• SONAR
  • Honeymoon's over ... Getting Fatal errors when comping in Sonar X3e
2015/01/03 15:09:29
lingyai
Hi,
I am still "breaking in " Sonar and after around 30 hours of a lot of stability and fun got my first dump-generating fatal error, in this case, three of them over and an hour and half. It has happened while comping pre-recorded audio.
 
I'm kind of head-scratching here. Two of the three crash dumps have been automatically sent to Cakewalk (one failed;  it was huge at apx. 65 mb) and have messaged them directly about this.  I will report back what happens.  Meanwhile, has anyone observed anything like the following, or have any ideas? I'll try to provide the background details, sorry for the length.
 
I have the latest update of X3e on a W7 64 Pro PC with an i7 2.3 khz CPU (or thereabouts) and 16 GB of RAM. I am not seeing any CPU or RAM spikes (both are running at roughly 25% each).
 
I was running this without my USB audio interface; i.e. I am using ASIOForAll, set at the most conservative 2048 samples and monitoring through the laptop's headphone jack.
 
The project is simple, all pre-recorded audio tracks: a guitar track, a piano track, and with two ("parent") sets of vocals of 15 audio comp ("child") take tracks each.
 
I'm running 8 or so plugins (all 64 bit) which I've known to be stable elsewhere and a simple signal path with a send bus for the vocals.
 
I have a few gain envelopes here and there, with changes so far confined to a very short range ( I've only gotten as far as comping the sentence in the vocal, before the third crash.)
 
Now, these might just be coincidences, but the problems occurred when I
 
a) clicked to hide or reveal the child tracks, using the icon for this shown in the Track view in the header of the parent tracks. At first it had worked ok, though sometimes sluggishly.  Then I noticed that clicking either parent track's icon would result in Sonar -- not crashing, but hanging (screen whited, "Not responding") for 20 seconds or so, then it would come back and all was ok. But it did this a few times.The last times it resulted in fatal errors. 
 
b) tried to view a gain clip for one of the child take tracks.  (I'd inserted a few before, by clicking the drop down arrow next to the  button (which defaults to "Clips") in the child's track header, and choosing "Clip Automation").  But for some reason -- and this was true of all of the children in this set-- there was, suddenly, no drop-down arrow on the button (which was showing "Clips"), and  clicking on the button had no effect at all; instead of revealing choices, it just remained "Clips".
 
To be honest the comping feature is the killer feature for which I as a new user have very high hopes. Until now, it has worked brilliantly in smaller projects with only 5-7 take tracks each (some all audio, some all midi via RAM-heavy Kontakt libraries, or some combo of the two).  This is as I said the first time I've really thrown anything this "heavy" at the comping feature.
 
But then again, shouldn't a decently-spec'd PC be able to handle comping in a project of 32 audio tracks, of which 30 are comp-able take tracks?   
 
Gosh I hope I can sort this out. Any advice would be mush appreciated.
 
2015/01/03 17:41:25
Kalle Rantaaho
Is there a reason you don't use your USB interface and its own ASIO drivers in this case?
ASIO4ALL is not ASIO, it's a WDM wrapper, and the motherboard sound chips seldom work properly in DAW work.
Have you checked in SONARs settings that there's only one interface in use (that your non existant USB interface is not selected somewhere). Trying to use two often leads to clocking problems and such.
2015/01/03 18:37:37
Anderton
I do not recommend using ASIO4ALL if there are native ASIO drivers available for an interface.
2015/01/04 12:29:13
robert_e_bone
I concur on getting rid of ASIO4ALL from your use - and further recommend that you COMPLETELY remove it from your system, meaning uninstall it and then go make sure it didn't leave any traces in your registry or in your program folders, etc..
 
At BEST, ASIO4ALL is a band-aid, and quite often people have weird and flaky problems with it just being on their systems.
 
I would suggest starting with getting rid of that, and then seeing if there are still issues.  :)
 
Bob Bone
2015/01/04 14:45:55
bapu
ASIO4ALL is the debbil I tells ya.
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