Forcing Cakewalk to release drivers after a crash

[Mánibranðr Studios]

Yeah this problem is still a thing, when Cakewalk crashes unexpectedly, which can happen sometimes, it hijacks any Audio or MIDI drivers it uses, like the Arturia Keylab Drivers and the ASIO drivers of my Roland SD-50 making them unavailable to be used in ASIO mode, or in subsequent launches of Cakewalk until a system restart. It also stays a zombie process and cannot be force-terminated from the task manager until I go to the resource monitor and suspend the zombie Cakewalk proccess. This is unacceptable, there should be a way to force Cakewalk to release those drivers upon temination so they can be continued to be used without needing a reboot.

This is important, because rebooting is the ultimate interrupt to a workflow, and sometimes when you get into project files that for one reason or another becomes unstable, that can happen a lot.

[Promidi]

10 hours ago, Freyja Grimaude-Valens said:

Yeah this problem is still a thing, when Cakewalk crashes unexpectedly, which can happen sometimes, it hijacks any Audio or MIDI drivers it uses, like the Arturia Keylab Drivers and the ASIO drivers of my Roland SD-50 making them unavailable to be used in ASIO mode, or in subsequent launches of Cakewalk until a system restart. It also stays a zombie process and cannot be force-terminated from the task manager until I go to the resource monitor and suspend the zombie Cakewalk proccess. This is unacceptable, there should be a way to force Cakewalk to release those drivers upon temination so they can be continued to be used without needing a reboot.

This is important, because rebooting is the ultimate interrupt to a workflow, and sometimes when you get into project files that for one reason or another becomes unstable, that can happen a lot.

Start + Run

taskkill /IM Cakewalk.exe /F
 

[Mánibranðr Studios]

1 hour ago, Promidi said:

Start + Run

taskkill /IM Cakewalk.exe /F
 

I have tried that before, and it didn't work. While it did eventually kill Cakewalk, the ASIO drivers are still occupied and will not be available after a relaunch.

[Promidi]

8 minutes ago, Freyja Grimaude-Valens said:

I have tried that before, and it didn't work. While it did eventually kill Cakewalk, the ASIO drivers are still occupied and will not be available after a relaunch.

That's really strange

Have you logged a support ticket?

https://help.cakewalk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360000025633

[abacab]

I have had this happen before, and then when I power  cycled my audio interface off/on, the driver was released.

This leads me to believe that sometimes when Cakewalk has a sudden crash, that drivers somehow get left in a state requiring cleanup that didn't happen.

[chuckebaby]

I have had this happen in the past. it is very frustrating. What I found a shortcut to reboot is...

- Instead of reboot which can require up to 60 seconds.

- Use the Windows Log off function.

- This does not reboot but logs off any user and their process running in TM.

 

On a side note, I haven't had this problem in over 5 years. For me anyway, I traced it down to 2 possible likely suspects.

-AMD chip set. (FYI- Your Roland SD-50 system requirements= Intel chipset is recommended)

- A device with a corrupt, unstable driver.

- A possible 3rd suspect was a plug and play device (M Audio oxygen 49). I was running this midi keyboard via USB, along with an Audio interface/control surface, running audio+midi USB.

9 hours ago, abacab said:

I have had this happen before, and then when I power  cycled my audio interface off/on, the driver was released.

This did work in my situation but the next time I started cakewalk, my device was missing "no audio device detected". I would have to restart Cakewalk again and again, waiting for my device to be recognized.

[Noel Borthwick]

On 12/10/2019 at 3:36 AM, Freyja Grimaude-Valens said:

Yeah this problem is still a thing, when Cakewalk crashes unexpectedly, which can happen sometimes, it hijacks any Audio or MIDI drivers it uses, like the Arturia Keylab Drivers and the ASIO drivers of my Roland SD-50 making them unavailable to be used in ASIO mode, or in subsequent launches of Cakewalk until a system restart. It also stays a zombie process and cannot be force-terminated from the task manager until I go to the resource monitor and suspend the zombie Cakewalk proccess. This is unacceptable, there should be a way to force Cakewalk to release those drivers upon temination so they can be continued to be used without needing a reboot.

This is important, because rebooting is the ultimate interrupt to a workflow, and sometimes when you get into project files that for one reason or another becomes unstable, that can happen a lot.

This isn't a problem with Cakewalk. Its poorly written drivers that don't flush their state on abnormal termination. Cakewalk already attempts to shut down drivers whenever an exception is detected. Not all crashes can be caught by the app so this is something that has to be handled by drivers themselves. Most well behaved drivers can survive the program being force closed from Task Manager as well.