Guidelines Needed

[tulamide]

@Noel Borthwick

I will tag a developer to make sure, this post is seen. To start with, this is not about a mean person complaining or something along those lines. I love Cakewalk, and I love working with it. I love that it is a gift to musicians, free of charge.
Please keep that in mind, for the following parts.

I often experience Cakewalk either hanging (""not responing" forever) or crashing silently to desktop. It is not regular, not happening several times a day, but it is enough to be annoying, having jammed for an hour and losing all your progress that you can't really repeat. Now, a program ideally would never crash, but that's not reality. I know that. But these occurencies are so random in a specific circumstance. For example, from some plugins I just know, that a hang/crash will happen at some point. But it doesn't matter what I do when it happens, because the next time it will happen while I do something completely different. I know that it is Cakewalk specific, because I work with 3 DAWs pretty much equally, Cakewalk, Waveform Free and Reason. All the issues I have only happen in Cakewalk. I never experienced any of it in the other DAWs, using the same plugins, doing the same things, for the same amount of time. Also, I have a recent PC with good properties.

Reporting such issues is difficult.
1) As a hobby developer I know the other side and realize it isn't helpful at all. You can't fix, what you can't reproduce.
2) Often times, when such things are reported, the reaction is always "that's not Cakewalk, but ... (enter plugin, driver, user, etc)"
3) Another standard argument is "you can't compare apples to pears".
 

My reaction to this (over time) has become to not report them at all. A silent crash to desktop doesn't create a dump file, and Cakewalk hanging doesn't provide any background information as well. It is of course easy to say, that's user specific. Nobody else might have reported it, and nobody else might be able to replicate it, because of its randomness.

But I also feel unsure, because -as I said in the beginning- I love Cakewalk, and I want it to be so reliable, that it can be used under production conditions. Others will use other plugins, that might work better with cakewalk, and therefore don't experience issues, and already see it as production-ready. For me it isn't. So I want it to be improved. But I just don't know how to deal with the described issues.

Some guidance would be of help. Should we report such random quirks, should we not? Mentioning what exactly I did before a crash won't help, because I can name at least half a dozen of things I've done, before the crash happened. For example, a drum synth can be set to follow key for pitch, to make it playable chromatically. I activated key follow and Cakewalk immediately crashed to desktop silently. Doing the same thing in the other DAWs of course does not provoke a crash. And when I run Cakewalk again and do the same it doesn't crash. However, half an hour later, while changing the drum synth's oscillator shape... boom, silent crash to desktop. This all doesn't make sense, neither for me or for you. I just know something's wrong, without any evidence or proof to give you.

How to deal with it. Should I continue ignoring it? Should I report them despite being of no help? And how to deal with the reaction, if reported. It is, frankly, disillusioning to report such strange things just to hear, "oh that's not Cakewalk". I just want to help, and I want to make it right. But the guidelines I'm aware of, don't cover such random issues.

And if you're not staff, but will answer: Please make sure to understand my point here. There's no need to defend anything or nayone. I know the developers are working hard, I know the program was so much improved over the years, I know we get this program for free. That all is exactly the reason I'm using Cakewalk, and want it to be as flawless as possible.

[Jonathan Sasor]

I mean, we definitely encouraging reporting issues when you experience anything with stability. But as you said, it can be difficult trying to triangulate things sometimes. The moment we're able to identify where a stability issue is, we'll fix it, but that requires being able to track down the root of the problem. For plugin crashes, there's often not much we can do on our end as if it's not the app itself that's crashing, it's up to the plugin developer to fix issues on that end. That said, we did add improved crash reporting, so even if you do not get a prompt about the crash, check the Minidumps folder in C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\MiniDumps to see if a system dump was copied there as the app crashed. 

Beyond that, for intermittent issues, that would boil down to trying to eliminating other variables to see if you can isolate a cause that we can investigate. I appreciate this might not be the most exciting thing for many users, however troubleshooting things on the user end can greatly speed up being able to fix any potential issues on our end. Try noting whatever common threads you can find when you get a crash, particularly if the app just silently crashes.

[Lord Tim]

If you're getting an app hang, you might be able to force a dump by following Noel's advice here:

Also, another good idea is to set the ExceptionHandlingSeverity variable to 7 (Preferences > File > Initialization File), which causes Cakewalk to report every error it can, including any otherwise benign ones. That should give you an error log at %appdata%\cakewalk\logs\cakewalk.log

Like Jon said, if you can reproduce it and report it, there's a better chance of it being fixed and we all win  

[Noel Borthwick]

I wrote an article with guidelines for diagnosing plugin compatibility.
Though to an end user it might not seem that way, the vast majority of problems are caused by plugin’s not being fully robust under a variety of operations. The most common problem areas are with following VST3 protocols, loading and saving state, thread safety, and proper separation of user interface operations from actual processing. Bugs in these areas can result in symptoms that vary from user interface problems, audio glitches, problems bouncing, crashes or hangs. 

We capture crash reports when possible and they sometimes lead to a resolution, but plugin issues are one of the most error prone areas in any DAW. You say you don’t see the same issues in your other DAW’s but that in itself doesnt mean anything beyond possibly the fact that the plugin vendor has not tested the same operations in Cakewalk. All DAW’s are vastly different in their internal architecture and a feature that works perfectly in one may or may not work in the other. We take plugin compatibility issues very seriously and if it indeed ends up being an issue in Cakewalk we fix it promptly. In fact even if it isn’t our issue we do what we can to work around it - much more than what some other DAW’s do.