Cakewalk Sonar crashing repeatedly for months now

[David Baay]

4 hours ago, ccondon23 said:

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. 

I suggest you run MemTest86 and see if any errors are found. In case you're wondering about the different versions available in different places - as I was - check out this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MemTest86

[Starship Krupa]

8 hours ago, ccondon23 said:

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.

I got a free license for Antares' vocal ensemble plug-in, and once I saw what Codemeeter was doing (it ran its own service, complete with a tray icon), I uninstalled it. I actually liked what the plug-in could do, but I already have Quadravox and had no desire to have this licensing server running at all times just so I could use this one plug-in very infrequently.

Recently I got email from Antares announcing that they were switching to iLok. PACE also installs a service, but since I have a couple dozen iLok'd plug-ins, I don't mind. So I downloaded their latest installer and ran it and lo and behold, while they had switched to iLok, the installer still  installed the Codemeeter crap.

So I tried getting rid of Codemeeter manually, deleting its files and disabling its service, and it didn't affect the Antares plug-in.

[Rick Daugherty]

I'm getting ALL KINDS of crashes lately.    And Cakewalk keeps telling me to do a 'clean uninstall' down to the registry/manually.  Not helping.

I got a "HEAP CORRUPTION" crash today.   

I'll save my work religiously for an hour, only to find out, NONE of my last 'saves' were actually saving at all, and ALLLLL of that last hour's worth of work

was NOT saved...gone!      NEVER had so many problems with Cakewalk/Sonar ever...been using it for 30 years.    Lots of 'freezes/white screens' etc.

Very frustrating.  And almost every time I open up Sonar, it tells me "Upgrade Available!" but I have the latest version.    Sucks.

[AB9]

Do you have the latest version that was issued yesterday. 2025.02 Update 1 (build 31.02.0.074) 

The reason I am asking is that it is still 2025.02, but it is an update to it.

 

[David Baay]

What does the dump .txt file way the crash is ocurring? 

2 hours ago, Rick Daugherty said:

I got a "HEAP CORRUPTION" crash today.   

Have you cranked up the Error Handling Severity at some point? I don't think you would normally see this error reported (bold part is my doing):

Enhanced error detection is now integrated into the DAW. This feature is opt-in for now and may be enabled by adding the ExceptionHandlingSeverity value to the Cakewalk.ini initialization file. We appreciate users helping make Cakewalk better by reporting crashes to us as well as plug-in vendors when necessary. To control the error detection sensitivity, you can now add a new ExceptionHandlingSeverity value in Preferences > File - Initialization File. Valid values for this setting are:

1 - Unhandled errors are caught  (default)

3 - All access violations are detected and unhandled exceptions are caught

5 - Unhandled errors and heap corruption is detected

7 - Unhandled errors, all access violations and heap corruption errors are caught (this is the strictest error detection mode) 

[Craig Reeves]

It's been really bad with regard to the crashes. Just about any and everything will make this DAW crash, particular copying and pasting large amounts of clips. It is a productivity killer. Significantly less table than Cakewalk by Bandlab. I have no idea what they did to this but these recent updates have made this DAW so much less stable. Even the simplest things will cause the DAW to crash. I literally am at a standstill in a project because I cannot copy and paste anything without it crashing. It is not justifiable in my view that a DAW so much more unstable than its competition should be priced the same or more than its competition. It's just broken. Simple and plain. Held to gether by duct-tape and bubble-gum. Bandlab just isn't putting enough money into the development to give us a DAW that works. The devs they have I'm sure are doing the best they can so it's not their fault.

Check this video out. This is a simple copy and paste and Cakewalk crashes EVERY TIME I try to perform this simple task. This is problematic.
 

And the worst thing is that it's difficult to report bugs because the crashes are random and unpredictable. A lot of the times moving clips, copying, and pasting clips is something Cakewalk has trouble with. They seriously need to tighten up the code in that area but the thing is, it doesn't happen all the time. Again it's fussy and unpredictable so you just have to be saving all the time. This is not the case in any other DAW but Cakewalk sadly. It's just way, way behind. Again, I blame Bandlab for just not putting enough money into it. It's possible it's just a lot of old code.

I believe Cakewalk will eventually face the same fate as Finale. I've been using Cakewalk for over 25 years so I say all of this with great sadness.

Edited Saturday at 07:40 PM by Craig Reeves

[Colin Nicholls]

Man, that is frustrating! I can see why you'd want to let of some steam; I'd do the same. Probably I'd use more swear words.

But here's the thing: Many, many people with many, many different configurations are not experiencing this. For them, Sonar is working fine and in fact, better than CbB ever did.

It HAS to be something about your hardware, or your software configuration. Installed any new plugins lately? Any other applications? Trying out other DAWs?

What if you create a new empty project in Sonar. No plugs, just raw audio. How does cut-n-paste behave? Add another track or two. Then add virtual instruments. At what point does the problem start to appear?

What are your hardware specs? What Audio interface? Driver model? buffer size?

Take your project in the video, and save it somewhere else, and start pulling it apart until you isolate the problem. Does the crash happen when you disable the audio engine? What if you change audio from your current I/O interface to, say, Windows internal sound card (if possible). Change driver types.

Have you run generic hardware tests on your machine? RAM test? could be a damaged memory chip.

All this testing is a pain in the butt, I know. Maybe it would be easier to convert all your projects to a different DAW. God knows it's tempting, I've been there.

 

 

[Max Arwood]

What plugins do you have on the track you are pasting to?