Crash & burn

What were you doing when it crashed?

I'm on Vista x64 / Sonar x64. My main cause for instability has been Rapture 64. I had a project with about 6 Dim Pro instannces and 3 Rapture instances that crashed on me on every session. Never had problems before with 8 until I bought the full version of Rapture. Reinstalled everything from scratch to make sure everything fine - up to latest 1.2.1 Rapture patch - to no avail. Consistent crashdumps with Rapture.dll every time the culprit.

I have replaced one of my Rapture tracks with a Native instrument electric piano patch, and froze another rapture track into audio. That has already made my crash rate much lower - however it still happens. I'm going to keep on experimenting with freezing the remaining Rapture tracks to see how it behaves, but at least for me, it seems Rapture 64 bit (full version) is giving me most of my headaches. When it crashes, most of the time my auto-save files are truncated, rendering them useless for recovery of your work - I've learned to save very often over the last few weeks. I'm going to avoid Rapture in my upcoming projects until a future update comes out - too bad 'cause I really like that synth.

Don't know if you are using Rapture - just wanted to share my experience.

Cheers,
~G

I've been working on my latest project for more then a week now

A hard lesson on why you need to save a back up copy after every single session you do in sonar. In this day and age, no one should be losing files. Just back up onto an external hard drive or CD/DVD
Cj

Can you set up an auto save to have it save it to a rewritable CD????

No, and you dont want a machine deciding when to back-up your projects. Im not talking about saves anyway. Back-ups!! . All you do is when your done for the day or session, you plug a usb hard drive or insert a cd or dvd and do a save as. It takes less than a minute.
You should really have 3 copies of every project.
2 copies on 2 different hard drives kept at home and one copy on a hard drive or on cd's or dvds kept at work in case of fire or theft.

Also what are the most possible courses of crashes with Sonar8?

Impossible to answer. But improper hardware is a main cause

I've been able to rely on auto save up until now

Auto save is NOT backing up. You've been able to rely on not backing up, because you never lost anything. That's like me saying i got away with robbing a bank until i got caught...Auto save wont help with corrupted project files. Just back up. auto save is not backing up. Its 2 different things completely.

I cannot for the likes of me find the auto save files, I have even done an entire deep file scan of my computer to find that file but nothing.

You are saying autosave files (plural). That would indicate that you lost not just the latest file, but files from other projects as well. Are you using versioning? While you might easily corrupt the current file if a write was in progress when the program stopped, it is likely that you would still have an entry in the index, and an unreadable file that you could still find. To lose several files (only one of which presumably was open) from a program crash is really bizarre. How are you searching for your autosave files?

Before I would try any automatic error recovery (chkdsk etc.) I would do a very diligent manual search for the files NOT USING SONAR. The scenario described makes it much more likely that Sonar has lost track of where the files should be, than that the files themselves were actually lost/destroyed/corrupted. Ideally you should not write anything to the disk until you have exhausted all recovery possibilities. Chkdsk can recover lost files if the problem is a corrupted index, but it is also capable of doing some damage on its own during repair operations. In no event should you use the same name as the lost project for a new project, or revert to a previous version of the same project using the same name, as this increases the chance that the lost files will be overwritten as well as making finding them more difficult. When it is time to give up all hope of recovering the files, chkdsk is worth a try.

What's Firebird?

Sounds like the fence is down at the Mozilla project.

The Firefox has mated with the Thunderbird.

Have you done all the required Vista Tweaks for your machine. See link below:

http://www.audioforums.com/windows-vista-optimization.php

Some plug ins can cause problems. I have found a great little plugin that emulates a Roland Space echo rather well on the VST Planet site. But it crashes Sonar if you attempt to use it on a stereo track or buss. Works OK in mono. So its not a bad plugin as such just a situation which works one way but not another.
Have you got any cracks on your system.? They can cause all sorts of grief too.

Are you sure?

ORIGINAL: Jpok1000

Well all very helpful possibility's there & I shall keep it all in mind. However I will definitely be saving my work regularly to RW disc from now on. I ran a disc error check on my HDD but nothing to worry about there. At the end of the day I think it was just one of them things that happens every now & again. PS FireBird is virtual synth from a company called Tone2. It's a very handy virtual instrument to have.

Are you sure Firebird is good plugin? Are you sure it isn't crashing your projects? Are you sure it isn't a virus in disguise? Are you sure you're in contact with them? Have you contacted them?

ORIGINAL: Jpok1000

ORIGINAL: Crg

Are you sure?

I'm I sure what???