Cakewalk by Bandlab Crashes to Desktop on Opening a Project (SOLVED)

[Larry Jones]

HERE IS THE UPDATE, SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ TO THE END: I goofed around trying to isolate a plugin that was causing this mysterious (to me) crashing to desktop, not on every project, but on some, seemingly random projects. I opened a ticket with support, described the problem as best I could, sent a minidump, and was told to uninstall/reinstall Cakewalk by Bandlab. To me, this is like being told to make sure my computer is plugged in, but I went ahead and followed instructions, including registry tweaks, and accomplished nothing except the loss of ten years worth of customizations. So no help from support.

But here's the problem, and the fix: There's an old version of Breverb 2 that was bundled with SONAR, and a newer version. If you have old projects calling the old version of Breverb 2 and you try to open them in a new version of CbB, the project will crash the program at the end of the load process. Start your project in safe mode, delete Breverb and save the project. You can then close the project, reopen it and add Breverb back, if you have the new version of Breverb (v2.0.10.0 64bit). Save again and you should be good. These are the steps I took, and they fixed my problem. I think the newer version of Breverb 2 was shipped with CbB in 2018. It may not be necessary to have the newest version of Breverb, as long as you have the version that is called when loading a project.

I have marked this issue "solved" in the title, and also changed the title a little to make it easier to find. Finally, I would like to report that in this case Cakewalk tech support not only didn't help me, but actually added additional headaches to my situation, and then started to ignore me.

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Original Post

Recently my Cakewalk by Bandlab has been crashing to the desktop when trying to open a project. This happens at the end of the opening routine, and there is no error message. I got a new PC (specs in my sig) recently, and this happens, I believe, only when trying to open projects that predate the transition. Newer projects still open and work normally.

To figure this out, I opened a couple of projects in safe mode. I thought the issue might be due to an ancient amp sim (Guitar Rig 3) that I have used a lot in the past and which I installed on my new system but could not activate, so I disabled that and let everything else load. But result was the same, so I repeated the safe mode process, this time not loading any plugins. The project opened, but most of the instruments are plugins, and all the tracks have effects, so the piece of music was barely recognizable and the project must have around 50 plugins.

So I'm wondering if anyone knows a faster way to troubleshoot this than repeatedly opening in safe mode, enabling one more plugin each time. That's what I'm gonna be doing, but if anyone has an idea about how I might speed up the process, I'd like to hear it.

Thanks!

Edited October 7, 2023 by Larry Jones
mark "solved" and describe solution

[Xoo]

Binary tree: disable half the plugins and open.  If it opens, enable half of these and repeat until it fails on one; if it fails, disable the other half instead and repeat.

[Larry Jones]

@Xoo: Thanks!