Drum Synths Crashing

Does anyone find that Drum synths are more prone to crashing than anything else? I'm still running Sonar 8.5.2 right now, everything 64bit, and this is by far my most stable setup I've ever had. Crashes are far and few between, however, I'd say 90% of all my crashes are related to a drum synth. The majority of my crashes are Session Drummer. Then a bunch of BFD2 crashes. And much less so, but still once in a while, Battery 3.

No other synth is ever at the root of any of my crashes. Is it this just a weird coincidence or are drum synths particularly crash prone for some reason?

I would see if there is a crash dump file. It'll be the same fault/problem for all the crashes.

Well on any given song I could be using any combination of Kontakt, Battery, Absynth, Nexus2, Omnisphere, BFD2, Session Drummer, Play, and many other synths/sample players. As well as VST based effects. Once a project decides to not want to open anymore, however, it just doesn't open anymore (crashes every time) until I do safe mode on the project, load all the tracks except for the drum tracks, and it loads perfect. The error it always gives me before crashing is the .dll of either BFD2 or Session Drummer had a exception or mishandling or something like that... Not at the computer right now so I don't have the actual wording.

Usually what I end up doing is loading it all in safe mode. Load a new instance of BFD2 or Session Drummer, whichever is crashing in that project. Move the midi track over to the new one. Then freeze it, move the frozen track to an audio track, and then just deleted all instances of BFD2 or Session Drummer. Sucks but that's how I'm getting through finishing up these old songs.

With all those samplers, RAM exhaustion would be my first guess. If one of the samplers attempts to allocate a block of memory and is refused the request by the operating system, the dll would raise an error and SONAR would crash. I am not a BFD user, but I know that Superior Drummer can suck up a surprising amount of RAM. Omnisphere, Kontakt and Nexus of course, can also require a lot of memory depending on the samples being used. Of all the samplers I use, only Kontakt handles memory failures gracefully - Omnisphere and Superior do not.

yea i'm gonna try to start writing down some of the names the next time i see crashes and let you guys know. it very well could be a RAM thing. my projects are getting bigger and bigger these days. i have 12gb but i'm sure its possible that i'm filling up. the weird thing though is how its always a drum synth. seems so odd that nexus2 or omnisphere or something NEVER are the root of the crash, but always one of these drum synths (and this may be my imagination, but whenever theres a crash DURING playback, its always from a cymbal crash, regardless of which of these drum synths that cymbal is coming from haha... gotta be a coincidence on that part i'd imagine, but i dont know)

Do you have your sample libraries on a separate drive? You should be running at least 3 drives, keeping the OS/programs, wav files and sample libraries separated. BFD2 will certainly want it's sample library on a separate hd for best results. Don't know how much RAM you have either, so it's hard to say exactly what the problem might be.

polarbear

Does anyone find that Drum synths are more prone to crashing than anything else?

...once in a while, Battery 3.

Not for me.  I have been using Battery 3 in almost every project for over 5 years and it has never caused Sonar to crash.  There are certainly some issues with Battery, but nothing to do with stability.  However, IK Multimedia's softsynths have been very unstable since moving from XP to W7-64.

id send it to cakewalk, they don't need your huge sample library's all they need is the crash info usually located in
%AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Logs.

right now its a guessing game.
 
what else might help are some specs on your system and your vst's (are they 32/64 ?) I know you said sonar was in 64 but is that all the synths as well ?

its in c/user/polarbear ??? /AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Logs

make sure you have Hidden folders checked in file preferences for win XP.
"you want to be able to see hidden folders"