Audio engine stops for no apparent reason
Good day to all!
I need help and I'd like to ask if any of you have experienced a similar issue and how you got out of it.
Issue description:
One day, I started my Sonar X3 project, as usual, and suddenly, during loading, I got the "The audio engine has been stopped unexpectedly" message. This is strange, because I wasn't doing anything on the computer, so I didn't know why it would have any problems. I waited for the VSTs to load (it takes a minute or ten) and pressed play. There was a lot of cracking and popping for about 2 seconds and then the audio engine stopped again. At this point, I restarted Sonar, no help. I restarted my computer, loaded it all up again, no help.
I decided to load a smaller project (with only a few VST plugins). It loaded up without an issue, but once I started playing the piano with sustain pedal, the audio engine quickly gave out again.
At this point, I would like to point out that my rig is not connected to the Internet. And I haven't worked with it for a few days, so there were no changes, no updates, no new installations, no new drivers, no new hardware or software. It just suddenly stopped working properly.
Here's what I did trying to solve the issue:
I tried adjusting the latency in my ASIO panel (Creative ASIO), but even at 200ms, the audio engine would stop eventually. I usually have it at 10 or 20ms, so this was very strange.
I decided to reinstall Sonar - downloaded the latest version and installed it, but that didn't help at all.
I decided to switch my discrete PCIe sound card off and use the onboard(realtek)+Asio4All, but the issue remained the same (alleviated again by higher latency, but eventually dropping out anyway, plus you can't work at 200ms).
I checked my RAM, but Windows found no issues.
My VSTs are half-streamed from a hard-drive, so I tried to move the instruments to a different drive, see if the regular one causes some sort of bottleneck in data flow, but that didn't help either.
I tried disabling the on-board audio card, just to make sure there are no conflicts, but it didn't help at all.
I've also tried loading up the instruments outside Sonar (in their PLAY interface), there were no playback issues
At no point did I notice any spikes in task manager - the CPU meter in Sonar shows the first "thread" rising and hitting the reds right before the audio engine stops, but the task manager shows no such activity in any of the CPUs/threads. Memory performance is stable and so are the disks. The PC itself is fully capable of playing video-games with no apparent issues, audio and video playback is problem-free.
What I've found is that the bigger the project (more VSTs loaded - I use EastWest Hollywood instruments, which means lots and lots of gigabytes for streaming and RAM placement, usually a big project occupies 12-15GB RAM out of my 32GB), the faster the engine stops. But even a single piano vst (EW Piano Gold) can make it crash if I play and sustain enough notes.
Okay, that's all the information I'm able to provide. Sonar itself is not crashing, so there's no report to send. I'll try to capture a video of the issue when I'm on the PC and add it to this thread.
Anyway, if any of you have experienced sudden changes in performance and/or have any ideas what else might I try, please let me know.
My PC specs:
Current version of Sonar (X3a build 209) - x64
Intel Core i7-2600CPU @3.40
32 GB of RAM
64-bit Windows 10
Creative SB X-Fi / Onboard "High Definition Audio Device", probably by Realtek
AMD Radeon R9 200 / Onboard GPU
Some 3-4TB worth of HDD, USB3 external and SATA III internal, all relevant ones are relatively new and work fine in all other situations.