soens
Here's some tips that really helped me reduce these issues:
 
1. Defrag monthly
2. Clean Picture Cache routinely
3. After saving 10+ versions of a project, start over with a new one
4. Turn off the internet (no connection - no antivirus)
5. Keep the OS hard drive free space @ 20% or greater.
6. Cake's Windows Optimization Guide ***They really should advertise this one more!***

Hi Soens, thanks for your reply. Can you tell me how to clean picture cache? This is something I've never done before.

chuckebaby
BSOD are almost always hardware issues but who knows, could be dim pro.
I myself have not had a crash since last year. ive had 2 sonar not responding but then eventually they caught up and went away, recovered from them.
 
what audio interface are you using ?

Hi chuckebaby, I've updated my signature which should show audio interface details now.

MacFurse

Merwyn
Hello everybody
 
I am suffering Sonar crashes and BSOD over and over again. Ever since I upgraded from Sonar 7 to Professional and then Platinum my DAW seems, quite frankly, ill! I have all but given up hoping to ever compose music again!
 
First, I have submitted a support ticket to Cakewalk. In the meantime I am posting here because I would like some feedback from the many expert users here. Thanks in advance...
 
Error logs in event viewer indicated Dimension Pro to be the problem, causing most crashes (but not all...realguitar caused one and the others just seemed to be Sonar PLT without indication to anything further). I have a bunch of dmp files I can't read.
 
I ran latencymon which advised me to disable CPU throttling. I did this...no change.
I deleted the AUD file...no change.
I clean installed Dimension Pro, as per this article;
 
http://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Knowledge-Base/2007013238/Clean-Install-Dimension-Pro-for-Dimension-Pro-1-5-full-installer
 
...all to no avail.
 
All drivers are up to date as far as I am aware, and I have the latest update for Sonar PLT.
 
To be honest, since I upgraded from Sonar 7 to Professional and then Platinum last year I have had endless trouble. My PC shop cannot find anything wrong with my PC and I am getting to the point where I feel I need to do a clean OS install (which I dread as I have a lot of music software to reinstall...at 2mb download speeds that's going to take forever!).
 
Is there anything I haven't tried yet?
 

You have the same card. GTX750.  See my last post. cheers. Dave.
  edit.  sorry. you have win7, but I think the coincidence is still too great. Check your drivers and backdate if you have to, to get things working. 

Hi MacFurse, thanks for the tip on the nvidia card. I've taken note of this and will backdate if I continue to crash.

mettelus

MacFurse
 
Win10 and GTX750 card !!  I am confident you will find this to be a driver problem. Install Nividia's latest driver for your card manually and leave everything else unticked. If you have GeForce experience installed, remove that too.
 
There is tons of stuff on forums relating to problems with the drivers and win10. You may have to revert back to an earlier driver to get things working but 3 new drivers were issued Feb/Mar and I found the last one fixed most problems. Symptoms for me were almost exactly what you are describing. Cheers. Dave.

Good catch...I have the 970, but have also noted weird stuff with the latest Nvidia drivers (not sure if this will apply to you though).
 
I was going to throw this into another post, but even with only loading the Graphics Drivers and Physx software, I was noting issues. I ended up backing to 359.06 yesterday (clean installation) with only the above selected because there is an issue in 364.72 (at least on my 970).
 
Premiere Pro was having more issues than SONAR was actually, so I installed the newest version of K-Lite's Codec Pack (mega). Even doing the "normal" installation, when it is installed it analyzes "known bad" codecs on the machine and flagged SIX that I had removed months ago! Even removing them did not fix the issue, but rolling back Nvidia's drivers did. Note: You do not need to install K-Lite, but I did just to get "known bad" codecs off my machine, and is the only installation I know that checks them.
 
Check your C:\NVIDIA\DisplayDriver folder, and look for earlier versions of the driver. Unless you moved/installed them elsewhere, the installers should still be in place. For me, the 359.06 driver is the "last known good one." Drill into folders until you find a "setup.exe" file.

Hi Mettelus
 
I've searched but seriously I don't know what I'm looking at. I found the 359.6 on GeForce but it says it's for windows 10...will it be ok for win 7?

Thanks to all who have added to this thread. Things I've done so far and progress I've made:
 
I've updated everything as much as I can.
I've disabled a lot of unnecessary services.
I managed to freeze the dim pro track and then take out dim pro synth and the troublesome project proceeded without crashing.
 
So far so good...
 
PS Nvidia Driver 359.6 not compatible with my system :(

Glad your project is able to work now.
 
The initial release and early life of Rapture Pro was a bit flaky, but it seems to be feeling much better these days, and I encourage you to look at picking that up as a replacement to Dimension Pro.  Rapture Pro plays the Dim Pro sounds, AND has a bunch of other really nice sounding ones - it seems to be a cross between Dim Pro and Rapture, so it give you some nice layered sounds.  GREAT pads.
 
Bob Bone
 

Spoke too early....first BSOD of the day.
 
Sonar was open but I wasn't working on the project. Internet was on but I wasn't using it.

If you get real BSOD (not just Sonar crash or freeze, so the state when you no longer can do anything with Windows), it is ALWAYS some hardware (or its driver) related. The problem that any peace of hardware/driver can trigger it. I would propose the following sequence (1-4 in any order):
1) RAM test. http://www.memtest.org/#downiso , also included with many Linux live distributions. Run for AT LEAST 3-4 hours.
2) System/CPU/Temperature. Any "Burn" test. I have not run anything for a while, but something like http://cpuburnin.com/ I would not run it for more then 10-20 minutes...
3) HDD. http://www.hdtune.com . Look for not smooth speed curve.
4) Graphic / driver / temperature. https://www.futuremark.com/ (3DMark, PCMark). Tests for 1 hour should be ok.
 
If (and only if) all that show no problem:
5) Audio (hardware and driver). Switch to internal audio with WDM driver mode. Try to reproduce BSOD.
 
I repeat, all that make sense for BSOD troubleshooting only.

It is helpful when specifying DPro and Rapture programs to provide the full path and name.
I found two "Gilmour" patches in my DPro installation under 22 - Electronica Collection > Simulations
 

• Gilmour Solo Clean 01 (at=vibrato, vel= timbre)
• Gilmour Solo Clean 02 (at=vibrato, vel= timbre)

Both of these programs have Random Unipolar as a source in the MIDI Matrix. Try setting the depth for this source to 0. Another solution may be replacing DPro with Rapture Session. I have not specifically tested programs using the Random Unipolar parameter in Rapture Session.
 
 

Upgraded to Win10 and everything works perfectly. I think it's a conspiracy to wean everyone off of other versions of the OS.