Omnisphere use with cakewalk by BandLab

[Yury]

May be someone had the same experiences.

When I use omnishere instrument in my arrangement it randomly, without any warnings shuts my computer down. It happens only when I use omnisphere. But when I freeze this truck and mute omnisphere truck, then everything works fine. It comes completely unexpected, so sometimes I lose some material.

May be someone had the same experience and found the solution? 

Edited February 2, 2023 by Yury

[Max Arwood]

I haven’t had any problems with Omnisphere. Could you tell us what your computer specs and sound card are. That might help. 

[bitflipper]

When you say "shuts my computer down" do you mean that literally?  Powers down?

Or do you mean Windows crashes? Or that Cakewalk crashes?

There was an issue a while back, where Spectrasonics instruments were crashing Cakewalk after they changed the number of outputs. The solution to that one was to remove the instance of Omnisphere (or Keyscape or Trillian) and insert a new one.

 

[Yury]

I mean literally computer shuts down and restarts on its own.

[Yury]

My computer: i7 9700K 3.6mhz,  memory 32gb, audio interface Behringer Utophia UMC 404HD, Drive C 500gb M2, drives D and F 4gb each and E 2gb. Power supply 700watts, monitor Samsung 32"

[abacab]

51 minutes ago, Yury said:

I mean literally computer shuts down and restarts on its own.

Are you getting a BSOD type of error? The blue screen with "Your PC ran into a problem..."

That's frequently a driver issue, but it can also be due to anything unstable in your system, including RAM.

If that is the case, there is an advanced Windows setting to prevent automatic restarts after a BSOD, that should leave the error screen in view in case you happen to miss it. If you change that setting, you would need to manually restart.

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/windows-disable-restart-after-bsod

[bitflipper]

When a computer unexpectedly shuts down and reboots, it's most often a failing power supply. I have also seen it happen when there was a shorted decoupling capacitor on the motherboard that overheated the power supply. Either way, it's gonna take a trip to your local computer fixit guy.

It should not be possible for a software instrument to power down  and reboot the computer. At worst, it will only crash the DAW and leave a crash dump for analysis. It could be coincidence that there appears to be a correlation to Omnisphere.

You might want to take a look in %appdata%\cakewalk\cakewalk core\minidumps and see a dump file is there with the date and time of your shutdown. Although unlikely, it's possible there's a clue in there. It's also worth scrolling through the Windows Event Viewer to see if there are any entries in the System Log that correspond to the date and time of your shutdown.

[abacab]

22 minutes ago, bitflipper said:

It should not be possible for a software instrument to power down  and reboot the computer. At worst, it will only crash the DAW and leave a crash dump for analysis. It could be coincidence that there appears to be a correlation to Omnisphere.

I'm only going by what Yury stated, that the shutdown only happens when using Omnisphere. If that's true, was thinking that maybe Omnisphere is stressing something in his system that is marginal and that it tips things over the edge.

Maybe he should take a look at this free utility to stress test the PC: OCCT Personal https://www.ocbase.com/download

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/stress-test-cpu-pc-guide,5461-3.html

[msmcleod]

Omnisphere is memory intensive, so it's possible it could be a bad memory.  This has happened to me in the past and is very difficult to identify.  If you're lucky, you might see some discrepancies in the BIOS when it's reporting the speed of your memory modules - i.e. if one looks different from the other, that's a good indication that one has gone bad.

Alternatively, Windows 10 has a built in memory checker: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-check-your-pc-memory-problems-windows-10

[Yury]

thanks everybody for your responces.

 

[bitflipper]

Yury, please come back and update us once you've solved this mystery.

[Starship Krupa]

On 2/15/2023 at 1:32 PM, abacab said:

maybe Omnisphere is stressing something in his system that is marginal and that it tips things over the edge

That was my thought as well. And as Mark suggested, memory could be a thing. An area of memory that doesn't get touched until you run something that eats up a lot of it. That could be RAM, or maybe there's paging going on to a disk that has bad sectors. Even with 32G of RAM, Windows will allocate page file in case it needs it, not necessarily as it needs it.

First thing I'd do is reseat the RAM sticks. Then run a memory stress tester.

It could also be other components, any of which can be stress tested. I like Kombustor for graphics. There are others for CPU, which can flush out problems with cooling (dust on the cooler fins, dried out paste, etc.).

The K suffix indicates that it's got an unlocked clock and it will turbo up to 4.9GHz. Are you overclocking it (I would, for sure?)?

DAW work tends to be very heavy on AVX operations, which can really cook the CPU. Omnisphere, I would hope, is probably making a lot of use of AVX, so it could be heating up the processor to the point of protective shutdown.

My favorite tool for monitoring heat, fan speed, etc. is HWINFO64. Start that, look at the CPU and graphics temps and processor speed, then start Cakewalk up with Omnishpere and keep an eye on it. If the CPU temp climbs fast, you might be in for some blowing dust off your cooler and/or putting new paste between the cooler and the CPU.

[abacab]

34 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

The K suffix indicates that it's got an unlocked clock and it will turbo up to 4.9GHz. Are you overclocking it (I would, for sure?)?

DAW work tends to be very heavy on AVX operations, which can really cook the CPU. Omnisphere, I would hope, is probably making a lot of use of AVX, so it could be heating up the processor to the point of protective shutdown.

> One thing to try here would be to increase the AVX offset in the UEFI/BIOS to slow the CPU clock down for AVX operations. On my ASUS Z390 board the default is -3x for AVX on the clock multiplier.

AVX offsets

https://www.pcgamer.com/how-to-overclock-intel-cpus/

"Intel's latest CPUs provide a series of updated AVX (opens in new tab) instructions, which are designed to accelerate audio, video, and image processing functions. However, these greatly increase the power usage and heat produced by a CPU.

To prevent AVX power spikes from limiting general overclocking potential, Intel introduced the AVX offset in the BIOS. This feature detects AVX workloads and adjusts the multiplier downward by a specified value to maintain system stability, so a system overclocked to 5GHz with an AVX offset of 2 would adjust to 4.8 GHz automatically during AVX enabled workloads and switch back again when completed."

> Another thing to look at is downclocking your RAM. Try setting it one SPD level down from the advertised speed, especially if you are running it at the RAM tested speed, or using an XMP profile. 

RAM Speed

https://www.makeuseof.com/difference-ram-spd-speed-and-ram-tested-speed/

"If you are undecided about whether or not you should attempt to overclock your RAM, you should know there are some benefits to leaving your computer as it is:

Stability: By leaving your computer's RAM speed at its default, you don't have to worry about the reasons for your computer's random crashes that usually follow speeding up your RAM."

 

Edited March 16, 2023 by abacab

[Yury]

I still have this problem. The only new is that I don't think its Omnisphere because lately I had same thing happened with other soft running. Even not musical soft. So I think its something with hardware in my computer. I built this computer myself and its been working fine for a long time. May be some of the hardware comes to the end of its life, or some drivers don't like other drivers at certain situations.  Random problems is a very difficult problems to fix or find the reason why. So I have to live with this problem until something breaks for good.