X1a or X1c: Adding VST intruments saving as another file causing crash

Hello,
I'm new (so some hand holding may be required). So far I've had great success creating a small tune in Sonar X1 Essential with no issues until a couple days ago. Now when I try to add a VST instrument, Sonar crashes. I updated to X1a, then realized there was an X1c available and updated to that (no other installs in-between - did I miss something?). Same issues before and after updates.

As seen in the image below it was Rapture this time:



Any VST instrument will crash it, not just Rapture. I thought it might be a memory error but everything seems ok before crash after loading project (maybe I do need more RAM?):



If I try to save the project file as a different name, it crashes without a fancy messages.

How should I start troubleshooting this?

I'm using Windows XP SP3, 195GB of free space, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT 430 video card, Creative X-Fi Audio Processor, any other info I can offer?

Thanks for the assist in advance!

Best regards,

Hmm. I don't think that's the case. I've already run msconfig and have a pretty limited startup (haven't messed with services much though). Sonar seems to take about 1.5GB RAM or so with my project open. Without Sonar I'm using up about 700MB RAM and have a very idle processor.

Got it. I closed all apps, restarted my computer, same issues. I tried disabling my AVG antivirus with same reproduced results. I'm still digging for a solution.

One odd work-around is that I can launch Audacity and record my current Sonar composition from there where it fails when I try this in Sonar lately, so I still think it's not a memory problem.

Any thoughts? Thanks for taking a look at this.

No worries. Thanks for taking a look. Further feedback still welcome. ;)

My audio card is a Creative SB X-Fi. It turns out that my audio card is now OLD, since I can't even download a driver update for it as it's a Creative Labs archived product. Now they have cards like the SB X-Fi Titanium (Titanium sounds standardly fancy). Maybe that has something to do with it. Whether a new card fixes the issue or not, any good suggestions for an affordable "pro-sumer" replacement?

I'm using a Dell XPS710 (probably also "old" now). It still plays the latest games just fine. About 6 months ago I purchased a NVIDIA GeForce GT 430 video card after the last one burned up, making game play even nicer now. I'm running 4GB DDR2 RAM. The processor is Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz. I see something about "Socket 775 LGA". I have a 1 TB NTFS hard drive (lots of it partitioned for a Linux dual boot), 372 GB partitioned for Windows XP SP3, with 195 GB free space available.

The good news is my life doesn't depend on getting this fixed... although the fate of the galaxy does... :)

Best regards,

Chris

It is most likely that card.  Here on this forum it has a bad reputation. All CL cards are looked at as not suitable for music production with Sonar or any other full fledged sequencer. They have poor drivers for low latency audio. There are a lot of inexpensive audio cards that will do a much better job. Have great drivers and are well supported.  Check out Calkewalk's own audio interfaces. For audio and MIDI you get a lot more for your money. They are not the only ones either.

owntheweb


Thanks for the feedback.

That's the feeling I'm getting as I take a pulse on general web forums and such.

Excuse my newbness, but I discovered "external audio interfaces" today at a local music store. I guess they can replace the usage of a soundcard to handle this stuff (correct me if I'm off on that). I like the idea of leaving my current soundcard for day-to-day use, but revising my settings for Sonar so that it uses the external interface.

I'll post a separate thread if I continue to have issues at that point.

Have a good one.

EDIT:
This link is setting me straight on audio interfaces:
http://www.songwriting-so..re.com/sound-audio.html

Chris

I take it you are talking about USB audio interfaces. I recommend them. I own one myself.

Hi Chris,

Just by looking at your screenshots I can see a few things wrong.

First you have a lot of eye candy type stuff running that really needs to be shut off. Your CPU usage should not be at 17% with the few synths you have loaded, even with the Sound Blast card.

The other thing I noticed is ... your project is set to 44.1/16. The 16 is the bit depth you are recording at and that should match what your sound card driver is set to. If it's at 16 you are ok, but most are 24bit now days. Make sure you use the ASIO driver when you set it up in Sonar also.

Can you do a screenshot of Windows Task Manager with the 'Processes' tab open so we can see what's running? The Exception Code c0000005 error you are getting is normally not anything to do with Sonar or it's plug-in's. It's almost always something running in the background that is interfering with something in Sonar.

X1 is very powerful software and when running on XP, you will need to run XP as lean as humanly possible. Meaning all resources must be freed and available to Sonar, all eye candy must be turned off in XP, and you have to have a good USB or PCI audio card that has good drivers.

Take a screenshot of Windows Task Manager with the 'Processes' tab open and post and we'll see if we can suggest anything. Take two screenshots if you can't fit all the programs in one shot.

Bub

Ooo. I widdled down the list a bit, closed firefox, Gimp, some other update utilities and things I didn't recognize. When I launched my project, I got this error:

"Out of memory."

Just a thought: I have two 2GB sticks of RAM in my PC. Could the max limit get hit on one of those sticks?

owntheweb

Ooo. I widdled down the list a bit, closed firefox, Gimp, some other update utilities and things I didn't recognize. When I launched my project, I got this error:

"Out of memory."

Just a thought: I have two 2GB sticks of RAM in my PC. Could the max limit get hit on one of those sticks?

No, that's not a problem. 4GB is plenty to run X1 and is really the maximum you can use in XP anyway.

Did you download the latest version of Memtest86? It's actually called Memtest86+ now and you can run it from a thumb drive or burn an ISO to a CD. The thumb drive will be formatted so you have to be ok with losing whatever is on it or use a blank one.

Glad you got it going and we could help.

:)