Some of you guys know I am pretty serious about what I do, and I like to do it on Sonar. I do MASSIVE projects sometimes - those are mostly DVD concert mixes, 80 or 90+ tracks, 3+ hours, 20+ busses, sidechains and plugins up the yinyang. Needless to say those are also normally under big pressure, and when things go wrong I have pretty big clients tapping their feet and looking at their watches. You don't tell a TV channel with several million viewers to wait while you try to debug your DAW..
 
Thus recently it came to a point where I nearly had to get rid of Sonar as a project was becoming so unstable that it was 20 computer restarts per day, 30 SPLAT restarts a session etc etc. Random crashes, closes and errors all the time. And my projects started taking up to 3 minutes (yes, you read correctly) to save every time I hit save.. which I had to do a lot due to the instability of the system.
 
To cut a long story short, Noel Borthwick, CTO of Cakewalk and a guy who certainly has a fair whack on his plate, personally looked through my Crash Dumps and project files and spotted the one common denominator between all of the issues: Melodyne Essential 4.0 (yes, some of you guys did suspect that in my early cries for help - but hard to bounce clips when you're not done tuning right?)..

Once it was identified as the culprit and I bounced all the tuned clips down to wavs, all of the issues magically disappeared. It leaves me not so impressed with Melodyne right now, but has restored my faith in the Bakers. I really really hope that Celemony will sort out their troubles asap, but that's another email I'm about to write to them.
 
The lesson Noel taught me is that it only takes ONE plugin to wreck an entire DAW. Keep that in mind if you can, I certainly will :O)
 
Hope this little post helps some of ya'll.
 
Ludwig

Imagine having to compose a help-wanted ad to replace Noel:
 
WANTED: top-tier coder with intimate knowledge of Windows audio rivaling anyone at Microsoft, and familiar with every DAW and plugin on the market. Must also be a talented musician, ready to work ridiculously long hours and put up with forum whiners who think it's your fault their mixes suck. 
 
Then sit back and watch the resumes roll in...

Awesome. You don't get that treatment on other DAWs.

Great story - in a much smaller way, I have been incorrectly gnashing my teeth at Sonar because of an apparent issue with TH3. Thanks for sharing, keeps my woes in perspective. 

I might also mention that a good few of Noel's emails were sent to me on Saturday and Sunday - at VERY odd hours..

bitflipper
Imagine having to compose a help-wanted ad to replace Noel:
 
WANTED: top-tier coder with intimate knowledge of Windows audio rivaling anyone at Microsoft, and familiar with every DAW and plugin on the market. Must also be a talented musician, ready to work ridiculously long hours and put up with forum whiners who think it's your fault their mixes suck. 
 
Then sit back and watch the resumes roll in...from MS Access "programmers"

Actualized.

LJB
The lesson Noel taught me is that it only takes ONE plugin to wreck an entire DAW. Keep that in mind if you can, I certainly will :O)
 

That should be a sticky and in EVERYONE's signature.

That's always the risk with any plugin, but it seems often to be more prevalent with "giveaway" plugins, like the cut-down version of Melodyne or TH3. It's one of the reason I buy a plugin if I want to use it rather than rely on "freebies", even though we know they aren't really free. The plugin vendors don't seem to test the "free" versions as well, unfortunately.
 
Dan
 

  I love good news.  Thanks for sharing.

dcumpian
That's always the risk with any plugin, but it seems often to be more prevalent with "giveaway" plugins, like the cut-down version of Melodyne or TH3. It's one of the reason I buy a plugin if I want to use it rather than rely on "freebies", even though we know they aren't really free. The plugin vendors don't seem to test the "free" versions as well, unfortunately.
 
Dan
 

I do believe Melodyne Essential normally costs $99.00.  Not free.