Showstopper VSTi Issue in Cakewalk by Bandlab

[noynekker]

Hello . . . I've run into a very frustrating problem in a few of my Cakewalk by Bandlab projects, such that I'm thinking of porting them over to be Cubase projects.

The issue is that when I unfreeze a VSTi track, it actually has become a different Vsti track, and the track goes silent ?

So, here's the thing. I have a track that is a guitar sample program in Omnisphere VST3 . . .  I freeze that track, to save resources etc. . . . then in a later session I unfreeze that track to work on it again, but when I unfreeze it . . . it  is now a BFD3 drum track, which is another VSTi I am using in the project, and it plays back silent. When I click on the Synth rack view, it is still labelled as an Omnisphere  VST, but when you click to open that VST it opens as a BFD3 drum VST.

So,  yeah, I can cut and paste and recreate these Midi tracks, and recreate the proper VST programs, move it all back to where it was, but it has happened so many times in various projects, such a waste of time, and  . . . I think I'm done.

Hopefully my explanation of this bug is clear. Anybody else run into this, and have a solution ?

Edited September 30, 2019 by noynekker

[John]

Interesting! I can't say I have heard of that bug before. It really shouldn't matter which synth is unfrozen, it should still restore the correct one. Has this happened before in others projects?

[Jonathan Sasor]

8 hours ago, noynekker said:

Hello . . . I've run into a very frustrating problem in a few of my Cakewalk by Bandlab projects, such that I'm thinking of porting them over to be Cubase projects.

The issue is that when I unfreeze a VSTi track, it actually has become a different Vsti track, and the track goes silent ?

So, here's the thing. I have a track that is a guitar sample program in Omnisphere VST3 . . .  I freeze that track, to save resources etc. . . . then in a later session I unfreeze that track to work on it again, but when I unfreeze it . . . it  is now a BFD3 drum track, which is another VSTi I am using in the project, and it plays back silent. When I click on the Synth rack view, it is still labelled as an Omnisphere  VST, but when you click to open that VST it opens as a BFD3 drum VST.

So,  yeah, I can cut and paste and recreate these Midi tracks, and recreate the proper VST programs, move it all back to where it was, but it has happened so many times in various projects, such a waste of time, and  . . . I think I'm done.

Hopefully my explanation of this bug is clear. Anybody else run into this, and have a solution ?

Do you have a project where this is reproducible? We have not seen this issue on our end, but if you have a project where we can verify, then we can work on a fix. 

[bitflipper]

There must be a very specific set of circumstances for this to happen. It could even be a corrupt cwp file. The CW folks could solve the mystery easily if you sent them the project (assuming the symptoms are reproducible).

Like others, I freeze and un-freeze synths all the time, including Omnisphere (that synth in particular gets the freeze/thaw treatment often, because it can be such a resource hog). Over the years I've witnessed a number of weird things happening after an un-freeze, but attaching the wrong synth has not been among them.

Could it be that you moved Omnisphere since the track was frozen? I did that once, after deciding to get Omnisphere off my SSD to recover disk space. The problem with this hypothesis is that you'd normally just get the missing-synth dialog.

I have seen one strange phenomenon wherein the missing-plugin dialog did not come up and the wrong plugin was chosen instead. But that was a highly unusual situation, in which two plugins had the same CLSID. That doesn't seem likely in your case, but I'm just trying to remember any comparable symptoms I've seen in the past.

[Noel Borthwick]

TBH I have never see heard of this issue reported before. I think your issue has to be very specific to a project or something environmental.
Can you reproduce this in a new project? If you can, please contact me and I can run through some tests to try and isolate it.

[RBH]

I've seen issues where the midi assignments can re-assign to other instruments if an instrument was deleted and then re-assigned. This has also happened if the VSTi was upgraded. Maybe the internal instrument ID has in someway changed and the " frozen " assignment gets uncorrelated.

[noynekker]

20 hours ago, John said:

Interesting! I can't say I have heard of that bug before. It really shouldn't matter which synth is unfrozen, it should still restore the correct one. Has this happened before in others projects?

Hi John . . . yes, I have had this happen in at least 3 projects. If no one else has had this happen, it must be something I'm doing wrong.

[noynekker]

7 hours ago, bitflipper said:

There must be a very specific set of circumstances for this to happen. It could even be a corrupt cwp file. The CW folks could solve the mystery easily if you sent them the project (assuming the symptoms are reproducible).

Like others, I freeze and un-freeze synths all the time, including Omnisphere (that synth in particular gets the freeze/thaw treatment often, because it can be such a resource hog). Over the years I've witnessed a number of weird things happening after an un-freeze, but attaching the wrong synth has not been among them.

Could it be that you moved Omnisphere since the track was frozen? I did that once, after deciding to get Omnisphere off my SSD to recover disk space. The problem with this hypothesis is that you'd normally just get the missing-synth dialog.

I have seen one strange phenomenon wherein the missing-plugin dialog did not come up and the wrong plugin was chosen instead. But that was a highly unusual situation, in which two plugins had the same CLSID. That doesn't seem likely in your case, but I'm just trying to remember any comparable symptoms I've seen in the past.

 . . . bitflipper, the only thing I can think of is that I added another VSTi instance of Omnisphere on a completely different track, then a while later unfroze the other Omnisphere track to work on it, but it became BFD3, and was silent because none of the Omnisphere notes were assigned to drum samples.

[John]

Hi Noy, It could be but I'm thinking it is more likely system related.  Something on your setup may interfere with Cakewalk. Right now you Noel offering to help and if I were you I would let him find the problem.  No one knows Cakewalk better or can find a cause for a problem quicker. 

 

[noynekker]

1 hour ago, Noel Borthwick said:

TBH I have never see heard of this issue reported before. I think your issue has to be very specific to a project or something environmental.
Can you reproduce this in a new project? If you can, please contact me and I can run through some tests to try and isolate it.

Hi Noel . . . thanks for responding. I will work on trying to reproduce it if I can . . . as I've stated this has happened more than once, I've obviously done a procedure against the program rules, but will have to examine what that is some more. (I know it's not a bug unless it's reproducible)

[noynekker]

40 minutes ago, RBH said:

I've seen issues where the midi assignments can re-assign to other instruments if an instrument was deleted and then re-assigned. This has also happened if the VSTi was upgraded. Maybe the internal instrument ID has in someway changed and the " frozen " assignment gets uncorrelated.

Thanks RBH . . . I think I understand what you're saying, and will look into that. Neither of these VSTi's have been upgraded recently, no tracks were moved or deleted.

[Noel Borthwick]

2 hours ago, noynekker said:

Hi John . . . yes, I have had this happen in at least 3 projects. If no one else has had this happen, it must be something I'm doing wrong.

I don't think it's anything you are doing wrong. Most likely you are performing some specific series of operations that expose a bug. Do you recall doing a series of replace synth operations or deleting synths before you ran into the issue?

I'll see if I can spot something in the code that might lead to this, but a recipe would be the quickest way to locate and fix the problem.

[paulo]

I also once had this problem on a project. All frozen instrument tracks and it played ok when they were frozen (ie the state I had left it in previously) but  unfreeze one and the midi output had changed to a different (and still frozen) synth, so nothing played and I couldn't freeze it again because the synth it should have been assigned to was still frozen. Tried another and same result. Tried unfreezing all the synths so that I could reassign outputs and it was a total mess. Split all the instrument tracks to reveal the midi tracks and nothing was assigned to where it should be, some midi tracks were assigned to the same incorrect synth. One synth even when re-assigned refused to make a sound even though all the routing was corrected and one synth remained frozen in the synth rack view,but  the audio still showed in track view and the *  icon in TV appeared as not frozen. I spent hours trying to put it straight and never quite managed it because I couldn't re-create the synth that was showing as frozen but wouldn't unfreeze (omnisphere IIRC) as I had no idea what patch was selected. It was only a half baked thing anyway, so I put it down to a corrupt file and gave up in the end.

[Robert Bone]

If not something in the freeze/unfreeze logic, perhaps it gets confused if there are synth additions and/or removals while stuff is frozen.  Could that be possible?  (Because my computer has the horsepower and memory, I never really bother to freeze anything, so I have not played around with freezing).

Bob Bone

Edited October 1, 2019 by Robert Bone
Added lack of familiarity with freezing comment

[noynekker]

5 hours ago, paulo said:

I also once had this problem on a project. All frozen instrument tracks and it played ok when they were frozen (ie the state I had left it in previously) but  unfreeze one and the midi output had changed to a different (and still frozen) synth, so nothing played and I couldn't freeze it again because the synth it should have been assigned to was still frozen. Tried another and same result. Tried unfreezing all the synths so that I could reassign outputs and it was a total mess. Split all the instrument tracks to reveal the midi tracks and nothing was assigned to where it should be, some midi tracks were assigned to the same incorrect synth. One synth even when re-assigned refused to make a sound even though all the routing was corrected and one synth remained frozen in the synth rack view,but  the audio still showed in track view and the *  icon in TV appeared as not frozen. I spent hours trying to put it straight and never quite managed it because I couldn't re-create the synth that was showing as frozen but wouldn't unfreeze (omnisphere IIRC) as I had no idea what patch was selected. It was only a half baked thing anyway, so I put it down to a corrupt file and gave up in the end.

Hi Paulo . . . what you're describing sounds a lot like what's happened in my very botched project. I've spent a lot of time just now trying to put it right, but I've wasted a lot of time with no results. Interesting that you mention Omnisphere. While trying to fix my project, I'm cutting and pasting my midi into new Omnisphere VSTi's, but notice the older ones keep changing, as if they are cycling to the next one. (if that makes any sense)

I'm using 3 different Omnisphere VSTi instances, and when I delete one, it moves to the next one . . . possibly because they are all assigned to midi channel 1 ? . . . but on totally different tracks.

When I solo the Omnisphere track, it also solos the BFD3 drum track, when I unsolo the Omnisphere track, the BFD3 tracks do not unsolo.

Yes, totally botched, I don't think I can fix this one.

[noynekker]

4 hours ago, Robert Bone said:

If not something in the freeze/unfreeze logic, perhaps it gets confused if there are synth additions and/or removals while stuff is frozen.  Could that be possible?  (Because my computer has the horsepower and memory, I never really bother to freeze anything, so I have not played around with freezing).

Bob Bone

Hi Bob . . . my reason for freezing here is that I want to get my latency adjusted back  to under 15 ms, so I can keyboard play a new part in, without losing all my mix and EQ settings for the rest of the mix.

[paulo]

16 hours ago, noynekker said:

Hi Paulo . . . what you're describing sounds a lot like what's happened in my very botched project. I've spent a lot of time just now trying to put it right, but I've wasted a lot of time with no results. Interesting that you mention Omnisphere. While trying to fix my project, I'm cutting and pasting my midi into new Omnisphere VSTi's, but notice the older ones keep changing, as if they are cycling to the next one. (if that makes any sense)

I'm using 3 different Omnisphere VSTi instances, and when I delete one, it moves to the next one . . . possibly because they are all assigned to midi channel 1 ? . . . but on totally different tracks.

When I solo the Omnisphere track, it also solos the BFD3 drum track, when I unsolo the Omnisphere track, the BFD3 tracks do not unsolo.

Yes, totally botched, I don't think I can fix this one.

I use Omnisphere all the time without issues so I don't think it's specific to that. As has been mentioned the deletion of a synth can cause a track to reassign itself to another but mostly I use the replace synth rather than delete. If I could have found a way to unfreeze the frozen but not frozen instance of Omni I was pretty close to fixing it, but nothing I could do would change that. The only other thing that beat me was how I ended up with two instances (out of 5/6)  of Iris 2 both called Iris 2 1 whereas the others were correctly labelled as Iris 2 2, Iris 2 3 etc..........Not sure how you get 2 instances/output tracks of the same synth both called 1. If I do delete a synth for some reason I always check the delete tracks option too so I really don't know why/how they all got messed up. The frozen audio was all correct so clearly it was set up properly at point of freezing. As I said I put it down to a corrupt file and moved on, but if it's happening to you a lot I can see how that would be a concern. Luckily just the once for me. Sorry I have no answer for you, just thought it might help you to know that at least you're not alone.

[user6769542299295194]

Having similar problems, on several occasions now. Though not when freezing synths. Not sure what the trigger is, but happened this time when had two projects open at the same time. All Kontakt synths (3 instances) were mixed up - eg  with outputs appearing on other tracks and the “open synth”  button for guitar opening the bass Kontakt. Very confusing and not easy to rectify. I’ve previously had to open a new project and cut/paste midi. Anyone working on solving this issue?

ps not my best choice of user name ?

Edited November 17, 2019 by user6769542299295194

[gmp]

Open a song that has this bug happening and on the midi track in the track pane, check the input, output, and channel and see if those are correct. I have something similar possibly even the same thing happen pretty often, but the fix is easy it's always one of those things I listed above.

I always attributed the cause to me going to midi devices and making changes. IN my case I use Studiomix to control automation with flying faders and sometimes I use the faders to control the drawbars on my B3 organ soft synth. So I change my midi devices to use LoopMidi as a midi device.

The other thing I do is fairly often I open CbB using remote desktop when I'm downstairs with the family and I may open a song and export a mix for someone. Using remote desktop if you go to Preferences Midi Devices you'll notice none are there. Midi doesn't work with remote desktop. So this messes up those I listed above, if you save the song.

 

Does any of this relate to your problem?

[marcL]

On 9/30/2019 at 5:39 AM, noynekker said:

The issue is that when I unfreeze a VSTi track, it actually has become a different Vsti track, and the track goes silent ?

This is exactly what happened to me a couple of days ago in an old project, but I used Kontakt 5 and Addictive Drums as synths (I don't have Omnisphere). As the project was not so important, just to draw an arrangement idea, I simply recreated the synth tracks (I always have a text file with notes for each song, in there I write down all synth settings, just if something goes wrong or if I want to recreate the same sound in another song/project).