylight from the old 8.x interface, there was a big attempt to keep consistency with the buttons and iconography so that people don't immediately freak out. Then as things evolved over the years into what we now have as CbB, it improved but you could really tell the legacy was there so as to not annoy the userbase, even if the reasoning behind having such an element was originally made in 2001 and design language or UX expectations have really moved on. Sonar and Next have a great opportunity to update the design language to bring it into 2023 onwards. Next can be entirely its own thing, but they still need to be a little careful regarding what to do with Sonar - it's essentially going to be CbB at first so it stays familiar, but its now that it's a great time to have a look at things like those weird button states or how controls scale, etc. and go "it's time to finally fix this"

There's nearly no good reason to use Bandlab Assistant now that there's that Web Installer mentioned above, so feel free to uninstall it. If you get a complaint in the installer that there's already a version on your system, you may need to do a Clean Installation but let's cross that bridge if we come to it.

The other option is the Bandlab app. Export your project to Bandlab and it'll open up in the Bandlab app just fine. We have this Bandlab ecosystem, we might as well use it, right?

Also, why specifically that release? There's been a bunch of bug fixes and enhancements since then. Early Access versions aside (which are their own thing for last minute testing by a wider userbase), there hasn't been any changes since November last year until now and it seems pretty solid for most people here. And, honestly, software development moves on. This is becoming a paid product that has to once again compete in the commercial space against other paid products. The devs can't do that if they're stuck supporting things from the past which have since been improved and refined - it's a small team so it makes no sense to allocate resources looking after outdated versions. Even far bigger companies draw this line somewhere.

Gibson is the company you have this beef with. Bandlab bought the code only, and hired the dev team that Gibson fired when they closed down the Cakewalk Inc company they purchased. Bandlab has nothing to do with this defunct company, other than buying the rights to the code. That Lifetime License died when Cakewalk Inc owned by Gibson did. We got 5 years of free use from the deal, and a product that allowed us to use the paid add ons that were locked to SONAR, and additionally as a courtesy we could even grab legacy products from the Bandlab servers, despite those things actually not being current Bandlab products. So it was a fairly good deal considering it could have gone away entirely when Gibson pulled the rug out. These new products, despite having similar names, are not the products that Gibson sold us. But they appear to have the same backwards compatibility and use of the stuff we bought from Gibson, now just all under a paid model from this new company who would probably prefer their developers could eat and the lights stayed on. Nobody knows the pricing structure for this stuff yet but it'll fail if it's not competitive - they know this. Let's wait and see what the future brings us. 5 years of having free use of a previously flagship priced product is a lot of goodwill from a new company that bailed out a dead product line.

I use Dropbox and drag the mixes into a shared folder on my DAW and then use the Dropbox app on my phone to listen back. If you're not worried about lower bitrates and just concerned with the balance of things, you can even stream each track right from the app, but it's easy enough to save everything to the device too, to listen to the original mixes.

Nothing wrong with voicing an opinion or not agreeing with what a company is doing, of course! I don't think anyone would want to step on that right, even if it might not be what they want to hear necessarily. I don't think anyone here is going out of their way to crap on Cakewalk though, or there's any nefarious agenda trying to promote other products or anything. I don't reckon we'd be asked to step in on any kind of chats like this unless it was consistent and ongoing, and especially in the main CbB forum. I'm still wearing my mod n00b hat but I'm really not seeing anything here personally that's making me want to chat to the team about it.

I think if it starts to get a little out of hand then we'll be asked to step in, but I also think that no product is beyond constructive criticism either. Some of the best features added to SONAR / CbB (and I would assume Sonar, when it's out) has come from someone getting frustrated or annoyed that something isn't doing what they expect it should do, posting about it, and the Bakers taking notice and adding it in to a future release. But let's try to keep the complaints constructive at least.

Pfft, there's no chance the Bakers are working on anything like a vector driven UI, keep dreaming... ? *cough*

A few of those buttons are problematic in that way. Take the PDC one for example. When it's off, CbB is doing automatic plugin delay compensation as you'd expect it would do, but when it's lit it means Bypass PDC, similar to how Bypass FX works. You wouldn't want this stuff always lit and be distracting up on the Control Bar unless it was important to do so, so you can understand why the state appears off. But at the same time, these work in the opposite way to what Mr Spock would consider logical for sure. Even just having a line through this stuff so if you click on the PDC or FX button that has a Strikethrough line on it would suggest that "ahh, if I click this it means I'm cancelling this stuff out" and it makes a lot more sense. Those custom themes I mentioned do something like this. I do understand why this was done like it was, to keep consistency with a poor decision made wayyyy back in the day, but going forward it'd be nice to see this made less ambigious.