Greetings friends.
 
We have been working on an update for Cakewalk Command Center (C3) , we are at a point where we would like to share our current plan with the community to collect your feedback. At this time we do not have a timeline for when we will deliver any of the proposed changes, that is something we will figure out after we get some time to work through your feedback.
 
One of our initial goals with C3 was to improve the new user experience. To be completely honest, (at least I) was not expecting the positive response and heavy use that C3 received from professional and upgrade users. To that end, many of the changes we would like to introduce are more geared to making it easier for professionals to get the functionality they need from C3 without making the new user experience any more complicated.
 
Disclaimer: Screenshots may not be the final art, this is mostly placeholder stuff. Everything stated here is subject to change and this is not a commitment on Cakewalk's part to make these proposed changes. 
 
What we will not be addressing in this update
Nothing is off the table forever, this is just a small list of a few commonly requested features that we will not be considering for this update. Please continue to make feature requests in the F&I forum and contribute to discussions around these topics, your thoughts are incredibly valuable in guiding our decisions. For this update however we will not be addressing these ones.
 
Multiselect/custom install selections.
The basic idea is, a method for users to select any arbitrary collection of products and install them. Supporting this adds a ton of complexity to some new options we'd like to introduce in 1.1 so we'd like to re-visit this topic after the changes to learn more about how folks feel about it.
 
Download pause/resume
Experience: We've been making a real effort to make more smaller installers where possible. Downloading smaller components has proven to be much simpler for users than downloading large gargantuan installers. This modular approach makes it easier for users to choose what they want and also not suffer as long when a download fails or becomes corrupt. 
 
Technical: By design most everything C3 does is asynchronous in nature. This includes downloading multiple files concurrently. This makes supporting pause/resume a bit more complex without adding a lot of additional information and also persisting this info when the application is closed/re-opened.
 
Both: Should we resume a download if a newer update is available or toss it out and auto-update the user? Not a life shattering event by any means but a seasoned user may prefer the version they selected, a new user may prefer to be on the latest and greatest.
 
Cancel downloads in progress
There are some design considerations - such as 'what happens when the user cancels download of 4 of 7 when C3 is downloading a collection?' that we are exploring in addition to the tech reasons for resume before we'd like to dive into this one.
 
Command Center 1.1 Update  
Persisting the installed product list in the registry
Today when a user installs a product C3 tracks the installed versions in a local per-user cache or by checking for a file on disk. This is problem when a user logs out of C3 as their cache is destroyed. Starting with 1.1 C3 will use the registry to maintain 'version awareness'. This should address issues where a product would report that it is not installed when in fact it is.
 
Supporting info: On the C3 side this is a fairly straightforward change. However this does require every installer to be updated to write its version information into the registry. Post-launch this may create a situation where products are reported as 'not installed' until they're updated to the latest version.
 
Content Path Customization
The 'Cakewalk Content' location is a pretty heavily used resource across multiple products. In 1.1 we will let users specify this path from the C3 settings page and C3 will copy the contents (if they exist) to the user specified location. 
 
Supporting info: Also a simple implementation on the C3 side. This change does require that the installers always respect the content path given to them by C3.
 
Verbose/Non-Silent Install
An option will be added to the settings page to allow users to bypass the silent argument that is passed to installers. This will allow users to step through the installer dialogs and options.
 
Easy access to the downloads and content directories
This is pretty simple, an open folder button will be added to the settings page to allow users to open up either the downloads or Cakewalk Content directories.
 
User-defined update check interval
Anyone that has lots of products or uses C3 to launch products understands what a pain it can be when waiting for the update check to complete. An option will be added to the settings page that will allow users to specify (in hours) how long C3 should wait before checking for updates. The last update check value is stored per-product in C3's cache. We're rolling with a default value of 24 hours but interested in hearing your feedback if this is to high or to low of a default.
 
Check for updates now button
Hopefully the title is self-explanatory. In addition to allowing users to specify how often C3 checks clicking this button will force C3 to check for updates immediately.
 
TEMP SETTINGS PAGE

I realize the language for some of these options is horrible - if you have any suggestions please share ;)
 
Download-only context menu option
For those that would enjoy the download and MD5-checking awesomeness of C3 but would prefer to manually run the installer or copy it to an offline-computer - this option is for you. It does what it says - downloads the files for a product or update without running the installer.
 

 
Behind the scenes fixes and performance updates
In addition to the new visible changes a lot of work has gone into fixing bugs and improving performance. Disk I/O should be improved (although probably not noticeable) as we've cut down on overly aggressive persistence calls. A few specific issues that might be worth calling out:
 
Error when clicking a link in C3: For some crazy reason (I don't know how or why) some folks did not have a default web-browser specified in Windows.  C3 now handles this condition with more grace.
 
Error when logging into C3 on a computer that has never had any Cakewalk products or VST plugins installed for non-admin users: This one tied into the aggressive persistence calls.
 
Update: 6/4/2015 
Based on feedback from our support group, this thread and the fault reporter so far we have also added the following for 1.1:

• All of your hidden products will now show up in the settings window so you can un-hide them. Right now its an utter mess, but once our designer takes a swing at it I'll get a new screenshot for everybody
• The 'Install All' option will always be available for products that have child products/installers
• We're looking into an 'Update All' button that will make it easier to update all products that have child products
• The product page now displays both 'Current Version' and 'Latest Version' for the selected product
• The C3 installer now adds windows firewall exceptions for ports 80 & 443 for itself, this won't stop super aggressive 3rd party firewalls but it should help with folks that have strict windows firewall settings in place

Your feedback matters
100% of these changes we're inspired by user-feedback via the forum and support. Keep this train rolling - let us know how you feel about these proposed changes. We can't incorporate everything in one update but it is important to us that we're on the right track with this first targeted set of changes. 
 
Please keep this discussion civil and on-topic
It would be very helpful for us to leave this discussion with helpful, actionable feedback.

On some parts I think you overcomplicate things.
There are various installers out there - that are also intuitive.
 
I think CCC resemble some of that - but forget about a simple checkbox at each product.
And possibly an chekbox option "smart download" or similar meaning - if to use that:
a) if not checked, one at a time is downloaded in sequence
b) if checked you start two in parallell first - see if second does not slow down first and both get similar speed, you start yet another parallell - as long as checkboxes goes.
 
Quite often the download servers is the limit, and you speed things up if having more headroom on your broadband to use up.
 
If we get an check option to download chm help file separately - would be nice. In reality Sonar took maybe 15-20 minutes tops. But you had to spend 90 minutes with all tuts just to get help file.
 
Two browsers that I like as downloaders are Opera and Maxthon - if to look for pause/continue stuff later.
Nothing is cleared from list of completed downloads - unless you press Clear completed.
And each row in list has an play/pause and stop.
 
Just a bunch....

I think you guys have it narrowed pretty good.  I won't speak for everybody, but for ME, being able to direct content locations PLUS being able to inform CCC about applications already installed (outside of CCC) will get me using it.
 
Let the dust settle on that while you develop the Talent PC module, then see what people most want from CCC from there.
 
 

I don't want to have any 32 bit on my system. I would like all 32 bit plugs marked clearly or put in a folder I can choose to not install. I would love to be able to set up my custom install one time and then save as a preset. I don't want to install some of the older FX and Synths because I have to install them to get others I do want.

Willy Jones [Cakewalk]
Multiselect/custom install selections.
The basic idea is, a method for users to select any arbitrary collection of products and install them. Supporting this adds a ton of complexity to some new options we'd like to introduce in 1.1 so we'd like to re-visit this topic after the changes to learn more about how folks feel about it.

That is what was and still is annoying me at most. With RapturePro the last time. I have asked for "Install All", it has downloaded near everything but then there was an error... After restart, I pressed "Install All" again, but after installing PR itself, it could not continue. But "Install All" disappeared. So, I have to manually: "Install 1", wait installation, "Click", wait rescanned installed, "Install 2", wait installation, "Click", wait... Even if not custom, is it possible to have "Install All" All the time?

I think these changes if implemented well will go a long way to improving CCC.
 
Currently I have given up on CCC primarily because of the lost data when a download fails. If the download fails using FireFox I can resume without loosing the part of the file that is already downloaded. Even after a reboot, it is a little tricky but it works.
 
Firefox just saves the partial file with a .part extension then it knows it can restart the download using the .part file as the beginning.
 
None the less I may be tempted to try CCC again once the download only option is available.
 
Thanks Willy for the heads up. I was starting to think we would not get any progress on this.

This sounds like a good direction for CCC to go in. You've got my vote.
 
Regards,
Dan
 

azslow3
 
Even if not custom, is it possible to have "Install All" All the time?

Yeah, I think we can see about making that happen. Should be pretty easy to add/fix.

Tom Riggs
 
I have given up on CCC primarily because of the lost data when a download fails. If the download fails using FireFox I can resume without loosing the part of the file that is already downloaded. Even after a reboot, it is a little tricky but it works.

 
We have seen a major decrease in failed and partial downloads since we switched to smaller, modular installers. I would be very interested in trying to figure out why this happens in your case though. Would you mind PM'ing your IP address next time this happens? (Or wait for 1.1's download-only option). We can check the logs and find out which location your download was served from. We found some ISPs had some weird stuff going on and they were getting served downloads from locations that were waaay far away.
 
Another thing worth trying if this happens to you consistently is changing your DNS settings to Google's DNS or Open DNS. I'm geographically closer to New York City. If I use Comcast's (a cable provider here in the US) DNS I end up getting downloads from Atlanta and Washington D.C. that are about a 3rd slower.
 

Willy Jones [Cakewalk]

Tom Riggs
 
I have given up on CCC primarily because of the lost data when a download fails. If the download fails using FireFox I can resume without loosing the part of the file that is already downloaded. Even after a reboot, it is a little tricky but it works.

 
We have seen a major decrease in failed and partial downloads since we switched to smaller, modular installers. I would be very interested in trying to figure out why this happens in your case though. Would you mind PM'ing your IP address next time this happens? (Or wait for 1.1's download-only option). We can check the logs and find out which location your download was served from. We found some ISPs had some weird stuff going on and they were getting served downloads from locations that were waaay far away.
 
Another thing worth trying if this happens to you consistently is changing your DNS settings to Google's DNS or Open DNS. I'm geographically closer to New York City. If I use Comcast's (a cable provider here in the US) DNS I end up getting downloads from Atlanta and Washington D.C. that are about a 3rd slower.
 

This is all well and good, Willy, but you'll never work around backhoe fades and similar errors.  Robust handling of download errors should be the spec IMO