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Catastrophic Failure?!


Johnbee58

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Yesterday, when I was about to render a project to a WAV file, after I chose File/Export Audio to desktop an error came up saying something like a "Catastrophic Error has occurred.  Mixdown cannot be performed! "  I may be paraphrasing a bit there but that was essentially the message.  I rebooted my PC and went back into the project and tried again with success, but I'm wondering if I got that error because maybe I forgot pick any tracks to bounce (which is a possibility).  I remember when I used Sonar X3 Studio and I forgot to choose audio to bounce it would say something like "Operation cannot be performed because no audio was selected."  Could it be that Cakewalk by Bandlab (formerly Sonar Platinum) is just more of a "drama queen" about such things, or might there really have been a "catastrophe" there?

Thanks

😀John B

Edited by Johnbee58
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A "Catastrophic failure" message is what you get when using COM objects or DirectX effects, and you get your reference count wrong.

The fact that when you rebooted it worked, leads me to speculate that a process in the background had crashed, and the other process (probably Cakewalk) tried to release a reference from it that no longer existed.

It's quite possibly the worst error message Microsoft ever dreamed up. How a reference count mismatch can be described as "Catastrophic" is beyond me.

 

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36 minutes ago, msmcleod said:

It's quite possibly the worst error message Microsoft ever dreamed up. How a reference count mismatch can be described as "Catastrophic" is beyond me.

 

I thought the error message came from Cakewalk.  😕

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Well, to tell the truth, at the time when I saw that error, I was breathing pretty heavy.  I just got done with a session which was several hours long and finally at the completion of a new project.  I was rendering the final mix and I would've exploded in anger to come that far and find I had a permanently corrupted project.  That would've been catastrophic.

It's kind of typical with me that if I'm going to have a major crisis working on a project, it comes at the very end.  Enough to drive any artist completely nutz!!🤯

😀JB

Edited by Johnbee58
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Yeah, it's a really badly worded error message. 

Back when I used to work with COM/ActiveX/DirectX , we always used to trap that particular error message and replace it with something less extreme.

A sure way of getting your customers flooding your support line is telling them they've had a catastrophic failure!

In fact all it means is, the thing your program was communicating with isn't there any more - either because it's crashed, or you've called release one time too many.

I guess from a program's point of view (whose only purpose in life may be to open up MS Word, change a few bits of text, and save it), it's pretty catastrophic if Word disappears... but that's hardly a reason to show it to the user in text form.

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Haha yes it is an error code (HRESULT) that is propagated to the UI from a failure at a lower level. The UI is just translating the error code to text so you get the bogus message.  We try not to show obtuse errors but this is a catch all condition. Its not related to reference counting - any object could have returned that code.
Likely something in the loaded project is in a bad state so when you went to mixdown something threw an error at a low level and it bailed the export operation as a result. Without a repro it would be hard for me to know what specifically caused the failure.
If that happens reopening the project file normally fixes it.

In short - its a poorly worded message and there is nothing catastrophic going on :) In fact the error code is a pretty generic one  E_UNEXPECTED that generates that text. Here is a list of the error messages for those interested:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/com/com-error-codes-1

Another particularly confounding one to users is "One or more arguments are invalid" 😛

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