Cakewalk, any new info on THESE bugs?

Very nice and thorough explanation. While I can't personally help you I hope Cake take notice of all your detailed work on this. Thanks.

If you haven't done so yet, it would be a good idea to submit a formal bug report.
You can do so using this link: http://www.cakewalk.com/support/problemreporter/default.asp

Looks like a great job writing up the problem. I wish all bug reports were that detailed.

-Jim

Wow... good work. Hope it gets fixed.

Sorry for the late response - I had a Seagate drive die on me

Anyway,

ORIGINAL: ohhey
What are the project MIDI setting while this happens ?

As soon as I get everything up and running again (doing a restore of my system right now) I will give you the details on the MIDI settings.

ORIGINAL: dreamkeeper
Silk - I guess what you found would qualify for a bug, at least part of it. But there's a simple workaround: use different channels.

I certainly won't put it that lightly. Both of these issues I raise qualify as bugs. What if the VSTi needs to output on multiple MIDI channels? Now you have to play musical chairs with all of your MIDI tracks' inputs to make sure things do not get in there that should not get in there in the first place. It severely limits the routing options because you have "crosstalk" between MIDI channels that should logically be completely isolated. The bottom line is that it just should not work this way. This is clearly the wrong behavior.

As you say, it is already tricky to make sure you don't get MIDI feedback. This just adds an unreasonable layer of complexity to this. Especially since it isn't exactly clear what is going on here, and exactly what is affected by this. Since I need to use this VSTi that outputs MIDI data, I have not found a reliable way to work around this. It is frustrating, because when I want to record MIDI from my MIDI keyboard, I first have to go and hunt down all of the VSTis that output MIDI and disable them.

As far as your suggestion about using different input channels go... I believe I tried that and it did alleviate the problem somewhat. I don't remeber exactly what the issue was after that, but I was never able to completely resolve it. Once I get my system up and running again I will see what the deal was there. Also, this does not work around the stuck notes issue at all (bug #1).

SilkTone

I certainly won't put it that lightly. Both of these issues I raise qualify as bugs.

Sorry, poor wording on my part. I meant to say they do qualify as bugs. I agree with you that there are situations where no workaround will help. These issues need to be fixed, period.

werner

ORIGINAL: dreamkeeper

it's always been my thinking that anytime you use several machines with multiple ins and outs you had to be channel specific

In the hardware world if you route several modules to only 1 MIDI port, yes. But with different MIDI devices, both in hardware or in Sonar, the channel shouldn't matter. Different ports, including those going to and coming from soft synths, are separated "circuits" - at least they should be. Imagine if there was crosstalk between different MIDI tracks feeding into different synths in Sonar: instant mess! What works for MIDI track-out --> synth, should work the same for synth --> MIDI track-in.

werner

Yes, dreamkeeper summed it up pretty well. There really should not be any MIDI crosstalk inside a DAW. It points to a software bug.

SilkTone

>> I looked for the bug report page previously but was unable to find it, even after going to the support section. The best I could find was the "Send your question" link. How do you get to the bug report page from the front page?

I'm not sure how to get there directly. I Googled something like "problem reporter site:cakewalk.com". One of the page hits gave the the link for the bug report form.
It should be easier to find the bug report page -- ya think?

- Jim

ORIGINAL: Tom Riggs

Just to point out the obvious. There is a sticky post at the top of this forum with information on how to contact Cakewalk. There is a link to the problem reported on that post.

Hope that will get the issue resolved.

Fair enough.

But - I'd think the link to the problem reporter should be on this page: http://www.cakewalk.com/Support/SONAR/default.asp
- and it's not (there's a contact-support-by-email link, but no problem reporter link).
(The problem-reporter link is also missing from http://www.cakewalk.com/About/contact.asp , by the way).

- Jim

I have never received feedback about a problem being fixed as a result of a report I have submitted. I recently reported (again) the problem of changes in volume envelopes not taking effect during play. If the project is saved and then opened, again, the changes in a volume envelope do take effect. Tech support never even tested the project I submitted. In their response, they claimed that because of my setup, I'm most likely using ASIO4ALL (which was wrong, I'm using NVidia ASIO drivers), and the latency in the drivers is probably what is causing the volume envelopes not to work correctly. That's not the stupidest comment I've ever heard, but it's close. One wonders greatly that a Cakewalk tech person would even dream of making it.

I agree with you. If Cakewalk isn't serious about fixing problems, why bother taking the time to help them by reporting the problem?

ORIGINAL: Anubis

ORIGINAL: mose


...If Cakewalk isn't serious about fixing problems, why bother taking the time to help them by reporting the problem?

Because you're helping the rest of us forumites by informing us that such a problem even exists before we bang our collective heads against the wall. And then... workarounds can be suggested by others(as in this case). So it's not done in vain, the rest of us do appreciate your efforts, thanks.

That is true. But to be honest, in this particular case the work-around only partially helps. If the bug report helps other people, that is great, but my goal was to clearly demonstrate the bugs to Cakewalk so that it can help them find and fix it. This probably won't affect most people since they don't use the Enable MIDI Out feature on synths and therefore won't run into these bugs. Why would any users download and test the plugin and Sonar project that I uploaded? Some people might do it out of curiosity.

But the original intent was to help Cakewalk find and fix these bugs.

ORIGINAL: kevo

I am looking at this from a developer's perspective.
A user reports that a Vsti they wrote themself exhibits the following behavior and they report that there are bugs in the host application.

The problem for the developer of the host application( Sonar) is now to determine if these are legitimate bugs in their own coding, or problems in coding of the Vsti plugin.

Either way, this is going to require the programmers to view the source code of the Vsti for bugs. This requires time, money and scheduling to do this. It is a pain to debug someone else's code. (I am not implying your code has bugs) But it has to be checked for bugs.

So, from support's perspective they have to determine the legitimacy of the claim by who reported this. Was it a known plugin developer? They are also going to be looking at how many users are reporting issues. They are going to do this before even looking at tracking a bug.

Cakewalk writes Vsti themselves. It is a high probability that their programmers would be aware of the issues, and either:
A: Code their Vsti's to compensate for known bugs in the Host.
B: Fix the Host
C: Ignore the problem.

If Cakewalk were aware of a problem with the Host (Sonar) they would address the issue. They would have no choice.

Now with all of this having been said. I am not saying you didn't find an issue. I am simply stating that the only way for Cakewalk to address this is if several Sonar users report issues.

Your work and efforts are only wasted if you stop here. You must be persistent and there must be other Sonar users reporting issues.

If you actually looked at the bug description in detail, you would realize that there is no way a plugin can be coded to get those results. I have been developing software for over 14 years now and I think I know a bug when I see one. To imply (without understanding the issues) that Cakewalk is debugging my code shows that you didn't look at the bug in detail.

The problem is that if Cakewalk has the same attitude as you have, then people should just stop bothering at all.

So, sorry for wasting your and Cakewalk's time.

EDIT: Here is part of the problem: This bug is difficult to put your finger on. People might see strange things happening due to this bug, but since it makes no sense, people that run into this won't know how to reproduce it, or how to describe it well enough to give Cakealk a clue. Now I went out of my way and gave them an easily reproducible, self-contained project that demonstrates the bug clearly. There are no plugins that ship with Cakewalk that has the Enable MIDI Out capability (I looked at them all), so the only way to demonstrate this bug is to create a bare-bones plugin that does the minimum to repro the bug. I even included the source code and Visual Studio project files. This is not about debugging my plugin, it is about repoducing a Sonar bug. Since you can't repro this with what ships with Cakewalk, Cakewalk will always be able to cop out and say the bug is in whatever plugin the user is using while the bug exhibits. In providing them with a plugin, I make it easy for them to repro, and debug it. I hate it when people don't understand the basic details, but feel it is OK to tell me that I am asking Cakewalk to debug my plugin. Sheesh...

I re-read my first post to see why you would have taken it as an attack. I didn't see anything there where it could be misinterpreted as a personal attacked.

I did not say your plugin had bugs. As a matter of fact I said "I am not implying your code has bugs." nor did I make any mention of your programming skills (which is irrelevant). I also did not say there wasn't an issue. As a software developer, I would be tracking incident reports to first see if there are reports from other known developers and users. If there were other reports the next thing I would do is to try to replicate the problem. I wouldn't take anyone's word something was bug free, even if they claimed to be programming for 140 years.

If you will re-read the post, you will see that I gave you a perspective as a developer and encouraged you to be persistent if you want attention drawn to this. It will take more than 1 person reporting a problem for Cake to take any notice or action.

Right now, you are coming across as a person with an attitude whom I would not want to deal with. Your attitude is less than desirable.

You have described a catch 22 situation. If more people do not report the issue, it is unlikely anything will be done.

I am curious which commercial plugins exhibit the same problems. I can Guarantee, if you contact those plugin makers that exhibit the same behavior, that something will be done post hast.

Best of luck!

Hello, when a bug is filed it is entered into a database and will get reviewed and prioritized for fixing once its established to be a bug. From the time its logged until the time its investigated it could certainly be several months and we don't normally contact the user who logged it unless more information is required. We even mention this in the problem report form.

We appreciate the the detailed information you provided and we will investigate this in due time. Our development process goes through a phase where we are fully focussed on bug fixing and that is when issues such as these are investigated.
What is the tracking number that was assigned to this bug by the way?

As a follow up, I was able to repro this with Jamstix 2 as well. If you have Jamstix 2, go into it's options and check Enable MIDI Output. Then open the synth rack and right-click on Jamstix 2 and select Enable MIDI Output. Now create a new, unrelated MIDI track, and set its input to your external keyboard-Omni. Now put the new MIDI track into record mode, and start recording (make sure Jamstix 2 plays some notes during this time). When you stop, you will see that Jamstix 2's MIDI output has been recorded onto the new MIDI track.

Jamstix 2's MIDI data has no business being recorded into an unrelated track whose input is set to record from an external MIDI controller.

Yes, there are semi-functional work-arounds (set keyboard input to a specific channel as opposed to omni), but it doesn't solve the problem completely (as it manifests in different ways, like stuck notes), and it points to a more serious underlying problem with Sonar's MIDI implementation. My guess is that Sonar's MIDI buffers are not thread-safe, and it is re-using the same allocated MIDI buffers on different threads, resulting in MIDI buffer data being corrupted. It is hard for me to believe that Sonar still can't get this basic functionality right. Although I have not regressed the bug all the way back, I know that it goes back at least a few versions already, since I started seeing this problem a few years ago, but could never quite put my finger on it.

greysound


I know your initial report on this was ages ago, but I wanted to confirm that I've run into identical and related issues to what you've described.  (Thanks for the thorough coverage).

In addition to the MIDI echo bug, I've been running into nasty crashes when running multiple MIDI-enabled VSTi's at the same time.  For example:

Catanya + Eloquence(now called Thesys) = Crash
Catanya + Catanya = Crash
Thesys + Thesys = Crash
JamStix + ____ = Crash
etc.

I suspect that the issue of internal crosstalk might be to blame, but I'm certainly no programmer.  My workaround has been to purchase energyXT and run it as a VSTi in Sonar.  I do all my MIDI stuff through that and output it to my Sonar instruments.  So far it seems to be working brilliantly so until Cakewalk gets the bug addressed it's one (not free but fairly cheap) workaround.

EDIT >>> The problem is directly tied to the state of the "Use Multiprocessing Engine" button.  I'm on a Core2 Quad machine.  If Multiprocessing is turned on and I'm using multiple MIDI-enabled VSTi instruments I will crash every time.  Turn it off and things are much, much better.

 
 
Greysound, thanks for posting this. I am convinced that these issues are related. I would also like to add a reference to this thread, where people clearly ran into this specific bug with Catanya. In that case, it also includes Sonar crashing.

Unfortunately, after almost a year since reporting this, there has been zero feedback from Cakewalk on the status of this bug.

I guess we can hope that 8.5.3 fixes this, but I am certainly not holding my breath for that to happen. After all, this can't possibly be serious, right...?
 
EDIT: I am not sure how much more evidence Cakewalk needs that there is a serious bug here in Sonar. The fact that every single VSTi so far that sends MIDI out have these same exact problems in Sonar should have given Cakewalk a clue by now. These VSTis have no problem working just fine in other hosts. It is just Sonar.