Here a crash, there a crash everywhere a crash crash....

[paulo]

Cakewalk constantly crashing after unfreezing a frozen synth track instance of Sektor Synth and attempting changes....

 

Can any of the esteemed computer folk please translate this error message into English for me?

 Win 7 64 latest Cakewalk version if it matters, but also happens in Platinum.

TIA

[John]

You have a plugin that is causing  CbB to crash. It is Sektor. 

[Larry Jones]

4 minutes ago, John said:

You have a plugin that is causing  CbB to crash. It is Sektor. 

I don't know if this is supposed to be funny, but it's certainly not helpful. The OP indicates in his first sentence that he knows CbB is crashing, and it's because of unfreezing Sektor.

@paulo, this is the kind of thing you need to send to support@cakewalk.com. They may want you to send the dump file described in the error message. A little more information here.

Best of luck!

[John]

If a plugin is causing a problem it is not the host that is the problem usually.  

[Bapu]

1 hour ago, Larry Jones said:

I don't know if this is supposed to be funny, but it's certainly not helpful. 

Well, John did forget to say it's a 64 bit plugin, ?

[Starship Krupa]

1 hour ago, John said:

If a plugin is causing a problem it is not the host that is the problem usually.

And how does that opinion help the OP?

Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, and sometimes it's a grey area. One thing I suspect, if the OP were to post this screen grab in the plug-in manufacturer's forum, the chorus of "Sektor works just fine in every other DAW" would be deafening.?

All we know at this point is that Cakewalk is crashing after paulo unfreezes a Sektor track. What to do? Larry has it right. Contact support, send them the dump file. Maybe there's a configuration or workflow change that can be made in Cakewalk that can prevent this. He should also check with the company who make Sektor to see if anyone else has had similar troubles.

The usual troubleshooting questions apply: is this in just one project or any project that uses Sektor, does it happen with a brand new project started in CbB, etc.

I have had plug-ins that started working incorrectly after updates to a DAW, and it was determined that the way the plug-in was coded was the problem. The plug-in manufacturer was unresponsive (Sonivox, notorious for this sort of thing). But it worked fine before my DAW made the change, so whose "problem" was it really when my DAW company were the ones who broke the functionality for me and the other users of the VSTi? Next rev of the DAW, they made some changes to other stuff and it mysteriously started working again, so it was all good in the end.

No matter what the sins of the plug-in, the host may either trap errors gracefully or fall flat on its face. A correctly-coded plug-in may also expose flaws in a host by making calls to functions that most other plug-ins don't. For these reasons, it's not really helpful to blow it off with "it's probably the plug-in's fault" and leave it at that.

Having said that, it's also kind of silly to title the thread "everywhere" a crash when all it is is one plug-in. I mean, come on, it's frustrating, but how about something more descriptive?

Edited June 9, 2019 by Starship Krupa

[Gswitz]

Can you hit e to disable all plugins before unfreezing? Does out succeed in that case?

[paulo]

2 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

I don't know if this is supposed to be funny, but it's certainly not helpful. The OP indicates in his first sentence that he knows CbB is crashing, and it's because of unfreezing Sektor.

@paulo, this is the kind of thing you need to send to support@cakewalk.com. They may want you to send the dump file described in the error message. A little more information here.

Best of luck!

 

Thanks Larry. As you say there is little doubt what is causing the crash I just wondered if the computer gibberish included in the error message gave any clue as to why. It seems that others who have this plug-in are not experiencing this issue, so I just was hoping that somebody could suggest why before going down official channels and causing possibly unnecessary work for someone.

[Jim Fogle]

2 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

I don't know if this is supposed to be funny, but it's certainly not helpful. The OP indicates in his first sentence that he knows CbB is crashing, and it's because of unfreezing Sektor.

@paulo, this is the kind of thing you need to send to support@cakewalk.com. They may want you to send the dump file described in the error message. A little more information here.

Best of luck!

@paulo

Once you have created a mini dump file by following the instructions in the link @Larry Jones provided, you will need to open a support request so you can provide the dump file to the Cakewalk developers. 

If the mini dump file is a large file, you can store the file in the internet cloud with one of the services like Box, Dropbox, App or 4Share.  The cloud service will provide you with a link to the file.  You will copy the share link to the support request.

If the file is relatively small, you can attach the mini dump file to the support request.

Open your support request here:  https://help.cakewalk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360000025633

In the future if you want to submit another support request you can navigate to the same support webpage by selecting the "Cakewalk by BandLab" tab at the top, left of each forum page and then selecting the second option, "Support Center" and selecting the "Submit a request" link in red font at the top, right of the webpage.

Here is a link to a thread the chief developer started with more information about mini dump files. 

BandLab and the developers appear to be making a big effort to make the application more crash resistant and stable.  They need us to assist by providing crash data when it happens.  Your follow through can make DAW life better for all of us.

[paulo]

20 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

The usual troubleshooting questions apply: is this in just one project or any project that uses Sektor, does it happen with a brand new project started in CbB, etc

 

20 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Having said that, it's also kind of silly to title the thread "everywhere" a crash when all it is is one plug-in. I mean, come on, it's frustrating, but how about something more descriptive?

 

To answer both points it happens every time in every project I've tried it in, new or old,  so I would say that everywhere is fairly descriptive of where it is happening. 

[paulo]

11 minutes ago, Gswitz said:

Can you hit e to disable all plugins before unfreezing? Does out succeed in that case?

I haven't tried that, but to be clear it's not the unfreezing itself that causes the crash, but whatever  I do afterwards - ie change a parameter on the synth UI or playing a note on the keyboard. 

[paulo]

5 minutes ago, fogle622 said:

@paulo

Once you have created a mini dump file by following the instructions in the link @Larry Jones provided, you will need to open a support request so you can provide the dump file to the Cakewalk developers. 

If the mini dump file is a large file, you can store the file in the internet cloud with one of the services like Box, Dropbox, App or 4Share.  The cloud service will provide you with a link to the file.  You will copy the share link to the support request.

If the file is relatively small, you can attach the mini dump file to the support request.

Open your support request here:  https://help.cakewalk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360000025633

In the future if you want to submit another support request you can navigate to the same support webpage by selecting the "Cakewalk by BandLab" tab at the top, left of each forum page and then selecting the second option, "Support Center" and selecting the "Submit a request" link in red font at the top, right of the webpage.

Here is a link to a thread the chief developer started with more information about mini dump files. 

BandLab and the developers appear to be making a big effort to make the application more crash resistant and stable.  They need us to assist by providing crash data when it happens.  Your follow through can make DAW life better for all of us.

Thanks for the info. If I can't solve the issue myself I'll do that tomorrow. I posted the problem here first as I was hoping to be able to solve it without giving the bakers more work to do.

[mettelus]

It captured a crash dump, so I would suggest submitting that the the bakers. That dump file has info we can only speculate on here.

[msmcleod]

2 hours ago, paulo said:

 

Thanks Larry. As you say there is little doubt what is causing the crash I just wondered if the computer gibberish included in the error message gave any clue as to why. It seems that others who have this plug-in are not experiencing this issue, so I just was hoping that somebody could suggest why before going down official channels and causing possibly unnecessary work for someone.

Unfortunately the C00000005 error is not particularly helpful. It's a Windows System error.

It basically means the plugin is trying to access memory it doesn't own. The cause of this could be a number of things though:  the most common is memory corruption (due to a bug in the plugin, not your physical memory), however even that could have a number of underlying causes such as pointers to memory locations being overwritten, or memory that was owned by the process but has since been deallocated.

I appreciate this doesn't help you get any nearer to solving this.

Hopefully support can at least tell whether its something that Cakewalk is doing (like effectively pulling the rug from under the plugin's feet, memory-wise), or whether its a problem solely with the plugin itself.

[John]

6 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

I don't know if this is supposed to be funny, but it's certainly not helpful. The OP indicates in his first sentence that he knows CbB is crashing, and it's because of unfreezing Sektor.

@paulo, this is the kind of thing you need to send to support@cakewalk.com. They may want you to send the dump file described in the error message. A little more information here.

Best of luck!

The reason I said what I said was because that is the only answer I could come up with at the time.  I had this happen with a plugin and it simply crashed the host it was in. I informed the developer and also posted about it in the forum on another web site of the host. I did everything I could to find the cause. I never did find the cause. However, I stopped using it until I was sure it wouldn't crash the host. A couple months later it was no longer crashing.  I don't know if the host developer fixed it or the plugin developer did. I do know that when a plugin crashes a host its a good idea to not use it. That was the real point of the post. Also I answered  mainly to let the OP know the post had been noticed.  

This forum is a place that can do remarkable things but why a plugin crashes is a very hard problem to solve here.  

[paulo]

9 hours ago, msmcleod said:

Unfortunately the C00000005 error is not particularly helpful. It's a Windows System error.

It basically means the plugin is trying to access memory it doesn't own. The cause of this could be a number of things though:  the most common is memory corruption (due to a bug in the plugin, not your physical memory), however even that could have a number of underlying causes such as pointers to memory locations being overwritten, or memory that was owned by the process but has since been deallocated.

I appreciate this doesn't help you get any nearer to solving this.

Hopefully support can at least tell whether its something that Cakewalk is doing (like effectively pulling the rug from under the plugin's feet, memory-wise), or whether its a problem solely with the plugin itself.

Thank you for the explanation. This is the kind of thing that I have no clue about.

[paulo]

Update for anyone interested.....

As suggested I have submitted the .dmp file to CW support and await their response.

In the meantime I have discovered that using the VST3 version of the plugin does not cause the issue, so I at least have a workaround. I'm clueless as to why that might be and have also submitted that info to CW. I thought I read somewhere way back that CW will automatically use the VST3 version of a selected plugin anyway if one is available. Or did I dream that?

While I was discovering this, the plugin vendor responded to suggest that maybe the problem is being caused by me using the VST3 version and that I should make sure I'm using VST2. I've now updated them that it appears to be quite the opposite and await their response.

[Starship Krupa]

Oh boy, can of worms there. Glad it's working.

Cakewalk will substitute a VST3 for a VST2 if the plug-ins have a certain internal identifier set. Not every company uses this, so sometimes both plug-ins will show up in the pick lists in Cakewalk. Meldaproduction famously does not use the matching internal identifier, so I have to  disable my 38 Meldaproduction VST2's using the Plug-In Manager.

It's kind of funny that they thought that the "more advanced" VST3 would be the one that would have the problem! I'm not surprised, though, as my other DAW, Mixcraft, really doesn't like VST3's, to the point that as much as possible I avoid them when using Mixcraft.

A sidenote, I'm just venting and it won't help paolo a bit, but this is the kind of thing that had me spitting nails when I dug more deeply into what was really behind Steinberg's much-touted VST3 spec and how little it actually covered and how little it was likely to improve things.

Protecting the host and the plug-in from each other in case of errors, a standard protocol for trapping and handling errors, those are things that could have been part of a new VST spec that  might have actually improved things, but instead what the industry got was mostly forced duplication of features that other companies had already implemented like sidechaining and GUI scaling.

There was no big revolution where suddenly with VST3 my plug-ins started getting scalable GUI's and sidechaining, they all already had it if it were applicable. All I saw was plug-ins started to be distributed in both formats that worked exactly the same. Except the VST3 versions had more of a tendency to crash.

I'm sure that for people who write these plug-ins,  they write the code, then the development environment poops out various versions of the plug-in at compile time. We're at the mercy of the development environment and compiler when it comes to whether they're going to work well.

[marcL]

1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said:

A sidenote, I'm just venting and it won't help paolo a bit, but this is the kind of thing that had me spitting nails when I dug more deeply into what was really behind Steinberg's much-touted VST3 spec and how little it actually covered and how little it was likely to improve things.

I totally agree, IMO VST3 was more targeted as a randy thing for the developers than as an improvement for the DAW users. In the contrary, in many cases the existence of 2 plugin versions (4 if you add 32-bit) makes the chaos complete! The whole handling of plugins would be so much simpler for the users and for the developers of DAWs and plugins, if there was only one version!

Now you may have noticed that also me is just venting and that does not help Paolo either! But I have to mention that I also had once a problem with a plugin's VST2 version (TH3) in combination with Splat and a Focusrite interface. Yes, you hear right, only the combination of all 3 components caused the crash! When I used my Behringer interface or another DAW the crash did not happen. But at that time I could leave the thing pass, because actually I wanted to use plugin as VST3 and it was my fault that I used the VST2 version. Although there was really a problem with the Focusrite driver in combination with TH3 and Splat. For this reason I really like your formulation below Starship Krupa:

14 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

16 hours ago, John said:

If a plugin is causing a problem it is not the host that is the problem usually.

And how does that opinion help the OP?

Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, and sometimes it's a grey area. One thing I suspect, if the OP were to post this screen grab in the plug-in manufacturer's forum, the chorus of "Sektor works just fine in every other DAW" would be deafening.?

 

[bvideo]

Just to set expectations for dump popups posted in the forum: There is very little in the popup that can be used by us users to "help the OP" with any substantial info. The only readable detail in this one is that the code that failed by referencing a non-existent memory address was in the plugin, not the host. That doesn't really prove one way or the other whether it's the host or the plugin that is behind the failure. We've heard a few times about how a plugin "does things differently", and the host wasn't expecting that, and the host can tweak code to make it work (an example of Starship Krupa's grey area). But given how many plugins have needed fixing, I agree with John's observation to this extent: it's less often the DAW's fault (but I guess there is no data available to prove that).

In this case it just confirmed the OP's observation that the crash probably happened while the plugin was processing parameters (or e.g. could have been processing audio while a parameter changed in an "inconvenient" way) after a freeze (which could be a clue as to why it would crash in one DAW and not another, given different or non-existent implementations of freeze). Some future poster might not have a directly observed cause & effect. Then if the crash happens in the code of a plugin, the popup would be giving the possibly helpful clue of the module name.