I believe I have found the cause for the type of v-vocal crashes I've experieinced, although I may not be able to explain it as well as those here with more technical know-how. I did quite a lot of different tests, which were very time-consuming since after each crash I have to power my whole system down and bring it back up. Here is what I have found -
As I said above, I am able to create a NEW project, insert an audio track, and IMPORT a wav file of vocals (from the same project folder as those that cause confirmed crashes) , and proceed to open v-vocal and process it just fine. I have repeated this several times using multiple different projects done previously with MC5. I brought them into Sonar and saved them and am not crashing at all.
If however, I try to open one of several PROJECTS done in MC5, it brings it up just fine. I go to the vocal track and try to add v-vocal effect and it opens fine, I select a setting, and at THAT moment, the cursor is a spinning hourglass and a couple seconds later I'm looking at a total "unexpected error and application must close" popup. It may not be blue screen but it's the kiss of death.
Upon further checking though, this is not the case for EVERY MC5 project I try to open. In fact, my first experience with the newly-installed sonar 8.5.2 was that I pulled up an MC5 project, reworked every single vocal track (6 in all) by deleting its former FX, and used v-vocal FX, did a remix and saved it - then exported to a wav and an MP3 just fine. Two subsequent projects crashed big-time. I believe those other projects were ones in which I had done some kind of additional processing on the vocal and project files overall.
For one, I had used Melodyne Uno on the vocal tracks, which required me to convert the individual wav from 24-bit to 16-bit. When brought back into MC5, I ended up doing further processing on those songs which I then bounced to new audio tracks - yielding 32-bit renders. I believe that it has to do with this track-specific rendering at different formats (bit depth) that MAY be the cause of the crashes using Sonar v-vocal plug-in.
I will leave this up to the CW folks to look into - knowing it, means I should be able to work around it. My plan of attack is to create a new project in Sonar, and import each track in manually until I have a stable project - or, I can leave it alone altogether and try to work it up as best I can just in MC5 and forget about it. Either way, I don't consider it a killer; but I wanted to be sure to document all I could here in case it happens to others, who may have fooled around with audio track formats like I have. I hope something I've been through can help others avoid some lost time! For me, it's all good - chalk it up to learning curve!
