Whole Cakewalk is extremely BUGgy, unworkable. Can't take it anymore.

[pulsewalk]

Now two more tracks are corrupted. They won't play. One of them also have a greyed out freeze button. Maybe even more tracks are corrupted that I don't know about... sounds like several other things are missing too, so I'm not sure anymore.

Is it even possible to stop this chain reaction of endless corruption or is my entire project now completely f*cked??? About 150 tracks as of now and lots of work behind it. The project is like 2 years old. Of course, I've not been working on it constantly for that long, but it is lots of work behind it anyway.

[Bristol_Jonesey]

There are a couple of things you could try

 

1. Do a save as with a new name to a new location. Make sure "copy audio with project" is checked.  This will ONLY copy the audio currently referenced by the project and will discard everything else.

2. With Cakewalk shut down completely, delete your aud.ini file. Cakewalk will build a new one the next time you open it up.

[sergedaigno]

pulsewalk,

If your virtual memory (paging) is disabled, enable it and let the default Windows manage it, who knows :)

[Herbert Zio]

...

Edited March 25, 2023 by Herbert Zio

[Herbert Zio]

Whenever I start facing some problems running some projects after updating Cakewalk, I uninstall the DAW and install it again cleanly.
But I always tend to keep a previous Cakewalk installer where the projects are running correctly, to analyze whether there is a problem with the project or with the new build.
And I always format the PC at a certain period, to make sure that no Windows files have been corrupted.

Try uninstalling Cakewalk completely, and installing the DAW in the latest version, maybe you can fix the errors.

If you have already installed the latest version, try installing the previous version and see if the issue is resolved.

I once faced a problem opening my projects, I did everything, uninstalled and installed Cakewalk, formatted my PC, and nothing made my projects open. I remember it was 2021.11 build 18, I had to rollback to 2021.09 build 145 and waited until another Build was released as somehow the recent version at the time was not working properly on my PC.

[Jeremy Oakes]

Is your Windows bit rate set at the same as Cakewalk and your audio interface ? If not set both at 44.1 or 48. They need to be the same.

That could possibly be the issue in your longish post on page one. Numbers 1,2 and 3.

J

[Starship Krupa]

@pulsewalk already said that they've tried uninstalling and reinstalling, and that the issue persists across Windows reinstalls as well. And across multiple systems, so disk or memory corruption are unlikely culprits.

Pulse, I think you and the others nailed it: something happens at one point and the further errors are either the result of it and/or create further corruption.

Another (former) pro software QA guy here. What Mark and Tim said about repeatable steps is crucial. If you can get a repro, the devs can fix it, and I'll say, with problems this severe, they would love to know how this is happening so they can fix it. No developer wants a user to have such a bad experience.

@chris.r, same, but probably best to start your own thread. I, too, from time to time have a MIDI track stop communicating with the synth track it's associated with. Maddeningly, I can't get a reliable repro on it. Either forcing the channel of the MIDI track to 1 or deleting and recreating the synth track usually fixes it. It happens regularly, but not reliably, if you get me. With weeks between incidents. Last night it happened with XPand!2, which is a common instrument, and it happens with other synths in very small projects with no other plug-ins. So I am pretty sure that it's Cakewalk all by itself that is hiccupping. But unless the devs can also see the problem, they're helpless to fix it.

I call these hard-to-repro bugs "heisenbergs" after the physicist who hypothesized that quantum events can be affected by being observed (or rather the methods used for observation....I think). They exist, but when I start looking at them, they vanish.

From your description, I think I might be able to help narrow it down. We'll start with the theory that it's a conflict between a VST effect and Cakewalk. I once saw something similar to your issue, although not as disastrous, where audio from one track started playing from another completely unrelated track. Weird as hell. I chased down the offender, which was, of all things, a MeldaProduction plug-in. I say "of all things" because I use their products on everything and they are usually rock solid. Couldn't reproduce it, though, so I call it a glitch.

Yes, you have a TON of plug-ins, as do we all, heaven knows. The thing to figure out is which one(s) Cakewalk is stumbling over. So first try to think of which plug-in(s) is common to all of these projects. Which of them you were likely using when the first track that got corrupted? Since one of the symptoms is unrelated tracks interacting with each other, is one of them a plug-in that communicates with another instance, such as via sidechaining? Instruments are plug-ins, too, so is this always with the same instrument(s)? Sometimes a combination of plug-ins can make the host choke.

Even if the issue has nothing to do with a plug-in, there are other details that might help. How far into the project did/does this start happening? What operation were you trying to perform when you first noticed it? What was the last thing you did before you noticed it? All of these things can help figure out where the program is choking.

As far as being able to salvage an already corrupted project, is there some way maybe you can create a new project, then drag the tracks to the new project? I know that would be a tedious task with 150 tracks, but it might be worth it to save a project you have so many hours of work invested in. And it might help troubleshoot.

[Lord Tim]

Yeah, I'm with Erik here - this doesn't sound like a Cakewalk problem as such, so reinstalling anything won't help things.

That's not to say there's not a problem inside Cakewalk that's allowing these problems to happen if you use a specific plugin, or do a specific chain of events, however! But if the program had these core issues, it would be something many more people would be seeing, and definitely not project-specific like this seems to be.

Let's be methodical about this and rule out the things that it's NOT.

First, are you able to get one of these corrupted projects to someone (or yourself) with a different computer to see if the project still displays the problems? The idea of this is to rule out if this is something that's only happening on your machine with this project, or the project itself is damaged.

Secondly, I'm going to echo what Erik suggested. I'm not sure of how you have these projects set up, but there's obviously a lot of tracks and routing, etc. going on, so they sound fairly complex. Can you save the broken project as a MIDI file for a start, so you have your tempo and markers saved, then open that .MID as a new project, save it as as Cakewalk CWP and then copy and paste in the audio tracks from your broken project? This obviously will lose you a lot of work, but that's not the point of this part yet - what I want to establish is that if you have this huge number of tracks dropped into a brand new project, rather than a 2 year old one that's getting more and more broken over time, does this new project show any of those weird issues?

I'd like to narrow this down to it being a project specific thing, so we're not chasing our tails.

If it does work out to be a project specific thing and new ones don't exhibit the problem, then you might have a path forward to make something which might be a pain to rebuild in the short term, but will be something which won't lose you everything once you keep working on it.

If the new projects DO start showing these problems, we should look at any effects you've dropped into them for a start, or of there's anything funky going on with the WAV files themselves. That would seem unlikely but stranger things have happened!

If it turns out there's a plugin that's misbehaving and causing Cakewalk to write bad data to bad places, then it's worth investigating to see where the problem is, either on the vendor's side, or if it's something that's exposing a shortcoming with how Cakewalk is protected against this stuff. I'm sure I speak for all of the devs when they say they don't want anyone to have this kind of crappy experience, and if they can prevent it from happening, they'll make it a priority. But we need to know where to look first to pass on the right info to them.

Edited March 26, 2023 by Lord Tim

[sjoens]

18 hours ago, pulsewalk said:

This is a very old project with "endless" versions and saves

This is what I deal with daily, and have concluded is the reason for 95% of project/track corruptions. Especially when the original project was created with an earlier version of Sonar AND/OR on a different system. But even when not, the more versions are saved, the more bugs crop up.

Often the only way to end the corruption is start a new project and carry over the data or find an earlier version that's bug free. This also helps weed out a wayward track.

 

[Milton Sica]

10 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

 

@chris.r, same, but probably best to start your own thread. I, too, from time to time have a MIDI track stop communicating with the synth track it's associated with. Maddeningly, I can't get a reliable repro on it. Either forcing the channel of the MIDI track to 1 or deleting and recreating the synth track usually fixes it. It happens regularly, but not reliably, if you get me. With weeks between incidents. Last night it happened with XPand!2, which is a common instrument, and it happens with other synths in very small projects with no other plug-ins. So I am pretty sure that it's Cakewalk all by itself that is hiccupping. But unless the devs can also see the problem, they're helpless to fix it.

 

This happens in some of my projects. The recorded MIDI simply stops playing.
I can often overcome the problem by reinserting the same plugin and copying the data and configs to it.
In other cases, even doing this the problem is not fixed.
Yes, usually in projects generated and written in previous versions.

[pulsewalk]

18 hours ago, Bristol_Jonesey said:

There are a couple of things you could try

 

1. Do a save as with a new name to a new location. Make sure "copy audio with project" is checked.  This will ONLY copy the audio currently referenced by the project and will discard everything else.

2. With Cakewalk shut down completely, delete your aud.ini file. Cakewalk will build a new one the next time you open it up.

Thanks! Tried exactly this, but it made no difference

[pulsewalk]

@sergedaigno, @Herbert Zio, @Jeremy Oakes

None of those actions does any difference.

The thing is, it's not like every version of the project is corrupted. It's enough to go back a number of versions and then the corrupted tracks forks fine.

The problem is that when I in that state try to fix the one or few problematic tracks, then it creates a chain reaction, where other, never before corrupted, tracks go corrupt also. And if I fix them, something else goes corrupted... and it only gets worse the more I try to correct.

It's almost like 1 correction creates 2 more, and correction of those 2 more creates 3 or 4 more ...like a never ending chain reaction of corruption. It really is a hell.

It's more or less impossible to know exactly where this corruption begins really with so many tracks. This project is very heavy, so only to open it takes quite a while. So trial and error takes lots of time, not least with the huge amount of tracks there are in this project.

Edited March 26, 2023 by pulsewalk

[pulsewalk]

I'm trying to figure out what the culprit is.

So the latest problem is that 3 track's has been corrupted because I fixed another track earlier. So these tracks does not play any audio anymore (they are VSTi tracks).

• One of them seem to have a functional freeze button, that you can press. However, when it's pressed, nothing happens.
• The other two have greyed out freeze buttons.
• None of these tracks play any audio anymore, complete silence.
• I've tried to delete all the FX on these, but no difference.
• Tried to set output channel etc. manually, no difference.
• Duplicating them does not make the duplicate work, it's just as dead as the original.
• Replacing the VSTi doesn't make any difference.

What more can I try to reset this corruption?

BTW, I also tried to open the project with SHIFT key,  to open the project in recovery mode. Didn't help.

Edited March 26, 2023 by pulsewalk

[pulsewalk]

There MUST be some kind of connection between tracks. What is it? And how do I check this?

So, if I delete a corrupted track. The freeze button on ANOTHER track suddenly are greyed out, why?

There MUST be a solution! The solution can't be that I will need to trash the entire project

Edited March 26, 2023 by pulsewalk

[Lord Tim]

See my post earlier. Come at this with a plan rather than just guessing, that way we can zoom in on the problem and save you a lot of time and possibly an even more broken project.

What I suggested won't fix stuff right away, but it's not meant to. We need to work out the HOW before we work out the WHY.

[pulsewalk]

9 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Yeah, I'm with Erik here - this doesn't sound like a Cakewalk problem as such, so reinstalling anything won't help things.

That's not to say there's not a problem inside Cakewalk that's allowing these problems to happen if you use a specific plugin, or do a specific chain of events, however! But if the program had these core issues, it would be something many more people would be seeing, and definitely not project-specific like this seems to be.

Let's be methodical about this and rule out the things that it's NOT.

First, are you able to get one of these corrupted projects to someone (or yourself) with a different computer to see if the project still displays the problems? The idea of this is to rule out if this is something that's only happening on your machine with this project, or the project itself is damaged.

Secondly, I'm going to echo what Erik suggested. I'm not sure of how you have these projects set up, but there's obviously a lot of tracks and routing, etc. going on, so they sound fairly complex. Can you save the broken project as a MIDI file for a start, so you have your tempo and markers saved, then open that .MID as a new project, save it as as Cakewalk CWP and then copy and paste in the audio tracks from your broken project? This obviously will lose you a lot of work, but that's not the point of this part yet - what I want to establish is that if you have this huge number of tracks dropped into a brand new project, rather than a 2 year old one that's getting more and more broken over time, does this new project show any of those weird issues?

I'd like to narrow this down to it being a project specific thing, so we're not chasing our tails.

If it does work out to be a project specific thing and new ones don't exhibit the problem, then you might have a path forward to make something which might be a pain to rebuild in the short term, but will be something which won't lose you everything once you keep working on it.

If the new projects DO start showing these problems, we should look at any effects you've dropped into them for a start, or of there's anything funky going on with the WAV files themselves. That would seem unlikely but stranger things have happened!

If it turns out there's a plugin that's misbehaving and causing Cakewalk to write bad data to bad places, then it's worth investigating to see where the problem is, either on the vendor's side, or if it's something that's exposing a shortcoming with how Cakewalk is protected against this stuff. I'm sure I speak for all of the devs when they say they don't want anyone to have this kind of crappy experience, and if they can prevent it from happening, they'll make it a priority. But we need to know where to look first to pass on the right info to them.

Yes, you are correct about this and this would probably be the way to go, if one want to get to the bottom of this. However, this is a project with around 150 tracks now, and over 200 before (I will have to go back to earlier versions too, to work myself backwards to find anything), and a piece that's running around like 10 minutes or so. It's "huge" really. This computer is struggling with both running it and opening it, even though I have 64 GB RAM and an okay CPU.
To do all that you've described is not possible for me due to lack of time. It would probably take weeks to do all that. It's not like an ordinary little project that loads in a couple of seconds... oh no, this one is heavy.

So what I'm doing right now is going back enough versions so most of the work is "intact" and "un-corrupted", and trying to recreate the tracks I now know WILL be corrupted in the future if I do this and that (I already know because of the newer versions), and then, instead of deleting these tracks, which I KNOW causes other tracks to go corrupt, I simply mute and archive them, then leave them be in the project. That's the only reasonably fast way to do this.

Otherwise I would need a computer that is approximately 50-100x as fast as this one, and maybe then, it would be doable that you describe there, just like it would be on this computer if this project would be a much smaller one.

But of course, if I find out anything at all that point to what could be the culprit, I'll report it here asap.

Edited March 26, 2023 by pulsewalk

[Jamie Robertson]

I'm going to be very careful here, not only because I've been a faithful Cakewalk user for decades, but also because I admit that I haven't been methodical about documenting these things, but I have experienced these same issues. Specifically, loading project with frozen tracks to discover than I can no longer unfreeze them, or that MIDI no longer seems connected to the instrument on that track. I've had to recreate tracks numerous times because they become "broken" in some way. I've not reported it because by the time the project gets to this point, I don't really have a good recipe for how it got that way. As the OP states, once a track exhibits a problem, it seems to ripple around causing more problems to pop up. I'm well aware that this is not a good description for tracking down actual bugs, but it is real.

FWIW, I started to think it was related to freezing/unfreezing. I would occasionally freeze an instrument track and then edit or apply FX/gain curves to the audio track. I think it may be that these tracks were more likely to start having problems, though that's not in any way a scientific observation. So I stopped using freeze and instead, now bounce to track and then archive and hide the  instrument track. I want to say this has improved my experience but I'm not sure I've had a sizeable project since I started this.

I'm only piping in here because I want to lend some credence to the OP's frustration. I've felt it as well.

[Lynn Wilson]

9 hours ago, Milton Sica said:

This happens in some of my projects. The recorded MIDI simply stops playing.
I can often overcome the problem by reinserting the same plugin and copying the data and configs to it.
In other cases, even doing this the problem is not fixed.
Yes, usually in projects generated and written in previous versions.

 

20 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I, too, from time to time have a MIDI track stop communicating with the synth track it's associated with. Maddeningly, I can't get a reliable repro on it. Either forcing the channel of the MIDI track to 1 or deleting and recreating the synth track usually fixes it. It happens regularly, but not reliably, if you get me. With weeks between incidents. Last night it happened with XPand!2, which is a common instrument, and it happens with other synths in very small projects with no other plug-ins. So I am pretty sure that it's Cakewalk all by itself that is hiccupping. But unless the devs can also see the problem, they're helpless to fix it.

Same here.  I don't mean to hijack this thread, and I don't know if this is connected to the OP's problem, but it seems to be happening to several of us.  I will note that it doesn't seem to happen to vst3 plugins, just vst2 plugins.

[pulsewalk]

18 hours ago, Jamie Robertson said:

I'm going to be very careful here, not only because I've been a faithful Cakewalk user for decades, but also because I admit that I haven't been methodical about documenting these things, but I have experienced these same issues. Specifically, loading project with frozen tracks to discover than I can no longer unfreeze them, or that MIDI no longer seems connected to the instrument on that track. I've had to recreate tracks numerous times because they become "broken" in some way. I've not reported it because by the time the project gets to this point, I don't really have a good recipe for how it got that way. As the OP states, once a track exhibits a problem, it seems to ripple around causing more problems to pop up. I'm well aware that this is not a good description for tracking down actual bugs, but it is real.

FWIW, I started to think it was related to freezing/unfreezing. I would occasionally freeze an instrument track and then edit or apply FX/gain curves to the audio track. I think it may be that these tracks were more likely to start having problems, though that's not in any way a scientific observation. So I stopped using freeze and instead, now bounce to track and then archive and hide the  instrument track. I want to say this has improved my experience but I'm not sure I've had a sizeable project since I started this.

I'm only piping in here because I want to lend some credence to the OP's frustration. I've felt it as well.

 

18 hours ago, Lynn Wilson said:

 

Same here.  I don't mean to hijack this thread, and I don't know if this is connected to the OP's problem, but it seems to be happening to several of us.  I will note that it doesn't seem to happen to vst3 plugins, just vst2 plugins.

No problem at all, just keep on "hijacking" .. I'm actually only glad to see I'm not the only one with these problems, because then maybe the developers are more interested in taking a look at it.

Yes, there may indeed be a connection between freezing and these events. Although, everything is such a mess now in this project that I don't know anymore.

I've had other similar problems also with automation that I've mentioned in this thread, there's also a link to that specific thread where I explain the problems and show it with a couple of videos. It's where automation information are "ghosting" between different tracks, which should NOT happen. And those were not frozen tracks. Seems like Cakewalk have problems with keeping the tracks well separated/isolated from each other.

There simply seems to be a problem with "connected" tracks, for some reason. It should be good if Cakewalk could keep the tracks "separated" / "isolated" better so this cannot happen.

Edited March 27, 2023 by pulsewalk

[Lord Tim]

Please don't take this as me being combative or antagonistic (text can give the wrong impression!) but there's not a real lot that can be done unless you go through methodical steps, so this is going to be something that will keep happening unless there's definitive steps to try and lock the cause down and fix it. I'm sure you understand that I definitely get the amount of work involved in breaking it all down, though, and I sympathise. It's a no-win situation at this point.

One thing that did cross my mind, and it did when Lynn posted a similar thread to this and now in here, I wonder if this is related to track indexing once sub folders were brought in? I'm not seeing this issue at all, personally, but if a project was built prior to or around the time sub folders were brought it, I know quite a lot of changes had to be made under the hood to accommodate it. Could it be possible this is what got these projects into the bad state in the first place, perhaps? @msmcleod - any thoughts?

Are you guys using a lot of sub folders? And about when did you first start working on these projects?

I might be just shooting into the breeze here, mind you, but it's something worth clarifying!