Lord Tim

I have a vague memory of there being some garbage collection when closing a project when it comes to orphaned patch points. Does that ring a bell for anyone?

You *can* force CbB to import a still picture (File > Import Video; set the file type to All Files) but I found I couldn't get it to export any workable video from it at all. So I guess if you want a still image for the duration of the song while you mix, and you only intend to play back audio, it works? Kind of useless though. Great answers above for the OP's question! My additional advice is to make a h.264 1280x720 MP4 export of the video in whatever video editing software you like, import that into CbB, create your song and mix with that as the visual guide, export the audio mix, and then import that audio into the video editor, then export the final video at whatever resolution and format you like. A 720p MP4 will put little strain on CbB on a reasonably spec'd machine, leaving it lots left over to handle the audio mix.

Worked as expected here (CbB installed on that particular machine already), although it was the full installer, of course, rather than the updater that you'd get by doing it in-app from CbB, so it was a much longer download than it needed to be. But for a new install, I'd expect this to be pretty bulletproof as opposed to the hit-and-miss Bandlab Assistant.

Yep, this is a go-to plugin for me. It just works.

Interesting, that was a bug that was present quite a while ago that was fixed. I wonder if there's edge cases where it still happens?

This is frequently requested and the Bakers are aware of it, but there seems to be some complex plumbing under the hood that makes it a bit tricky to implement. It'd be a welcome enhancement for sure!

Cakewalk by Bandlab recognises any products locked to SONAR and allows you to use them (32 bit DX plugins notwithstanding, but you say you're on Win7x64 so that's not an issue). You don't need to re-register or download anything again, it's all automatic. If you're not seeing them, there's a good chance that your VST paths aren't all copied over into preferences, and you may need to do a rescan. Check out this page for info about that: http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=0x22B07 And ensure you have the same paths in CbB as you do in 8.5.

Cheers, @bjornpdx Actually it was really run and gun since we kind of flew under the radar filming in public like that without getting permits (it's legal to shoot in public but if the cops decide you're being a nuisance, you could be told to move on or have a free ride in a police car...), so it was super stripped down. It was basically me and my video company partner (he even made a cameo as the "angry phone box guy" later in the clip) with various gimbals, etc. and a few different nights getting B-roll, etc. to fill out the shoot. Our production company has a few more people, drone pilots, etc. and all of that stuff, but we figured we could get away with this one with less. I did the edit, colour grade and VFX later here in the studio. Needless to say that after doing the recording, vocals, guitars, keyboards, mix, master, filming, editing, grading, delivery and PR for this song, I'm starting to get sick of listening to the damn thing! HAHA!

Cheers, @Bajan Blue ? Really appreciate that! And yes, I agree - the visuals can really make a song come to life.

Not quite, but close! It requires the Microsoft Edge WebView rendering engine to be installed to make it work correctly on Win7 machines especially. Edge doesn't have to be your default browser. Check out Noel's explanation here:

HAHA! Cherers, @paulo Yeah, I have to agree - when we first started talking about this (and it was a weird spontaneous thing where we were chatting to Darren Hayes on Twitter and our bassist goes "LT could do a good cover of this" and I go "ehh... why not, this is a great song!") we had a few people chime in and suggest a real Iron Maiden treatment for it. That felt really like it was selling the original short. There's so much great stuff going on in the song - syncopated hats, really funky guitars, groovy bass, etc. and that would have all gone away with a simple metal style gallop. We basically come at what we do like this: The song is king, and doesn't care about your ego. Respect it.

Cheers, @David Sprouse

The first thing I would do is remove ASIO4ALL from your machine entirely. There's no need for it at all because TASCAM supplies proper ASIO drivers for the 16x08, and you should definitely use those. ASIO4ALL is a stop-gap "driver" for computers that don't have a proper audio interface connected, and isn't actually an ASIO driver at all - it's just wrapping the native Windows driver into a format that some DAWs can use. Even that is unnecessary to a point in Cakewalk when you use WASAPI mode. But yes, definitely get rid of ASIO4ALL and use the TASCAM supplied ASIO driver. This should fix the problem.

@Wookiee Thank you for listening, sir! ) Yeah, quite famous Aus band from the 90s and this song was a massive hit worldwide, although it got a fair bit of backlash at the time from the more... exclusive sectors of the music community. This is the original: Lots of tips of the hat to the video as well as the song in our version. I always felt that unless you plan to entirely rework something as a completely new interpretation of a song when you do a cover, there should be a fair amount of respect paid to the original, so we really tried to capture every lick and nuance in the music and throw all of the visual elements from the clip into a big bucket and do our take on it all. Of course, that means if you hate the original, ours probably won't do a lot to change your mind! HAHA!

Cheers, @mark skinner Yeah, I actually felt kind of sorry for our actress by the end of it, but she was having a ball - it was all entirely manufactured for the camera, thankfully!

So I was chatting to another forum member about this song and it went something like: Him: You should post this in the Songs forum, when did you last post something there anyway? Me: Not that long ago? Surely... Him: Really? Me: [checks when I last posted here] Uh... yeah, I should probably stick my head in more often... ? So to remedy that, here's our cover and a clip we just released for the Savage Garden mega hit: Recorded, mixed and mastered entirely in CbB, and bonus trivia, I directed and edited the clip for it as well, so lots of ego to spread around here! HAHA! Hope you guys dig it!

Yep, make sure SPlat is installed first and all of the goodies you paid for when you bought SPlat that was locked to it will simply just work in CbB, and as the other guys said, you get years of fixes and improvements since then. The arranger and tempo tracks are worth the upgrade alone, IMO!

@musikman1 Your best bet is to start a topic on the Feedback Forum: https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/forum/8-feedback-loop/ The CD Burning thing was added a fair while ago, so I'd suggest an overhaul would be coming before an enhancement at this point, but you never know! Always worth asking.

Yeah, the Cakewalk burner really was just made for quick tests. If I remember right, it burns down to Track at Once rather than Disc at Once so you don't have a lot of control over gaps, etc so I wouldn't be surprised if other features are missing. I've sent in my laundry list of features I'd like to see, and one is proper DDP authoring, and extending on that, using the DDP as the burn image, rather than using this TaO method. It'd certainly save me a few steps for doing glass masters! In the meantime, give www.anyburn.com a try - it's free.

This is kind of what I was getting at with my last post. Every user is going to do something a little differently with how they use an app. The Devs/beta team/people who use Early Access can only anticipate so much before someone comes along with a certain workflow or certain combination of hardware or software to utterly break things. Even if the app is working as designed, if people are getting so completely tangled up with a tool, maybe that tool needs changing? Or indeed it could be a hole that needs plugging. Just because everyone uses a tool in a certain way and you don't doesn't mean it's not a bug that you've uncovered that needs to be fixed. Erik is a great example of this. He came from Mixcraft and started asking "but why?" to a lot of stuff ancient users like myself just went "because that's how it is" without thinking about it too much. Some stuff was learning the tools more, but a lot of stuff really could be better and fresh eyes and perspective can really be useful for all of us. But those EA threads can get a bit nuts sometimes with reports, things can get missed. If it's something which is a problem, definitely report it.

Yeah, I'm not talking about this thing, I'm talking about that particular case. The facts remain, if the Devs can't find and reproduce an issue, they can't fix it, and that case was an outlier. No need for snark here. If we're seeing stuff like in this thread, possibly it means something in a project is getting corrupted over time. I'm not seeing every second person reporting this on the forum, so it must be specific to either the app use, the environment or user error made by a misunderstanding about how a feature should work. All of these things should be reported, even the misunderstanding thing. If it's the former 2 things, sending in a project file could get the problem fixed once and for all rather than "oh yeah, this DAW is weird and broken lolollolll" - why put up with that? Report it. And if it's the last thing, maybe the documentation needs fixing? Maybe the tool itself needs a tweak even if it is working as designed? This is a user forum and a great place to start by bringing stuff up to see if anyone else has seen something similar as a sanity check. But as users we can only do so much with advice - sometimes the Devs themselves need a project to work out why these specific weird things are happening. I'd rather stuff got fixed and the hell out of my way so I could get my job done.

I really feel for Sharke. He was genuinely running into some serious show-stopper bugs that very few people (devs included) could reproduce, which means it just couldn't be addressed. I have to admit, if I was running into bugs that affected my workflow that badly, I would have gone elsewhere too. How he was using SONAR didn't help matters - he was really pushing the limit for how automation was used, which was likely exposing stuff more than most people wouldn't have ever seen. The irony is that since then, quite a lot of work has been done on automation so there's a very good chance his problems have been resolved. Not saying there's not quirks to address yet, mind you, but I really think that since Bandlab got the IP, the Bakers have really put more of a focus on fixing a lot of this stuff as compared to the Roland/Gibson days which made guys like Sharke have to look elsewhere.

Just want to say it's nice to have disagreements on here and it still be respectful. This place is pretty cool.

Regardless of how well your DAW is going, if you want a specific plugin that's written to be heavy on the resources because it needs to be (think amp modellers, sample libraries, physical modelling, etc.) then old hardware is going to be the bottleneck between you and your creative vision. Can you work with ancient hardware? Sure - I was using a laptop with 8GB of RAM on a dual core CPU for ages and doing huge productions on it. Did it suck? Yes. Yes it did. It involved a bunch of extra work that just isn't required from a more powerful machine that may not support an OS anymore. But I got the job done, albeit much more slowly. It's not a dark future, it's just how it is. Don't be surprised if one day Justin and co. turn around and go "look, this is stupid supporting a 20 year old OS that's been abandoned because we can't run X language to draw the UI efficiently on a modern interface" with REAPER. Every dev needs to make a decision as they go along for their own sanity and the ultimate stability of a product. If you're always looking behind you trying to maintain compatibility with some long dead OS, it's asking for legacy bugs, bloat and problems as it goes onward. Apple is probably the most brutal with this. "Right, here's our new OS, all of this old stuff doesn't work now. Good luck with the new versions if/when they arrive." Eventually people stopped supporting CP/M, DOS, Win 9x, etc. with their software. You're seeing 32 bit software start to disappear in favour of 64 bit. What I'm saying is you might have choices now, but as systems change, devs will need to keep up or their software will be left behind too, and those choices will diminish. Even if a host might be compatible, your choice of plugins will eventually start to shrink before you're forced to find a host and OS that supports them. If you're happy with doing basic stuff, with stock plugins, sure - have at it. You can certainly make good music with stock stuff in any current DAW, but if you require certain things to do your job in a professional situation, those limitations can mean the difference between doing it in a week as opposed to months with workarounds. I don't believe this. Win7 is an abandoned OS. If you want to use this for anything online, then the risk is only going to increase as the years go on, vs. a currently updated OS. If you rely on any plugin that uses a company that does online authorisation (and there's many) then you're stuck 'walking that path without a bodyguard" if you use Win7. The other thing is this is all kind of irrelevant to a point with CbB anyway. You download it and set it up online (like most software), sign up and into your Bandlab account, and you can choose to be online or not. So long as things are kept current to around 6 months - and there's offline auth too - then there's really not a lot of difference between this and SONAR X1, other than the devs wanting to be smart about what bugs they chase. Additionally, imagine having to write spaghetti code to work around something in a discontinued OS that was already fixed 10 years ago in the currently supported OS? Or finding some obscure bug that's only a thing that appears because of this old OS? Wouldn't you rather they focus their time on making the best CbB they can? And getting people to keep the app current takes the wild goose chases out of the process of tracking down new bugs. Something may have been fixed a year ago which people on an old version may be complaining about "this stupid buggy software has X issue and the devs suck!" whereas it actually may have been fixed since then. Keeping it all current mitigates that. Bottom line is this: I don't care what you use, ultimately. That's your choice - as it should be. (And I'm aware that's a lot of writing to say "I don't care" ?). All I'm saying is while you may have choices now, things change and if you're able to deal with those limitations that you're giving yourself by sticking with something old, have at it! You can definitely make great music on a Windows 95 machine if you really want to. Or tape machines for that matter. But speaking as someone who does need fairly powerful hardware to run the specific things I do for the work I'm being paid to do, I'd rather hop on board with the way things are heading and work out a path forward rather than watch the world inevitably shrink around me and have to come up with contingency plans and workarounds. It's just not a good way to run a business.

The reality is this: Win7 is EOL now. There's no support for it from Microsoft and CbB isn't actively being tested on it anymore. That's not to say it won't work on Win7 but the Bakers aren't 100% ensuring it works since the OS is basically a dead end. Going forward, you'll find more and more software and hardware that won't work with Win7, so your options are basically this: Use your current Win7 compatible software and hardware and wait for it to all eventually die out. Then you have to choose where to go from there. You can hunt around for old parts and keep trying to piece together old hardware and outdated software to stay in that old ecosystem, and miss out on the performance gains and enhancement the current gen of gear has. Or you can move to Mac, possibly having to re-buy a lot of stuff and learn a new DAW, and then having to choose wisely because Mac is in a transition between Intel and M1 hardware, and a lot of software still has to phone home on a Mac regardless, and they get a fair amount of updates a year like Win10 does. Or you can move to Linux and have to deal with an extremely limited amount of hardware and software and less than idea troubleshooting if anything goes wrong, since it's not on any of the other two mainstream operating systems. The computer world is a very different place now than it was 10 years ago, and it's rare to find anyone not embracing a fully connected world, and will be even more so going forward as the old deprecated software and hardware fades away. I know I'd much rather make plans to ensure I have a future with what I did rather than finding one day that the world has moved on without me and I'm stuck making a very hard choice when something I rely on no longer works in the not-to-distant future.