Obnoxious bug with zoom control

[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

 

[Lord Tim]

Yeah, I'm definitely looking in that direction too. My crappy machine has a pretty low spec Intel integrated adaptor, whereas all of my good machines have discrete Nvidia cards, so it's certainly possible it's related. That's why I want to compare specs to see if we have that kind of thing in common.

[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

[Lord Tim]

Interesting. I'm running a 32:9 super Ultrawide here myself, and my crappy machine barely has the guts to drive it properly (most machines I have eat it for breakfast with their video cards).

What kind of monitors / video cards does everyone have here? It might just come down to things not keeping up while pixels are pushed around a bigger screen .

[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.

[Glenn Stanton]

it may be the zoom function operates too quickly and the number of events to process (rotating the dial or clicking on the +/-) overloads the software which is trying to process everything else. if i operate the controls slowly (+/-) it doesn't seem to happen. same with a single indent of the wheel. if i quickly spin it or click the scoll buttons it goes into the lock up and seems to be trying to scale beyond it's limits and/or has too many operations to attempt.

[william nayeri]

On 5/15/2020 at 2:45 PM, Ben Staton said:

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!

The zoom window stays visible.
When will be the next release ?

[Gregg Markus]

On 7/28/2020 at 3:54 PM, Glenn Stanton said:

it may be the zoom function operates too quickly and the number of events to process (rotating the dial or clicking on the +/-) overloads the software which is trying to process everything else. if i operate the controls slowly (+/-) it doesn't seem to happen. same with a single indent of the wheel. if i quickly spin it or click the scoll buttons it goes into the lock up and seems to be trying to scale beyond it's limits and/or has too many operations to attempt.

I'm fairly certain it's not the slide speed. It would seem that if it's going to lock up, it lock up the instant I touch my mouse to the slider. It just jumps right out to the max level and gets stuck.

I just doubled my memory from 16 to 32 GB (and I used faster RAM). I was hoping to avoid dumping more money into that machine, because it's time to upgrade. I literally just did this last night before I went to bed. I booted up Sonar to see if it would still get stuck in my task manager after I closed. It does.

I gotta say, I've been using Sonar/Bandlab for 18+ years. It's been rock solid across multiple machines. And now all of a sudden, I have two deal-breakers after the same update. It's a real bummer, and I sincerely hope the next release gets this sorted out. I've looked at other DAWs and     ....yeesh....    no thanks.

[Stunted Records]

This has been happening to me and its a real pain in the neck. If I set up a section to loop and then zoom in to edit a take I get so far and then it won't stop playback without Ctrl + Alt + Delete......all the controls in Cakewalk are unrespopnsive.

There's another issue too that I've noticed - If my loop is cycling so that I can review takes, if I hit the timeline during playback to make it go back a bit the whole sound of the song drops in level and sounds like a blanket over the speakers...again this is a C+A+D scenario and inevitable loses work.

These are big issues, I've used Cakewalk for years but I'm seriously considering moving to something else when I start my next project.

[Jonathan Sasor]

5 hours ago, Stunted Records said:

This has been happening to me and its a real pain in the neck. If I set up a section to loop and then zoom in to edit a take I get so far and then it won't stop playback without Ctrl + Alt + Delete......all the controls in Cakewalk are unrespopnsive.

There's another issue too that I've noticed - If my loop is cycling so that I can review takes, if I hit the timeline during playback to make it go back a bit the whole sound of the song drops in level and sounds like a blanket over the speakers...again this is a C+A+D scenario and inevitable loses work.

These are big issues, I've used Cakewalk for years but I'm seriously considering moving to something else when I start my next project.

Please try the 2020.08 update which has a number of optimizations for zooming. It is available now to update through BandLab Assistant. 

[Lord Tim]

Well, this fixed every issue I came across so I'm pretty stoked! Great work!

[CJP]

Yes, it looks like this is fixed. Fantastic! Brilliant! Thank you very much.  Cakewalk is awesome!

[Gregg Markus]

I updated late last night. I only started one session for a minute or two. It'd didn't get stuck, but I'll want to do more extensive testing tonight. I hope this is finally over.

I read the early release notes and there was mention of a zoom control (related to centering the scroll bar or something?). I was hoping this meant additional zoom fixes. So I really hope this works.

I've been using Pro Tools for the past couple weeks. And I tell you...     we really take for granted how awesome CbB really is. Especially when compared to other DAWs. My only wish (other than big free performance) is to finally have a proper Mac version. I always paid for my renewals prior to Bandlab, and I'd happily go back to that model if it meant development hours for a mac version.

 

On 8/7/2020 at 10:09 AM, Stunted Records said:

This has been happening to me and its a real pain in the neck. If I set up a section to loop and then zoom in to edit a take I get so far and then it won't stop playback without Ctrl + Alt + Delete......all the controls in Cakewalk are unrespopnsive.

There's another issue too that I've noticed - If my loop is cycling so that I can review takes, if I hit the timeline during playback to make it go back a bit the whole sound of the song drops in level and sounds like a blanket over the speakers...again this is a C+A+D scenario and inevitable loses work.

These are big issues, I've used Cakewalk for years but I'm seriously considering moving to something else when I start my next project.

 

 

If the latest update didn't fix this for you, you might try a workaround suggested by Lord Tim earlier in this thread. Open up your ASIO control panel (in my case the MOTU control panel), and change the latency/buffer - or - change the clock type. This stops the audio engine, and gives you control again. It's a serious hassle, but at least you won't have to "end-task-and-lose-all-your-work".