PC Fan Foretells Crash

[Jim Stamper]

I have a Windows 11 Intel NUC11 Enthusiast mini-PC, which is built kind of like a laptop. A great little powerhouse. Normally very quiet.

The fan almost never runs. But just about every time I hear it blowing, it means Sonar is locked up / crashed. It won't accept any keystrokes.

When I use Windows to close the Sonar session, the fan stops running immediately, all is quiet again. 

The PC itself is not locked up. Everything else continues running as normal.

It's become Pavlovian for me. I hear the fan running, I know Sonar crashed 🐶

I haven't posted it before, but this has been happening for a long time, multiple releases of Sonar, both CbB free and now  paid Sonar subscription.

Sonar freezes randomly, it's never a specific amount of time being open, or time of the day, or any specific operation. I have Sonar open almost constantly every day, and sometimes I leave it open all night so I can continue a project the next day without interruption. I would guess it freezes about once each month.

I'm posting it now in case others have noticed this, and to maybe give the Bakers another clue about Sonar freezes.

Edited September 19 by Jim Stamper
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[timboalogo]

Hi Jim,

I can hear my fans take off when I'm doing something very CPU intensive, but my system doesn't freeze.

The guys will need you to supply your PC specs (RAM, CPU, etc), and will ask what kind of project you have open (with a zillion vsts, etc) when you hear the fan, and to have a look at Task Manager to see what's going on with your system, like a virus scanner.

So a little more detail please before the experts chime in.

Timbo

[Jim Stamper]

1 hour ago, timboalogo said:

Hi Jim,

I can hear my fans take off when I'm doing something very CPU intensive, but my system doesn't freeze.

The guys will need you to supply your PC specs (RAM, CPU, etc), and will ask what kind of project you have open (with a zillion vsts, etc) when you hear the fan, and to have a look at Task Manager to see what's going on with your system, like a virus scanner.

So a little more detail please before the experts chime in.

Timbo

Thanks Timbo,

Yes, fans take off when the system gets warm, but in my space it rarely gets that warm. It seems that Sonar freezing triggers the PC to either run hot with some frozen activity, or it somehow triggers the fan to run "unprovoked". The fan almost never runs except for a Sonar freeze. And the fan stops at the same instant I tell Windows to close Sonar, completely silent immediately.

I'm not going to invest much time in troubleshooting this. I post issues in case someone already has a solution, or if it provides clues to the Cakewalk experts for problems they may know about.  

Processor: 11th Generation Intel Core i7-1165G7 (4 Cores, 8 Threads, up to 4.7 GHz Turbo) 

RAM: 64GB

4 TB Storage: (2) 2TB internal SSD drives

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 (6GB GDDR6) with integrated Intel Iris Xe Graphics 

Projects: It happens with all sorts of projects

Virus Scanner: Windows 11 MS Defender runs all the time

 

Edited September 19 by Jim Stamper
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[Promidi]

What measured temperature does your CPU get to when Sonar has locked up / crashed?

I have had mine (very briefly) up to 100°C and it does not crash. (though I do not like doing that very often)

The brief time at 100°C is sometimes when I am using RX11’s Music Rebalance tool. 

Sonar sometimes gets to around 85°C to 90°C when playing a heavy project - fans nearly going into warp - . However, Sonar has never locked up or crashed even when at high warp.

Something else is probably going on with your PC.

[jayeyehaich64]

If you haven't already you should exclude Sonar and all the stuff you use for your music from MS Defender seeing how you have it running all the time. Just so it's not constantly scanning the stuff you are using during your sessions. Might save you a little CPU and a ℃/℉ or 2 😁, likely won't cure your ill's, but something you should do in the name of giving your DAW as much available power as you can. Best of luck.

[Jim Stamper]

18 hours ago, Promidi said:

What measured temperature does your CPU get to when Sonar has locked up / crashed?

I have had mine (very briefly) up to 100°C and it does not crash. (though I do not like doing that very often)

The brief time at 100°C is sometimes when I am using RX11’s Music Rebalance tool. 

Sonar sometimes gets to around 85°C to 90°C when playing a heavy project - fans nearly going into warp - . However, Sonar has never locked up or crashed even when at high warp.

Something else is probably going on with your PC.

My PC normally runs around 47C with Sonar, and the fan is not running. For my PC, the fan shouldn't kick on until at least 65C, and likely wouldn't be audible until well above that temp.

I don't believe the PC gets hot and then crashes Sonar. I believe Sonar crashes and triggers the fan to run until the moment that I kill the Sonar session, then the fan is completely quiet immediately. If the PC was truly hot, the fan should reduce speed gradually.

The next time it happens I will have to look at Task Manager to see if the CPU is at 100%, which may "falsely" trigger the fan.

My original post was to see if anyone else had the same symptoms.

Thanks

Edited September 20 by Jim Stamper
accuracy

[Jim Stamper]

17 hours ago, jayeyehaich64 said:

If you haven't already you should exclude Sonar and all the stuff you use for your music from MS Defender seeing how you have it running all the time. Just so it's not constantly scanning the stuff you are using during your sessions. Might save you a little CPU and a ℃/℉ or 2 😁, likely won't cure your ill's, but something you should do in the name of giving your DAW as much available power as you can. Best of luck.

You're right it's best practice to exclude Sonar and all the stuff from MS Defender (does that mean every single plug-in 😱?). Or to stop Defender while working in Sonar.

But for me, in many years of using DAWs and MS antivirus since the earliest versions of Windows and all, I don't recall it's ever caused a problem. Hard to say why ... Maybe because I've always tried to have high performing PCs, or maybe because my projects don't need that much horsepower, or maybe MS Defender isn't that intrusive.

Thanks

Edited September 20 by Jim Stamper
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[Promidi]

51 minutes ago, Jim Stamper said:

You're right it's best practice to exclude Sonar and all the stuff from MS Defender (does that mean every single plug-in 😱?). Or to stop Defender while working in Sonar.

Yes, it means exclude Sonar and all the stuff from MS Defender.  Stopping Defender (and remembering to) while working in Sonar would be a bit of a pain.

Because you exclude entire folders, excluding all of your plugins is simply a matter of excluding the entire folder where your plugins are stored (along with all other Sonar related folders).

I have Malwarebytes premium and have done the same with that. 

[Glenn Stanton]

if you add exceptions for Sonar (or Next) and any other standalone processes (like Kontakt for example which i use in standalone mode a lot), then you should be good. the processes will pull in DLL (FX, VI) which will also be excluded from live process AV activities. you don't really need to exclude the FX paths. i would recommend that your project and content paths are excluded though, as content and project files will be scanned .

i have all my project files (non-executable) and content (also non-executable) on a wholly separate drive and folders, so a single entry for each suffices.

my plugins and other possibly executable files are in program files directory and are scanned when installing or updating.  executable code is the risk... 

using W11 defender. i excluded CW project files and WAV, and MP3 files as well. Melodyne temp folder is excluded, and picture cache as well. so beside my CAD and photo/video stuff, my DAW and related process exclusions are probably a few dozen. including ProTools, Audacity and Luna, RX, Izotope, Acon, and standalone audio apps like Kontakt, Synth V, Musescore, EZ series, etc. 

[Jim Stamper]

Thanks to all, it's interesting to learn how you set up your antivirus exclusions. I agree it's best practice. And this will be useful if I ever suspect that MS Defender is causing me problems wrt to Sonar.  MS Defender is supposedly designed to only run when the system is idle ... defined as no keyboard / mouse activity for 4 minutes plus other criteria for activity such as CPU, RAM, Disk.  It may check a new project when you first open it, but if so,  it isn't noticeable to me. 

[reginaldStjohn]

The only way that Sonar could cause your fan to turn on is if it was using a lot of CPU and thus the CPU temperature was rising causing the fan to turn on to try to keep the temperature under control. Fans on the PC are controlled by BIOS and run according to load and temperature inputs.

It is possible that Sonar is getting in a tight loop or processing that indicates to the BIOS that it needs to turn on the fan(s). You should see a coresponding spike in CPU activity in the task manager, even if it is one core getting pegged at 100 percent.

[Jim Stamper]

21 hours ago, reginaldStjohn said:

The only way that Sonar could cause your fan to turn on is if it was using a lot of CPU and thus the CPU temperature was rising causing the fan to turn on to try to keep the temperature under control. Fans on the PC are controlled by BIOS and run according to load and temperature inputs.

It is possible that Sonar is getting in a tight loop or processing that indicates to the BIOS that it needs to turn on the fan(s). You should see a coresponding spike in CPU activity in the task manager, even if it is one core getting pegged at 100 percent.

I agree. The next time it happens I'll try to check the CPU and other resources in Task Manager 

[Base 57]

Have you sent a Crash Dump to the Bakers? The fan is just a symptom. Determining the cause of the crash should be the priority.

[Starship Krupa]

On 9/21/2025 at 10:51 AM, Jim Stamper said:

MS Defender is supposedly designed to only run when the system is idle ... defined as no keyboard / mouse activity for 4 minutes plus other criteria for activity such as CPU, RAM, Disk.  It may check a new project when you first open it, but if so,  it isn't noticeable to me.

By default, Defender scans every file that is read from or written to the drive in real time. That is the reason to make exclusions.

I only found this out because I was trying to troubleshoot a Cakewalk issue. I was playing back a project with about a dozen audio tracks and noticed that the the Defender process was accessing the files each time I hit Play.

I run Windows Pro, so just turn off realtime scanning entirely, but for people who run Windows Home and/or who do want to have the antivirus scanning every file they read or write, it's a good idea to exclude the Cakewalk Projects folder and VST2 and VST3 and any sample folders from realtime scanning.

[Jim Stamper]

19 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I only found this out because I was trying to troubleshoot a Cakewalk issue. I was playing back a project with about a dozen audio tracks and noticed that the the Defender process was accessing the files each time I hit Play.

Whatever it's doing, I don't believe Defender is causing any issues for me, but can you provide more detail on how to see what its doing?

So you mean Defender is scanning the .wav file for each track every time you play the track? How could I see that happening, can you see it in Task Manager (and where in Task Manager?). How would I know it's scanning each .wav file? 

Thanks

[Starship Krupa]

2 hours ago, Jim Stamper said:

can you provide more detail on how to see what its doing?

Open Task Manager and click on the Performance tab.

Down at the bottom of that pane, you'll see a button "Open Resource Monitor."

Resource Monitor lets you monitor what processes are using various resources, and things such as file access. Click on the Disk tab, and in there you can see whether there's a lot of disk activity, and if you choose, select one or more processes to specifically monitor.

If you're running Sonar, select sonar.exe and then observe what files Sonar reads and writes.

I can't remember the name of the process for Defender, but when I discovered this, I had selected the Defender process in the Disk tab, and could see it chugging away every time I hit Play in Cakewalk.

I used the same tool to discover that however many takes you have in your project, Cakewalk/Sonar streams all of them on playback, regardless of mute status of the clip or take lane. If, like me, often choose to keep your unused takes around for possible future use, the way to minimize the impact is to move your unused takes to another track and then Archive the target track. Audio in Archived tracks isn't streamed on playback.

This is the reason I made a feature request years ago to implement Archiving at the take lane level.

[Jim Stamper]

On 9/25/2025 at 2:39 PM, Starship Krupa said:

Open Task Manager and click on the Performance tab.

Down at the bottom of that pane, you'll see a button "Open Resource Monitor."

Resource Monitor lets you monitor what processes are using various resources, and things such as file access. Click on the Disk tab, and in there you can see whether there's a lot of disk activity, and if you choose, select one or more processes to specifically monitor.

If you're running Sonar, select sonar.exe and then observe what files Sonar reads and writes.

I can't remember the name of the process for Defender, but when I discovered this, I had selected the Defender process in the Disk tab, and could see it chugging away every time I hit Play in Cakewalk.

I used the same tool to discover that however many takes you have in your project, Cakewalk/Sonar streams all of them on playback, regardless of mute status of the clip or take lane. If, like me, often choose to keep your unused takes around for possible future use, the way to minimize the impact is to move your unused takes to another track and then Archive the target track. Audio in Archived tracks isn't streamed on playback.

This is the reason I made a feature request years ago to implement Archiving at the take lane level.

Thanks for the details. I tried this but didn't have the same results. I see heavy activity from Defender while Sonar is opening a project, it gradually winds down as the project gradually opens all plug-ins ... this might be 20 - 30 seconds beyond when Sonar says the project is "open". Once fully open, I play the project, and Defender has no activity in Disk resources, and only a tiny amount of CPU resources - not chugging but sitting still in background. I only did a quick test with one project. 

There may be some difference in our computers, OS versions, Defender versions, or specific Defender and Windows settings. 

[Starship Krupa]

15 hours ago, Jim Stamper said:

There may be some difference in our computers, OS versions, Defender versions, or specific Defender and Windows settings.

There are likely differences. I'm running Windows 10 Pro and I've tweaked the heck out of it.

One of the biggies is that Defender realtime scanning is disabled entirely. Defender scans during idle periods. If I have any doubt at all about a downloaded file, I scan it manually.

You might see less Defender activity at project load time if you exclude C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3 and your VST2 folder from realtime scanning. On systems that I set up or tune for other people, I exclude plug-in folders as well as the entire Cakewalk Projects folder.

When setting Defender exclusions, I noticed that Celemony apparently adds exclusions for the Melodyne separations folder and files. I've made the suggestion to the Cakewalk devs that the Sonar installer could do this as well, but maybe the fact that the user can choose the location of their Cakewalk Projects folder makes that problematic.

[Wookiee]

@Jim Stamper how many disks do you have?

[Jim Stamper]

1 hour ago, Wookiee said:

@Jim Stamper how many disks do you have?

4 TB Storage: (2) 2TB internal SSD drives