Weird, Beepster.  I've never had my most recent version not in the RP list, outside of crashes.
If I save/close/shut down properly, the most recent version is listed the next time i open Sonar.

Slugbaby
Weird, Beepster.  I've never had my most recent version not in the RP list, outside of crashes.
If I save/close/shut down properly, the most recent version is listed the next time i open Sonar.

Yeah. Sumthin' dumb is going on with my system (I built and configured it all myself when I knew NUTHINK' about nuthink') but I get things done so I haven't bothered with a full tear down/rebuild/reconfig.
 
I personally think it has to do with my hard disks. Not sure though.

Beepster
Yes. That will happen sometimes when only using "Save". That is why it is better to do a "Save As" for each significant project "milestone". Like you get your drums down, "Save As". You get your bass down "Save As". Etc.
 
Just using "Save" is hit or miss because if a crash occurs then SOMETIMES you can get your project back or at least to a certain point but IME you are just as likely to lose everything (mind you I haven't been in that position since X2 which taught me to be hyper vigilant about manual project versioning via Save As)....

I don't understand why using "Save" is hit or miss. Like you, I do "Save As" to a new file name (i.e. Title, Date, Rev x) when I have major changes. In the past I kept hitting save almost everytime I took a breath for fear of losing what I've had done. When I did have a crash, I could open the last saved file and it indeed always gave me back what I had when I hit save. Am I just lucky that "Save" always worked?
 
But somewhere along the update trail, (for me at least) Splat has been so stable, I can't remember when I had the last crash! While this is good news I worry that it has given me a (false?) sense of security and I don't hit save as often as I used to. (Every 15 minutes or so).
 
Now that I've said that, I going to find a piece of wood to knock on....
 
Walt
 
 
 
 

WallyG

Beepster
Yes. That will happen sometimes when only using "Save". That is why it is better to do a "Save As" for each significant project "milestone". Like you get your drums down, "Save As". You get your bass down "Save As". Etc.
 
Just using "Save" is hit or miss because if a crash occurs then SOMETIMES you can get your project back or at least to a certain point but IME you are just as likely to lose everything (mind you I haven't been in that position since X2 which taught me to be hyper vigilant about manual project versioning via Save As)....

I don't understand why using "Save" is hit or miss. Like you, I do "Save As" to a new file name (i.e. Title, Date, Rev x) when I have major changes. In the past I kept hitting save almost everytime I took a breath for fear of losing what I've had done. When I did have a crash, I could open the last saved file and it indeed always gave me back what I had when I hit save. Am I just lucky that "Save" always worked?
 
But somewhere along the update trail, (for me at least) Splat has been so stable, I can't remember when I had the last crash! While this is good news I worry that it has given me a (false?) sense of security and I don't hit save as often as I used to. (Every 15 minutes or so).
 
Now that I've said that, I going to find a piece of wood to knock on....
 
Walt

Yeah... that's exactly it. Hit or miss and I think it is/was a system specific thing.
 
Either way it really doesn't seem to be a huge issue anymore and yes... hardly ever get crashes anymore (unless I do something really stupid). A lot of these habits have become mostly unnecessary but they are so ingrained and just a good idea in general I'm glad I developed the habits (even if it was infuriating at first).
 
I also kind of suspect just the act of doing a "Save As" snapshot actually helps keep the "crashy" gremlins at bay. Like when you do a proper save Sonar kind of gives itself a second to think about everything in the session and cleans it up a bit. Dunno though but I definitely found as soon as I started regualrly versioning everything was snappier and less prone to corruption... even in the X2 days.
 
Weird.

Sorry Beepster...
I had a instrumental that I did a few years ago on X1 I recently put some vocals on top of the song, I changed the version over to Platinum and was saving in Platinum however Platinum crashed and could not recover the saved changes. I went back to X1 and opened the project and it was the old copy. Went back to Platinum and it was not there. I opened up X1 and went to revert and the last saved was in there. I clicked on it and the project I worked on today opened up. Accept for the plug ins that come with Platinum. 
 

Dappa, how are you opening your project files?
By going to the folder and right-click/Open, or by using a link from within Sonar?  The "inside-sonar" links are just shortcuts that direct to a specific file.  Depending on the file extension, folder location, or a corruption, a shortcut may bring up different files.
The more you describe it, the more this sounds like the problem (from my limited IT Support history).

It's not just Sonar I've seem this sort of behaviour in, I've had it happen in Photoshop and Lightroom in the past as well. Stuff that should have been saved either not being there after an application crash or there but an "older" version missing the editing done in the session that crashed.

My safety measure has been frequent auto-saves, versioning and frequent use of "save as". And frequent back-ups. One thing nearly 40 years of computer use has taught me is that data that exists in an application, which means in RAM only or maybe as a temp file as well, is a ghost until it's saved to permanent storage. And until that's backed up to a different drive, not just a different partition on the same drive, it's just a slightly less ephemeral ghost. And data on punched paper tape was just as temporary, as the readers were quite capable of chewing up the tape to the point they couldn't read it.

Window's partial answer to the problem is the "system restore" function, though it's far from bullet-proof. Apple's is Time Machine which by default backs up all new data to whatever drive has been selected for the purpose on an hourly basis. The problem is that's fine when working with "typical user" amounts of data, where most big files like media stuff gets written once then left alone and the user isn't creating maybe hundreds of megabytes of data every hour - which is exactly what DAWs and video editors do. Both approaches can eat up huge amounts of disk space, and Time Machine can be endlessly churning away trying to keep up.

So "save as" often, use autosave and use versioning. And as soon as you're through with something, back the data up to another drive.

As for losing current data when Sonar crashes, I wonder to what extent the Windows file-writing system is at least partially responsible. It's meant to not store as soon as the "save" command is used, but instead to tag the cache of data in RAM as to be stored then write it to disk when system usage gives it a suitable "gap" to do it in. By default Window's caching is "off" in Sonar and in theory audio is written to disk as it's recorded - a practice that goes back to the days when RAM was measured in MB not GB and an audio file would rapidly occupy all the RAM if not streamed straight to (and from) the disk. It should also protect against the loss of recently recorded audio if the application crashes because that audio should have been written to disk as it's recorded.

Yet sometimes it isn't there, which makes me wonder if the data is on the drive but Windows hasn't yet written the relevant file table entries so can't see it. Only software that can find chunks of long-deleted files can't find the data either.

So I guess we're stuck with the "save early, save often, version and save-as" routine.

tlw
It's not just Sonar I've seem this sort of behaviour in, I've had it happen in Photoshop and Lightroom in the past as well. Stuff that should have been saved either not being there after an application crash or there but an "older" version missing the editing done in the session that crashed.

My experience as well, even with programs like Word and Excel. I've learned never to trust anything that has a microprocessor involved 

Not sure why you apologized but yeah... cross version projects can of course be problematic as well.
 
What you just describe, although SPlat is supposed to be backwards compatible with projects created in earlier versions, is another case where you may want to consider a) finishing the project in the version that created it or b) fully migrating all files (MIDI, Audio, Track Presets, etc) to a NEW project in your current version.
 
That said I think most X3 or later projects should be pretty safe to open in the modern version of Sonar. For X2 or earlier a migration is probably the safest route.
 
If any of the discontinued plugs used in a previous project (like say VC64 or VVocal) aren't appearing or causing problems there are ways to get them into the project (making sure they are installed/VST scan/refresh browser/etc) but some of those things were removed for a reason (32 bit/unstable/whatevs and in this case are what likely caused you crash in the first place). So in those cases (starting work on an old project using the modern version of Sonar) you may want to abandon those old plugins and redo the work using their more modern replacements (eg: using Melodyne instead of VVocal for pitch correction).
 
Most of the old plugs have been replaced with comparable plugs that are usually better and definitely more stable.
 
The PITA in that scenario is learning and re-kerjiggering the newer plugs to do what you had done originally.
 
Two ways to deal with that would be...
 
a) Simply finish the project in the Sonar version you created it in (in this case X1)
 
or
 
b) Open the project in the original version and export an audio file with all those old effects active. Then you can get the effects printed to the track and just import it into your new "SPlat" project. Of course you cannot adjust those effects after doing that (at least not in the new project) so make sure you really think about the export beforehand. You can of course always go back to the old Sonar version/project to make adjustments on those old plugs, rexport and drag that into your newer project.
 
 
Just tons of ways to do this to full satisfaction. You just kind of have to be a little creative about it all and willing to piss around a bit.
 
Cheers.

Slugbaby
 
I went back to X1 and it was in there under revert!!!