Cakewalk Sonar crashing repeatedly for months now

[ccondon23]

I've been having an issue with Cakewalk Sonar crashing repeatedly.  The crashes began shortly after I switched from Cakewalk by Bandlab to Cakewalk Sonar.  They occur most often in a specific project and occur more often in a specific version of that project.  However, other projects have also crashed.  This same project also crashed when loaded into Cakewalk by Bandlab. 

Cakewalk support says that the crash occurs in 'nt.dll'.  I have updated drivers and the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables. Yesterday I tried doing a repair install of Windows 11.  I've been sending crashdumps (when one is generated, which does not occur 100% of the time) to Sonar support since mid-December.  I have followed any instructions that they asked (including updating the C++ stuff, doing a uninstall/reinstall of Cakewalk, etc.) and I've provided them with a copy of the project that crashes most often. The response since late December has basically been "Thank you for your patience, keep sending crashdumps, we're working on it."

In addition, a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing crashes after closing a project, including sometimes getting a crash notification a half a minute or so after I completely closed Sonar.  I've notified Cakewalk support about this and provided crashdumps as well. 

 

Has anyone been seeing similar issues?  Does anyone have suggestions on what else I might try?  I keep reading that Sonar is super stable, but I've seen anything but and I'm kind of at my wit's end here.  I don't want to switch to a different DAW - I've been using Cakewalk/Sonar since the 1990s - but I'm really starting to think I don't have a choice. 

 

Thanks,

Chris

 

 

 

[Sock Monkey]

I too have had crashes since around November. I switched to Sonar from Cakewalk a year ago now.
I don’t have Cakewalk installed since like you they had me do a clean install so I never bothered with reinstalling it. 
I’ve submitted projects and lots of dump files. 
I often only get auto generated replies. 

Most of my crashes happen on opening and are obviously plug in related. So I use safe mode. 
I’ve had dozens of these but there’s no crash dump generated. 

But I’ve also had numerous crashes where the dump reports  say Sonar that happened when doing something like replacing a synth. Those are scary! 

The thing is that I don’t use a lot of plug ins and the ones I do use are solid like Melda and Overloud. I collected my favourite ones years ago and so Im not ever using weird stuff. They are all CPU lite load. 
So safe mode works because there might only be 10 to exclude. I’d hate to be using a lot like I see some people do. 
I always save my projects as midi files so I will never totally lose anything. I now also export all audio tracks as stems too. 
 

Staff have sometimes kept in touch but it is annoying to have had an issue and only real solution recommended is a clean install.? Now their favourite is the C++ deal. 

The crazy clean install has been a problem for me ever since because I lost 10 +years of personal settings and presets. The instructions are outdated. 

For me it is mostly old projects that were first created in Sonar Platinum. You’ll see I posted in the Feedback thread regarding this. 

Interesting as well is that and reports that I submitted regarding Cakewalk Next have not been replied to. Not even auto generated. I just found a major issue with the new tempo map. Nobody seems interested. 

 

Edited February 5 by Sock Monkey

[ccondon23]

47 minutes ago, Sock Monkey said:

Most of my crashes happen on opening and are obviously plug in related. So I use safe mode. 

What is the benefit of running in safe mode? And how do you do that? 

[Colin Nicholls]

5 minutes ago, ccondon23 said:

What is the benefit of running in safe mode? And how do you do that? 

Prompts you to confirm each plugin at project load time, giving you the chance to skip them.

Hold Shift down during project open.

 

Edited February 5 by Colin Nicholls

[msmcleod]

Also if you've not got Sonar set to do an automatic background scan, make sure you kick off a manual plugin scan every time you update your plugins.



 

[Sock Monkey]

T

1 hour ago, Colin Nicholls said:

Prompts you to confirm each plugin at project load time, giving you the chance to skip them.

Hold Shift down during project open.

 

to be clear it took me a few days to find out that you need to open the project from the file menu. Open file, browse to project and hold down shift then open. 
The instructions are missing that important information. 

[Starship Krupa]

I've been experiencing regular crashes specifically when using A|A|S instruments.

What happens is that I start playback and as soon as the A|A|S synth tries to produce sound, Sonar crashes.

This occurs on two very different systems, my main DAW and my Dell laptop, so I have a hard time believing that it's specific to me.

However, I've submitted the crash dumps and test projects to both Cakewalk and A|A|S, and apparently they can't reproduce the crash.

So for now, my favorite DAW and favorite virtual instruments don't get along.

[pwalpwal]

23 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

I've been experiencing regular crashes specifically when using A|A|S instruments.

What happens is that I start playback and as soon as the A|A|S synth tries to produce sound, Sonar crashes.

This occurs on two very different systems, my main DAW and my Dell laptop, so I have a hard time believing that it's specific to me.

However, I've submitted the crash dumps and test projects to both Cakewalk and A|A|S, and apparently they can't reproduce the crash.

So for now, my favorite DAW and favorite virtual instruments don't get along.

does it happen in other hosts with the same synths?

[Starship Krupa]

4 minutes ago, pwalpwal said:

does it happen in other hosts with the same synths?

No. For instance the same projects run fine in Cakewalk by BandLab.

It's always the same, divide by zero.

Edited February 5 by Starship Krupa

[pwalpwal]

1 minute ago, Starship Krupa said:

No. For instance the same projects run fine in Cakewalk by BandLab.

useful info for the devs

[Starship Krupa]

1 minute ago, pwalpwal said:

useful info for the devs

Information has been submitted in great detail, including the fact that the same projects work fine in CbB.

I usedta be a pro software QA engineer, and believe me, I've thrown everything I have at this, trying to inform both companies.

It's especially odd because Cakewalk and A|A|S were once bundle buddies. And Strum Session is one of the instruments that will trigger it.

[OutrageProductions]

4 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

No. For instance the same projects run fine in Cakewalk by BandLab.

It's always the same, divide by zero.

I have had "divide by zero" errors in the crash dump a few times. One cause was me outrunning Scaler 2 with keystrokes, and the other (more often) was from a too small block size in the buffer setting of my Audio I/O driver control panel. Granted, I'm occasionally using a device that has a driver from Win Vista days that still works, but requires a minimum block size of 512 or it crashes CbB. (but not Nuendo, Cubase, or PT, interestingly!)

[Starship Krupa]

9 minutes ago, OutrageProductions said:

One cause was me outrunning Scaler 2 with keystrokes

From my "white box" perspective, and longtime experience with A|A|S synths, I strongly suspect that it's something to do with Sonar sending data to the plug-in, and the plug-in not outputting data fast enough when Sonar expects it to be there. Or the plug-in not being in a state that Sonar expects it to be. Due to processing being diverted to drawing the UI or something.

There's a race condition happening or something. Given that much has been done recently to speed up performance, specifically as regards plug-in performance, I have to suspect that it's down to that. Something that used to have enough time to happen now doesn't have enough time to happen.

I recently crashed Sonar by scrolling through Vital's preset list too quickly, while the project was playing. Not a divide by zero error, but it crashed Sonar with a minidump. So a lot of UI drawing going on in the plug-in, and boom, down she goes.

The developers so far can't get my submitted projects to crash on them, and it's very difficult to fix a problem that won't manifest its symptoms. Laypeople, I think, sometimes expect that programmers can just open their code and figure out what's going wrong by reading it, guided by the user's description of the error.

While that's not impossible to do, it's very unlikely to happen. Especially when it's not being reported by hordes of users.

But it can't be just me, it happens on two very different systems.

[ccondon23]

1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said:

The developers so far can't get my submitted projects to crash on them, and it's very difficult to fix a problem that won't manifest its symptoms. Laypeople, I think, sometimes expect that programmers can just open their code and figure out what's going wrong by reading it, guided by the user's description of the error.

While that's not impossible to do, it's very unlikely to happen. Especially when it's not being reported by hordes of users.

I worked in software tech support for much of my career, so I know that problems like the one I'm seeing a really tough to hunt down -- basically the crashing process/module/whatever is the victim and it's really difficult to figure out what other process/module/whatever somehow corrupted the victim, especially when the problem is not reproducible.  I've offered to run a special build, but they haven't taken me up on that, likely because there's not enough data to determine where to put any debug code -- and whatever debug is needed would likely be in nt.dll or some other application that Cakewalk doesn't have the source code for. 

 

It's very frustrating, but I understand why it's taking a long time (and, in fact, they may never be able to resolve it).  That's why I've been calm and polite in my interactions with them, rather than yelling, "Why haven't you fixed this yet?!"  🙂

[Talionlab]

I have encountered the same problem. I think there must be something wrong with AAS. It seems that they rarely maintain and update their products, so I almost dare not use this plug-in now. Sorry, my English is poor.

[Starship Krupa]

2 minutes ago, Talionlab said:

I have encountered the same problem. I think there must be something wrong with AAS. It seems that they rarely maintain and update their products, so I almost dare not use this plug-in now. Sorry, my English is poor.

Thank you for replying to this. The more information we give the companies the better their chances to fix it.

Preguntas:

Do you have projects where this happens every time?

When the crash occurs, do you get the following dialog?

Have you tried contacting A|A|S' support and Cakewalk support through official channels? The more people who report a problem, the greater the chance that developers will use resources to fix it. One person reporting it is usually seen as a fluke, two people reporting it starts to form a pattern, and if we can get three reporting it, then it's way more likely that they will put attention to it.

If you see the above dialog when it crashes, it would be of great help if you were to attach the .dmp file shown in the dialog to a reply in this topic or to me in a private message.

If you have a project that crashes every time, or most of the time, it would also be of great help to send it (or a simplified version) to the developers (both A|A|S and Cakewalk) as well.

If you would rather contact me directly to forward the files, I'd be happy to. I've been in contact with the development staff at Cakewalk and at A|A|S and know where to send them directly.

I like to refer to plug-in problems as "compatibility issues" between the plug-in and host rather than try to figure out whom to blame. In the end, the products should work well together. Cakewalk SONAR Platinum once bundled 3 different A|A|S instruments, and my projects don't crash Cakewalk by BandLab, so this issue seems to be something new to Sonar. If Sonar has introduced an issue in its new code or the new code has exposed an issue with A|A|S' ( very popular) instruments (or both or neither), it's in both companies' interests to fix the problem.

For my part, A|A|S' synths are without question my favorites, I've spent more on them than all of my other virtual instruments combined. If this problem persists, I'll be very sad.

[Talionlab]

Yes！ it's just that I use Strum GS-2，The same problem exists.

[ccondon23]

This morning I was poking around Event Viewer and noticed that there was another app that crashed in nt.dll, CodeMeter.  Apparently, CodeMeter was installed as part of the licensing for the free version of AutoTune that I had installed.  While looking into AutoTune and what else might have been installed, I found the following link: http://www.antaresaudiotechnologies. com/&token=88461c5a (don't click this!),  which my ISP blocked as a suspicious site.  This is NOT the site of Antares, makers of AutoTune, that site is antarestech.com. 

Since I don't use AutoTune anyway (I use Melodyne for pitch correction) I uninstalled it along with the CodeMeter stuff that was left behind after I uninstalled AutoTune.

 

Since then, no additional crashes.  I'm not 100% sure that the issue is resolved because it often took a while before a crash occurred,  but I'm hopeful - I did a fair bit of editing in the 'broken' project and it usually would have crashed by now -- not always, but fingers crossed.

[ccondon23]

Sigh...nope, didn't fix it.

Edited the file for hours without issue. Edited other files without issue. Shut down Sonar and reopened the problem project, crashed with seconds.  Tried again, crashed again within seconds without my having done anything other than opening it. 

 

[Sock Monkey]

The last crasher was the first time I had to totally bypass all effects to open it. The others were always the same few pro channel ones. 

I made note of the plugins and instruments during safe mode opening and  once opened I “save as “ and rename it. 
It wasn’t a big deal for me to add all the instruments and effects as they mostly are ones I always use and they also have pre sets. 
But it’s odd that replacement with exact same plug ins and project ran smoothly all day.  
I have safe copies stored in dozens of locations as is normal for any of my older projects. 

For me rebuilding is not a big deal but this would be next to impossible for people who create monsters with zillion different plugins. 

It drives home the need to not put all your eggs into one basket. 
And I still think it’s a reason many gave up and left. 
Sonar is still at the top of my list of Daw’s but I’m feeling more and more like new projects should be started elsewhere for future safety reasons.