Obnoxious bug with zoom control

[MashedBuddha]

v2020.01 Build 28

 

Sometimes when a prject is playing and I adjust Horizontal Zoom Control at the bottom right corner, the program gets stuck on that and seems to be zooming in endlessly, continuing to the play the track, and the program doesn't respond to any input whatsoever.  I have to End Task it.  Please fix this

[David Baay]

I usually zoom with Ctrl+Alt+Scroll Wheel, but just tried the buttons and cannot reproduce any issue. And I don't recall seeing any other reports of this. In order for the Bakers to fix whatever you're encountering, you'll need to give them a project and/or recipe that reproduces it consistently.

[Blogospherianman]

On 4/1/2020 at 10:27 PM, MashedBuddha said:

v2020.01 Build 28

 

Sometimes when a prject is playing and I adjust Horizontal Zoom Control at the bottom right corner, the program gets stuck on that and seems to be zooming in endlessly, continuing to the play the track, and the program doesn't respond to any input whatsoever.  I have to End Task it.  Please fix this

I’ve been having this issue as well!

[evanking345]

On 4/1/2020 at 11:27 PM, MashedBuddha said:

v2020.01 Build 28

 

Sometimes when a prject is playing and I adjust Horizontal Zoom Control at the bottom right corner, the program gets stuck on that and seems to be zooming in endlessly, continuing to the play the track, and the program doesn't respond to any input whatsoever.  I have to End Task it.  Please fix this

I've had this issue twice in the last 2 days

[CJP]

I've had this happen as well. To free up Cakewalk without having to End Task it and lose your work, you can Ctrl+Alt+Delete to Task Manager, right click on the Cakewalk Application and attempt to create a dump file. As the dump file is created it will halt Cakewalk from continuously running and you'll be able to zoom back out and carry on working. You may have to make a dump file more than once to force Cakewalk to stop. Just remember to delete the dump files if you have to do this a few times as they can take up a lot of space.

[Blogospherianman]

If I hit Play then Zoom and it hangs, I can hit the WIN key to escape the Horizontal Zoom slider, then Right click Task bar and Click ‘Show desktop’ to regain control.

If  I Zoom then hit play and it hangs I have to WIN key then Task manager and End Process for Cakewalk.

I have since Cleaned my Video drivers and re-installed, as well as swapped from a firewire interface to a USB one.  Projects that hung every time aren’t  Hanging now. They still jitter and stutter between 75%-100% Horizontal zoom, but have stopped hanging all together.  Not sure which worked.  I have cleaned Video drivers before and still had it happening so I’m not sure.

 

[Ben Staton]

Thanks for the reports. We've logged this issue, and I'm investigating it now.
When it happens, does the little zoom window remain visible on-screen, or does it disappear but the mouse is still stuck?
Thanks!

[winkpain]

I too have had this issue.

[Blogospherianman]

1 hour ago, Lord Tim said:

The zoom window stays visible for me.

Same here

[Ben Staton]

I'm working on a fix. In the meantime, using Alt+Tab to switch to another application, and then going back to Cakewalk, seems to 'un-stick' the mouse so you can continue working.

[Ben Staton]

A fix for this will be in the next release!

[Gregg Markus]

FYI - This is still happening in the latest release. Those release notes indicated there was a fix for this.

I would actually say it's worse than it was before. And the alt-tab trick (switching to another window/application) doesn't work. 

[Klisin]

What helped me was to regain control by using Alt+Tab and letting it go zoom crazy for a few minutes until it says "dropout engine" and then it allowed me to save. Just wait, even thought it feels frustrating 

[Gregg Markus]

BTW, Alt-Tab over to another program hasn't been helping me. This has me on the edge. A few times I've had no choice but to end-task. What the heck happened with CbB over the past two updates? It's been rock solid up until this.

This is listed as a bug fix for the most recent release. Well, it didn't fix anything. If anything it's worse. The version prior only got 'stuck' once in a while. But now it's happening about 50% of the time I reach for that slider.

Sorry for vent; but since there still doesn't appear to be a way to submit a bug report (none that I can find), I guess I'll just do it here.

I've been with cake for far too long to leave now. And this is my first real bug/problem. But it's such a deal breaker for me considering how frequently I use this little tool. So I sincerely hope this gets resolved ASAP. Because I can't continue if it stays like this.

 

[Blogospherianman]

I’ve had it happen on projects with just an already frozen piano and a vocal. 

[John Bradley]

FWIW, I think it's more likely to be a video card and/or driver thing rather than raw CPU performance, given that people can get it to happen on simple projects with very low CPU requirements. We all know that if there's one thing that can reliably lock up a machine, or blue screen it, it's the video driver.

I get it (or at least did, until I learned never to touch the zoom control while the DAW is playing!) on my system, which is based on a Core i7-950 (3.1GHz) from a decade ago. Video: I'm using an Nvidia GTX750 Ti, driver version 432.00

 

[Gregg Markus]

On 7/19/2020 at 11:07 PM, Lord Tim said:

This looks like a really tough one to crack. On one machine of mine, I can fairly reliably get things to stick and it looked like this was a good pointer for what was the cause, but on every other machine the same process works correctly.

My initial thought was it was a CPU usage thing; the machine that is choking and getting stuck is in desperate need of replacing and is usually running near the limit of its abilities, and I've found that's when I run into the most issues with this bug. I find it hard to make my other machines work as hard to get it close to this kind of load so that's where the line of thought was going.

However, I was phase aligning 2 wave files with no effects on there at all, zoomed into the sample level and the zoom got stuck during playback, so if it's a CPU thing, this was a different bug exposing the same problem.

What are your machine specs, @Gregg Markus? And how hard are you pushing your projects when it happens? We might be able to narrow something down between us to help Ben get a handle on it.

My machine is fairly old by today's standards, but running an i7 with 16GB RAM. I replaced the MOBO a year or two back, and upgraded my video card at the same time to support higher res monitors. I mainly use this machine for mixing (these are dense sessions with 100+ audio tracks, 10-20 are running Line6 Helix Native, and maybe 5-10 more tracks of different virtual synths). But...   since I'm mainly mixing, I tend to run my buffers higher (usually at 1024) to avoid drop outs and crackles.  According to Task Manager & CbB's meter - I should be well below any point of concern. And this "glitch" appears to happen regardless as to how many tracks I'm handling (could be 1, or 150 tracks). Since this started, I've taken to freezing and submixing more. I haven't isolated it to any plugins either, but I have been running into a separate issue involving Waves Scheps Omni Channel plugin.

I made some time tonight to go through and update my drivers, and check for a BIOS update. It'd be great if this fixes it. But we'll see.

So after BIOS/Drivers, I'll test it with one of these larger sessions. If it happens again, I guess I will start from scratch with an empty session, and start adding audio files (no VST, no plugs) to see what happens.

 

 

EDIT: Forgot to add that I'm taking the video card comments to heart. Back in December I added a ultrawide monitor, and have seen some minor visual glitches (mainly upon startup, or when switching users). No crashes or anything bad, just some head scratching quirks that go away. So fingers crossed.

 

Edited July 24, 2020 by GMGM

[Gregg Markus]

Quick follow-up. I updated graphics driver, and....  

now I can make it get stuck EVERY time. Buy it mainly seems to be only when I zoom in to the sample level.  If I go in too close, boom- it's over. I have to stop my internal clock or end-task.

Prior to the graphics update, the slider would zoom all the way in and get stuck even if I barely touched it. Now, it seems to offer some level of control - up to maybe 75% of the slider's travel - before it's f###ed.

It's only been 10 minutes since I restarted - so I feel this might be a possible step. So I'm being cautiously optimistic here. It's literally been about 10 minuets since I restarted my computer.

I need to plug in my X Touch and see if those zoom controls act any differently.

[Blogospherianman]

My system is 5 years old sporting an Asus z10-PE-D164L, with Dual Intel Xeon E5 2603 v3 @ 1.6 (2 processors, 32 Gigs of RAM, Windows 10 64 bit, Grapgics card is a fanless AMD RADEON HD 6450.

With my graphics card fully updated, I get stuck zooming more so than when I uninstalled the graphics driver and re-installed.. Oddly it updates to an older driver first then comes back later wanting to update to the latest driver.. The latest one hangs more consistently.. with the older driver it still stutters pretty bad when you reach the 75% zoom level and beyond.. Also if you zoomedin first then hit play it would hang. Seems to be graphics card related, except that some of us have NVidea and others AMD. ?

[John Bradley]

I'd imagine it's not a video card issue per se (as in, a specific card or a specific driver), but if you have an older/slower video card and you zoom in further than you should during playback, Cakewalk will flood the card with "now draw this" requests faster than the card can keep up with. This causes a backlog of drawing requests to build up (they are queued, one would imagine), and the program gets unresponsive until the queue is emptied... which possibly only occurs once you're past the end of the song and there are no more waveforms to display in the track view. Or maybe never.

Not that I know, but that's my semi-educated guess. Presumably there's some way for CW to know that it's going overboard with the drawing requests (some way to tell how many outstanding requests there are in the buffer?) and just stop updating the display until the buffer empties out or whatever. Or something like that.