Back to sudden crashes, hours of lost work due to saves not actually saving, no dump files created.....

[AxlBrutality]

Quite some time ago I had this issue, and it caused me to abandon CbB for nearly two years.  I returned and CbB has functioned almost flawlessly for about 6 months...until this morning when suddenly I'm dealing with the exact same issue. 

I went back and found a couple others that had the same issue way back when, but no surefire diagnosis seemed to come of it and/or their hardware/software situation was different than mine.

CbB will randomly freeze.  Sometimes when hitting play, sometimes when hitting stop, sometimes when editing a clip, sometimes when doing nothing at all.  Happens with all plugins disabled, happens with all plugins enabled.  Small projects, large projects, doesn't matter.  happens more often when Cake is open for longer periods of time, which kinda makes it seem like a memory leak but I can't find any signs of such a leak.

To add insult to injury, all of the work done in said session is lost, in spite of both auto-saving and manually saving.  It's like the project was never even touched.

And to make matters worse, no dump file is created, so I can't even have the devs take a look at it.

I'm on the latest/final CbB build.  My computer is fully updated.  Windows Defender realtime scanning is off; updates are paused (I update manually).  I don't have other AV or anything running in the background.  All my plugins are updated.  I also don't even run any of the same plugins that I ran two years ago (besides a handful of stock Sonitus plugs), as I did a full revamp of my workflow and tools a couple months ago (again, everything worked fine this go around until this morning).

Also, nothing was specifically updated this morning to change anything.  I ran /chkdsk with no errors reported.  Computer is cleaned and defragged weekly.  Cleaned picture cache and audio folders.  Etc.

System resource usage is very consistent and stable in every project, and no project of mine goes past 50% even with all plugins enabled.

I don't even know that I'm asking for a resolution at this point; just posting in case someone else has the same problem I guess.  I'm just tired, man.

Edited December 13, 2024 by AxlBrutality

[Terry Kelley]

But it's not something you can reliably reproduce? If you can, send it to the developers and they will look into it. They are pretty responsive in that situation.

 

[David Baay]

1 hour ago, AxlBrutality said:

To add insult to injury, all of the work done in said session is lost, in spite of both auto-saving and manually saving.  It's like the project was never even touched.

Undiagnosed chronic crashing is not wholly unusual; given the symptoms and other factors having been eliminated, I would tend to suspect audio driver misbehavior. But unsuccessful saves with no indication of a problem is pretty much unheard of which points to some sort of O/S or hardware/firmware level issue.

Is there anything atypical about your storage setup like disk arrays or network storage?

Have you recently changed/updated your ASIO interface and/or have another one you can try to see if stability improves?

[Amberwolf]

This doesn't fix the problem, but to see if your data is recoverable:

Did you see the files in the folder as you saved new versions of them? If so, they should still be on the drive somewhere.

If the project was always saved over the top of the old one, and the crash happened during a save process (even if this happens in the background like autosave, etc), then it might be trashed because parts of the file may not match up with others even if it's recovered. 

 

I'd guess you've already checked to be sure the files were not saved in an incorrect location by the program? 

 

If not, a search for the project file extension(s) and any audio files generated is at least worth a shot (using the advanced options to search within system folders as well, in case something really messed up where they went). 

 

There are programs out there that can locate "lost" files, and might be able to find yours, if they were indeed written to the drive at all.   Doesn't always work, but it's worth a shot if there's any chance they're there. 

 

9 hours ago, AxlBrutality said:

Computer is cleaned and defragged weekly.  Cleaned picture cache and audio folders.  Etc.

FWIW, doing these things (other than the picture cache) may ensure inability to recover "lost" files, as the defrag will move file segments around the drive, and overwrite things that might still be there but were not in the visible files (no FAT references to them). 

With modern harddisks (even the decade-plus-old ones I use) it's almost always unnecessary to defrag for performance reasons; even a fairly fragmented drive accesses data fast enough to keep up with most usages (maybe if there are enough audio tracks continuously streaming to/from the drive it might start choking).  

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the problem you're having but it might make it impossible to locate / recover lost files (or accidentally deleted ones) in the future if you ever need to do so. 

[datadog]

Just a thought... Have you run a memory test on your ram? https://www.memtest86.com/

I've had this issue of random crashes and freezing before and it can be frustrating to figure it out. After running memtest86 for several hours (over night), a stick of ram would occasionally cause an error. After replacing the bad ram, the problem never came back; it's been three years now- no wierd crashes anymore. I'm not saying this is your problem but bad ram can be elusive and random in nature. It can work fine for days then intermittently cause problems. This is especially true if you overclock your system.

 Good luck!

[David Baay]

19 minutes ago, datadog said:

I've had this issue of random crashes and freezing before and it can be frustrating to figure it out. After running memtest86 for several hours (over night), a stick of ram would occasionally cause an error.

Good point. The one time I had realy chronic and mysterious crashing turned out to be due to bad RAM, verified by Memtest. And other apps were not affected; only SONAR was using RAM extensively enough to hit the bad blocks.

But it seems the OP has disappeared...?

[pwalpwal]

19 minutes ago, David Baay said:

But it seems the OP has disappeared...?

maybe he has a life outside the forum?

[datadog]

Yes, great explanation. That's why it's so hard to pinpoint when other programs work fine. That flakey cell of memory has to accessed when it's acting up by the routine in the program that called it. "Poof" is the result. Cakewalk Bandlab is a complex program that relies on sound memory.

[AxlBrutality]

On 12/13/2024 at 10:32 AM, Terry Kelley said:

But it's not something you can reliably reproduce?

 

Negative.

On 12/13/2024 at 11:36 AM, David Baay said:

...given the symptoms and other factors having been eliminated, I would tend to suspect audio driver misbehavior. But unsuccessful saves with no indication of a problem is pretty much unheard of which points to some sort of O/S or hardware/firmware level issue.

Is there anything atypical about your storage setup like disk arrays or network storage?

Have you recently changed/updated your ASIO interface and/or have another one you can try to see if stability improves?

Nothing atypical about my storage paths.  Everything related to the DAW is installed/stored/run off of my C drive (SSD).  I back things up off site, but all the primary files are right here.

Regarding my interface/drivers, there were no changes.  However, I did see that my interface's driver was outdated and have since updated it.  The problem persists, however.  Unfortunately, I don't have another one on hand.

I am still running a 2nd gen Focusrite 2i2, which I obviously need to upgrade at some point.
 

On 12/13/2024 at 7:32 PM, Amberwolf said:

I'd guess you've already checked to be sure the files were not saved in an incorrect location by the program?

Nothing is turning up, but your point about defragging may make that a moot point.  if/when it happens again I'll do a quick search before any disk cleaning or defragging.

I will say that it would be quite odd, because 99% of the time these files save in the correct location.  Why it would randomly save elsewhere in a session that happens to crash later is beyond me, lol.

 

On 12/19/2024 at 8:51 AM, datadog said:

Just a thought... Have you run a memory test on your ram?

Ran several different tests this morning; none came back with any errors.  All tests stressed the RAM to the max on all cores.

I do overclock, but not to the extreme and I have always done so.

Also, just to add more info....I run 32 GB of RAM (4x8), so it's not like there's a shortage of RAM in general.  Also, as mentioned, according to CbB's performance monitor and verified by task manager, my RAM usage is as low as 20-30% when some of these freezes/crashes happen....which is consistent with what it's running at prior to any issues. 

(On the other end, towards the end of full mixdowns I can approach 60% usage according to CbB, but again it's pretty consistent and that's not abnormal for large projects anyway.)

 

On 12/19/2024 at 9:17 AM, David Baay said:

But it seems the OP has disappeared...?

Had to walk away for a while.  Losing hours of [often tedious] work is not a pleasant experience.

 

On 12/19/2024 at 9:36 AM, pwallie said:

maybe he has a life outside the forum?

This also.  I own/operate a small business, have kids, have a full pack of huskies, it's the holidays, and two of my own bands released albums this month.  Been a bit hectic around here, lol.

 

Also, as a general note...CbB isn't the only intensive program I run on this machine.  I often deal with pretty CPU/RAM-heavy games, as well as graphic art/rendering stuff that can stress the CPU and RAM just as much as my GPU.  CbB is the only one that exhibits this behavior.

Edited December 28, 2024 by AxlBrutality

[Craig Anderton]

Maybe this is a long shot, but have you updated your graphics drivers recently? This has cured several weird/intermittent problems for me in the past.

[mettelus]

On 12/13/2024 at 12:14 PM, AxlBrutality said:

Happens with all plugins disabled, happens with all plugins enabled. 

I would do a deep dive into what plugin you have in your project. Disabling a plugin does not prevent it from running in the background (why you can re-enable it with the transport running). If this situation didn't happen for 6 months then suddenly re-appeared, the biggest suspect would be a plugin you are suddenly using again. Upping buffers might help (especially with starting the transport), but I would focus on exactly which plugins are present (disabled or not) first.

Another side note since you mentioned games is that massive amounts of spurious data can some from a mouse or keyboard that has been damaged. I have seen things from exceeding mechanical limits on key springs, to simple lint on mouse optics, to finding out that the control wiring on my mouse runs between the scroll wheel and "free scroll" button... that was an interesting one to diagnose because it actually broke the wire connection and would make/break itself at random. I consider mice/keyboards true consumables, so if they get more than 4-5 years under their belt with me, I am lucky.

[Terry Kelley]

Often use of CTRL-s is your friend.  No matter what the developers do, something will happen. Save yourself - save often.

[Sock Monkey]

Nobody has mentioned SSD drives. I had freezing and generally slowed down condition and I tested my drives with the Samsung Magician. Turned out my C drive had issues. Cloned it and swapped it out and computer was like brand new again.