Cakewalk Hanging on "Creating UI..."

[Ken M]

I've seen lots of posts regarding Cakewalk hanging on "Creating UI". Thought I'd share what I found when it happened to me.

I installed the current version of Cakewalk on my desktop computer. Installation went smooth, but when I tried to open a new project (using the 4-Track.cwt template), Cakewalk would hang on "Creating UI". I did all the stuff people suggested in other posts: uninstall / reinstall, disable anti-virus, run as Admin, don't install add-ons, etc - none of those worked for me.

When it hung, I'd wait 10 or 15 seconds then terminate the app. One time though, I let it run while I was searching for more suggestions on the net. And eventually (after several minutes), the UI was created and Cakewalk came back to life.

I'm a programmer, so I decided to use Process Monitor to see what Cakewalk was doing when it hung. What I found was for some reason Cakewalk decided to get a list of the files on my Desktop and then opened each of the .zips (might have opened other file types, but it was the .zip files I noticed it opening). One of my .zips was a download of the Material Designs open source icons, which has something like 60,000 icons in it, and it looked like Cakewalk was checking out each icon in the file. Why it would do that is beyond me.

So I moved the Material Designs zip and another large zip file into a temp folder on my desktop, then relaunched Cakewalk. Tried to create a new project and *boom*, just like that the project was created and was ready to run. Same thing happened when opening an existing project: it would load immediately if the .zip file was not on my Desktop; would take forever if the .zip was on my Desktop.

I looked through the Preferences dialog in Advanced mode, looking for a path pointing to my Desktop but couldn't find one.

Anyway, if you're experiencing a long delay when creating or loading a project, try moving any zip files on your Desktop to another folder. Maybe what I found will help in your case.

And if Cakewalk Support is reading this post, I'm happy to send the the Process Monitor log file. Also, it would be good to know if there's a way to disable that .zip file scanning.

[Noel Borthwick]

@Ken MThanks for the report. Which version of CbB were you running? 

Most likely your media browser was pointing to the desktop where the zip files are present. Please check if this is the case.
If you point the browser to a different folder and resave the problem will not occur. However I was under the impression that this issue had been addressed earlier. It was an issue with the shell browser extension we are using rather than Cakewalk itself.

We'll look into it for the next release. Thanks for the detailed report. You can PM me the process monitor log.

[abacab]

I've seen a case of Cakewalk itself taking a long time to open, no project involved, and not counting the VST scan.

In my case, I tracked it down to using the old Sonar Platinum path for project templates, instead of using the Cakewalk Core path. This only started happening recently after I saved a new project template from Cakewalk to the Sonar Platinum project template folder. I had always been using the Platinum template path since installing CbB.

I copied my project templates over from Platinum, and changed my Cakewalk preferences to use all Cakewalk Core paths. Now Cakewalk opens almost instantly! I really don't understand why that made a difference, as both content paths are on the same SSD drive.

Edited January 23, 2021 by abacab

[Ken M]

Gents,

Thanks for your prompt replies.

Noel, the media browser sounds like a good suspect for this issue: when I opened the Browser View it was pointing at my Desktop. I tried pointing to another folder preset then restarting Cakewalk, but whenever I would click on the Media tab it would still show the contents of my Desktop even if the Preset location was pointing elsewhere (in this case I had selected "Track Templates").

Will PM the process log to you.

Ken