Some Rapture presets stop audio engine in Sonar 6

some of the presets from the Expansion paks, e.g.RGC PhD Drops.prg, the audio engine stops, accompanied by some noise.

I'm not seeing this here (don't you just love getting that reply?). Although this may also sound like a standard brush-off reply, I have a reason for this request. Please reply with your driver type, latency setting and the tempo that your project is set at. Also, any other .prog examples that you've run across. I want to align my system with your settings, and see if that plays a role.

Did you happen to notice if Rapture's meters in the Master section maxed out when this happened? Did you hear a buildup of distorted sound, followed by a slight *pop* when the audio engine kicked out? On a rare occasion, I've seen something similar with my own presets, and I'm wondering if there's a connection here.

Is this some kind of general virtual instrument quirk?

My gut feeling, Mike, is that it's some kind of 'alignment of the planets' among the billions of possible combinations. Tons of hosts treat tempo with slight variations, and feature sets have huge ranges. Rapture can be a victim of its own depth (personally, I prefer it that way). For example, you throw eight octaves of pitch sweep in an envelope, then add a handful more with VelTrack. You don't even have to touch additive LFOs and StepGens to realize that you're way past any reasonable boundaries. Something's bound to break. The same goes for filters.

With a shipping preset, that's been 'field-tested' on a number of systems; before and after release. That leads me to believe that system conditions line up to produce an unexpected result, on just a few (or many more) systems. It may be a combination that wasn't anticipated beforehand. I've driven myself crazy over things like that, only to find out that they disappear when I changed latency or base tempo.

Nine times out of ten, if I reported it through the proper channels with a Cakewalk synth, the problem was addressed in the next update. The key is to document a repeatable recipe (not always the easiest road). Then those on the receiving end of the request can reconstruct it to address the problem.

I will get back to you on the settings, however regarding the sound, there was a pop that sounded kind of distorted, but it was very short, just prior to the audio engine stopping.