[CLOSED] Cakewalk 2022.11 Update 1 Early Access [Updated to Build 21]

[Xoo]

I think you will find you'll lose existing preferences if you do switch, but don't quote me on that.

[tulamide]

This version changed something regarding my personal issues. The first start, until the project selection window opens, is not faster. But the plugins do load faster at project load. They also open fast now (at least all of which I tested) in the DAW. But the "busy" moment after stopping the playback has not gone completely. It does happen when I run a loop and work a bit, especially MIDI. The display that normally shows the current time in the transport bar, and is used also to show progress when rendering or opening, shows a progress bar after 1 second, for maybe another second. I can only read about "saving", the rest goes away too quickly.

[Noel Borthwick]

Do you have auto save enabled? If so it's likely trying to save your project.

Try disabling that.

[Milton Sica]

36 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Do you have auto save enabled? If so it's likely trying to save your project.

Try disabling that.

I also have AUTOMATIC SAVING enabled, as it is an excellent tool that preserves changes made to the project. Protecting from power surges, etc.

Do I understand that for better performance I must disable this option or was it a suggestion to test where the slowness is happening?

[Noel Borthwick]

On 11/26/2022 at 3:45 AM, tulamide said:

This version changed something regarding my personal issues. The first start, until the project selection window opens, is not faster. But the plugins do load faster at project load. They also open fast now (at least all of which I tested) in the DAW. But the "busy" moment after stopping the playback has not gone completely. It does happen when I run a loop and work a bit, especially MIDI. The display that normally shows the current time in the transport bar, and is used also to show progress when rendering or opening, shows a progress bar after 1 second, for maybe another second. I can only read about "saving", the rest goes away too quickly.

@tulamide try capturing a video while you stop the transport. That will show the exact message being displayed. Most likely this is autosave which if you have a big project will take a second to save the project. Perhaps one of your plugins is causing the project to get modified while playing.

[tulamide]

14 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

@tulamide try capturing a video while you stop the transport. That will show the exact message being displayed. Most likely this is autosave which if you have a big project will take a second to save the project. Perhaps one of your plugins is causing the project to get modified while playing.

Indeed, that helped. It was autosave. I'd set it to "15 minutes or 10 changes", but I'm not sure, how to set so that it only saves every 15 minutes. With some plugins it saved every 5 or so seconds! However, I used a setting now that got rid of this behaviour (360 minutes and 20,000 changes)

There are still some plugins left that use a very long time, wether on project load, after dragging into the project, or when opening their GUI. In particular I can name iZotope BreakTweaker, which takes about 10 seconds. I know that it loads/opens quicker in other DAWs (Waveform, Reason), but I won't complain too much. The positive progress is definitely there and appreciated! Thank you!

Edited November 28, 2022 by tulamide

[Milton Sica]

6 hours ago, tulamide said:

There are still some plugins left that use a very long time, wether on project load, after dragging into the project, or when opening their GUI. In particular I can name iZotope BreakTweaker, which takes about 10 seconds. I know that it loads/opens quicker in other DAWs (Waveform, Reason), but I won't complain too much. 

Some time ago I had problems with Ozone loading slowly and I received a tip, I don't remember if it was from @msmcleod, which was to have the Ozone Plugins validation application running in the background.
This fixed the slowdown for me.

[scook]

9 hours ago, tulamide said:

Indeed, that helped. It was autosave. I'd set it to "15 minutes or 10 changes", but I'm not sure, how to set so that it only saves every 15 minutes.

To auto-save based on time only, set the number of changes to 0 (zero). 

[Terry Kelley]

This EA opens projects noticeably faster. I have a couple that have tons of plugins and no freezing and I would guess that it's at least 30% faster. Definitely noticeable.

[tulamide]

10 hours ago, Milton Sica said:

Some time ago I had problems with Ozone loading slowly and I received a tip, I don't remember if it was from @msmcleod, which was to have the Ozone Plugins validation application running in the background.
This fixed the slowdown for me.

WTAF? I was the typical "yeah, sure, why should that help"? I started iZotope Product Portal, left it open. Started Cakewalk. Added BreakTeaker to the project. Opened lightning fast!

Whatever witchcraft this is, it helps, so I won't investigate the dark powers that enable it

[Milton Sica]

52 minutes ago, tulamide said:

WTAF? I was the typical "yeah, sure, why should that help"? I started iZotope Product Portal, left it open. Started Cakewalk. Added BreakTeaker to the project. Opened lightning fast!

Whatever witchcraft this is, it helps, so I won't investigate the dark powers that enable it

In one of the threads I commented on this the explanation is given.
I'll try to find.

[tulamide]

Ok, a weird issue. I was working on a song and at one point I replaced a synth with SynthMaster 2.9 (newest version). I opened its browser and selected specific patches, one after the other, while listening to a looped section of the song. At one point, I couldn't see any changes in the GUI of Synthmaster anymore (although the changes were made, i.e new patches selected), and part of its GUI was displayed on top of the Cakewalk GUI, far outside of the SM window. Not good. I closed the window, and with a bit of mouse movement and collapsing/expanding tracks, I was able to get rid of the SM garbage on the Cakewalk GUI. Opened SM again, and after a while, the same issue repeated. This time, after cleaning up, the window opened was just white (note, over the whole time, SM audio output was working just fine, reacting to the midi notes). I replaced SM with another synth, but the window again was white, and this time Cakewalk hung for 30 seconds and then crashed silently to desktop. I was able to retrieve a dump file from %appdata%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\MiniDumps.

Dropbox link to dump file

 

Edited November 29, 2022 by tulamide
grammar

[Olaf]

8 hours ago, tulamide said:

Ok, a weird issue. I was working on a song and at one point I replaced a synth with SynthMaster 2.9 (newest version). I opened its browser and selected specific patches, one after the other, while listening to a looped section of the song. At one point, I couldn't see any changes in the GUI of Synthmaster anymore (although the changes were made, i.e new patches selected), and part of its GUI was displayed on top of the Cakewalk GUI, far outside of the SM window. Not good. I closed the window, and with a bit of mouse movement and collapsing/expanding tracks, I was able to get rid of the SM garbage on the Cakewalk GUI. Opened SM again, and after a while, the same issue repeated. This time, after cleaning up, the window opened was just white (note, over the whole time, SM audio output was working just fine, reacting to the midi notes). I replaced SM with another synth, but the window again was white, and this time Cakewalk hung for 30 seconds and then crashed silently to desktop. I was able to retrieve a dump file from %appdata%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\MiniDumps.

Dropbox link to dump file

Sounds like it could be a RAM or GPU RAM overload issue. Do you know if you had enough RAM memory still available? Did you have any other programs/windows open?

Edited November 29, 2022 by Olaf

[Keni]

Huh!

 

ok. Time to give my DAW's gremlins personal names.

Last night's work found Melodyne render back to "normal" naming.

I sometimes feel my machine is toying with me as my cats used to?

 

There have been no updates or other machine changes in between.

 

Edited November 29, 2022 by Keni

[Max Arwood]

Has anyone had the export function to changing settings or mute tracks from a prior state of cakewalk while using hidden tracks?

[Glenn Stanton]

57 minutes ago, Max Arwood said:

Has anyone had the export function to changing settings or mute tracks from a prior state of cakewalk while using hidden tracks?

yes, you can watch it happening if you are in track mode and when you select, un-select, mute / un-mute. i think though the states revert when you finish the export or close it

i'll have to try that ? 

[GreenLight]

I'm curious - where did you (the Bakers) get the inspiration/idea to work on improving project load times? Was someone having issues or did someone have an "Heureka!" moment? ?

The improvements sound impressive, great job!

[Noel Borthwick]

14 hours ago, tulamide said:

Ok, a weird issue. I was working on a song and at one point I replaced a synth with SynthMaster 2.9 (newest version). I opened its browser and selected specific patches, one after the other, while listening to a looped section of the song. At one point, I couldn't see any changes in the GUI of Synthmaster anymore (although the changes were made, i.e new patches selected), and part of its GUI was displayed on top of the Cakewalk GUI, far outside of the SM window. Not good. I closed the window, and with a bit of mouse movement and collapsing/expanding tracks, I was able to get rid of the SM garbage on the Cakewalk GUI. Opened SM again, and after a while, the same issue repeated. This time, after cleaning up, the window opened was just white (note, over the whole time, SM audio output was working just fine, reacting to the midi notes). I replaced SM with another synth, but the window again was white, and this time Cakewalk hung for 30 seconds and then crashed silently to desktop. I was able to retrieve a dump file from %appdata%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\MiniDumps.

Dropbox link to dump file

 

I looked at the dump file. The crash isn't in any Cakewalk code and its impossible to decipher from the stack. There are a lot of Sitala threads there but it's not clear if it was responsible. Very possible that some corruption caused the crash. The problem with errant plugins is it can be very hard to track down from the DAW level if crashes are random because they can corrupt memory. Details from your dump are below. Something (not Cakewalk) is basically trying to read from a bad memory address somewhere. 

Based on your description the most likely explanation one of the plugins possibly ran out of memory and had poor error handling leading to this crash. The bottom line is there is nothing any DAW can do to protect from cases like this. If you have consistent problems with particular plugins your best option is to work with the plugin vendor to fix it. 

ExceptionAddress: 00007ffb092812a8 (ntdll!RtlDispatchException+0x0000000000000048)
   ExceptionCode: c0000005 (Access violation)
  ExceptionFlags: 00000000
NumberParameters: 2
   Parameter[0]: 0000000000000000
   Parameter[1]: 00000000000000bc
Attempt to read from address 00000000000000bc

PROCESS_NAME:  Cakewalk.exe

READ_ADDRESS:  00000000000000bc 

ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xc0000005 - The instruction at 0x%p referenced memory at 0x%p. The memory could not be %s.

EXCEPTION_CODE_STR:  c0000005

EXCEPTION_PARAMETER1:  0000000000000000

EXCEPTION_PARAMETER2:  00000000000000bc

FAULTING_THREAD:  ffffffff

STACK_TEXT:  
00007ffb`092812a8 00007ffb`092812a8 ntdll!RtlDispatchException+0x48

STACK_COMMAND:  ** Pseudo Context ** Pseudo ** Value: 3 ** ; kb

SYMBOL_NAME:  ntdll!RtlDispatchException+48

MODULE_NAME: ntdll

IMAGE_NAME:  ntdll.dll

FAILURE_BUCKET_ID:  BAD_DUMP_MISSING_MEMORY_NULL_CLASS_PTR_READ_c0000005_ntdll.dll!RtlDispatchException

OS_VERSION:  10.0.19041.1

BUILDLAB_STR:  vb_release

OSPLATFORM_TYPE:  x64

OSNAME:  Windows 10

IMAGE_VERSION:  10.0.19041.2130

[Noel Borthwick]

31 minutes ago, GreenLight said:

I'm curious - where did you (the Bakers) get the inspiration/idea to work on improving project load times? Was someone having issues or did someone have an "Heureka!" moment? ?

The improvements sound impressive, great job!

A few people had certain projects taking long to load with certain plugins, so we investigated it and found that some plugins can flood the message queue with data when loading.  Since Cakewalk was waiting for all activity to finish at load time, this caused the delay.

I've now also further improved load time on systems with no internet or poor internet speeds. The app should load immediately in such cases in the next build.

[Milton Sica]

13 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

 

I've now also further improved load time on systems with no internet or poor internet speeds. The app should load immediately in such cases in the next build.

Is this already in build 17 or will a new EA come out?