V-Vocal crashing Sonar "cronus.dll" Workaround

I will give that a try - I'm another having this cronus.dll problem.

ORIGINAL: gadget

I will give that a try - I'm another having this cronus.dll problem.

Check the version of your Cronus.dll. You should be able to hover your mouse pointer over the file in Windows Explorer and the version data will appear. The version that's being shipped with the 8.x updates is 1.5.1.0 (timestamped 10/4/2007). Note that this is older than the version that had been shipped previously (1.5.2.0 from 10/1/2008). It would seem that Cakewalk's fix was to regress the Roland supplied file back to a previous version.

(I keep both of them around...just in case.)

Mine is 1.5.1.0 with creation date '6 Dec 2008'...

... and modified date '10 April 2007' (!)

Modified before created - now that's clever

Anyhow, joking aside, which one's best to have?

Hi Vinny,

I was having the same problem with the cronus.dll as well. Constant crashing and disruptions of mixing. I havent been working on a projects that included vocals for a while so the problem faded from my mind. I'm glad I found your post and I will check my V-Vocal plug to see if they are enabled or not and run some tests.

Thanks for the information!

Eric

It's not quite a find yet - lets see if it helps anyone (other than me)!

ORIGINAL: jshep0102

I adopted the habit long ago, of committing V-Vocal changes immediately via Bounce to Clips.

Me, too. There is also a copy of the clip (sometimes on top of it, sometimes underneath the bounced clip w/ a red circle/arrow through it on the clip and it's kinda greyed out). I always delete that, too. No issues when doing these things. HTH, Shep

FYI...the "red circle/arrow through it" bit is simply a muted clip. You can un-mute it by selecting it and hitting 'Q' on your computer keyboard. SONAR is being good to you by making a copy of the clip before you mess with it so, even if you commit your changes with a bounce, you can still go back to the way it was before (so you can screw it up differently the next time).

cronus.dll (along with VpEnc.dll and VPSoloDec.dll) is V-Vocal.

It is also an ActiveX library, which means it has to be registered in order to work. If it's not registered, SONAR will not be able to link to it at runtime and a nasty error will be raised when you attempt to invoke V-Vocal.

Registration should take place during installation, but if anything (e.g. insufficient Windows permissions) prevents that from happening you'll need to re-register it manually. I have also seen ActiveX libraries become un-registered after a successful installation, but I do not know why that happens.

To manually register an ActiveX DLL, use the REGSVR32.EXE utility. At the Windows Run prompt (or in a DOS window) invoke REGSVR32 twice, once to un-register the DLL and a second time to register it:
REGSVR32 /U "c:\program files\cakewalk\shared dxi\vvocal\cronus.dll"
REGSVR32 "c:\program files\cakewalk\shared dxi\vvocal\cronus.dll"

If REGSVR32 fails, it will say so and give you an error code that indicates why the registration failed. If you've given the correct path, AND cronus.dll actually exists, the most likely cause of failure is that your Windows profile does not have sufficient rights to modify the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry hive. The second most-likely reason is that cronus.dll itself is corrupt.

(For many DLLs, the most likely reason for failure to register is a missing dependency. However, all of cronus.dll's external dependencies are standard Windows files so this shouldn't be an issue unless you've got a serious problem such as a mismatched OLEAUT32 or something.)

The other two DLLs are static libraries and do not require registration.

Bitflipper -

I think we know that cronus.dll is, or is a part of, v-vocal. This is not a case of v-vocal not working. It is a case of it working fine and then with multiple clips open it causing an un-handled exception error which causes Sonar to crash, which the dialog always names "cronus.dll" as the offender - Different problem. Were cronus.dll not registered, it would not work at all, and wouldn't show up in the plug-in manager at all, either excluded or otherwise. And yes, I have tried un-registering and re-registering "cronus.dll" and it didn't fix the problem.

Everyone is talking about how they fix this crashing problem with workflow, by immediately committing changes to clips by freezing them and closing v-vocal. That workaround works for some people (for me too), but does not fix the underlying problem. The workaround I'm suggesting doesn't fix the problem either, but it seems to stop the crashing due to the un-handled exception error on MY system. I'm interested in seeing if it limits the issue in other systems as well. If it does, then we may have additional clues for Cake TS (or Roland) for a real fix, so we don't have to do workarounds, and we can work with v-vocal with multiple open clips without having to worry about Sonar crashing, and making a great program that much better and more solid.

I am fully aware that this "shouldn't" be a fix, and in my mind it's not - its a workaround. Someone at Roland probably left some parameters exposed in the cronus.dll that shouldn't be, which is causing this behavior (as a completely wild, but not entirely uneducated guess). All I can say is that it works for me, and I'm trying to find out if that's dumb blind luck or if there's something behind it!!

Have a great day...

V.

This problem with V-Vocal has existed literally for years.

I know...

It comes up very frequently. For proof, just do a search of this forum

I did...

The bug has existed since Sonar 5 when V-Vocal was first introduced

Very likely - I still used AT until S7, I think...

The workaround of working on 1 clip at a time, and bouncing to clip, works 100% of the time for most users.

I know this too - but I think the workaround I'm suggesting is easier than that one, and so may be attractive to some people.

I'm not trying to re-invent the wheel, I'm just sharing something I found that made my life easier. If in turn, we find something that makes it easier for Cake to fix something, is that not good? Use the other workaround if you want to. Try this one if you get a chance and see if it makes things easier for you. Report it to Cake TS if it does and if enough of us do, we may have a fix released in the future. In the mean time, I can mix with multiple v-vocal clips open on my machine and Sonar remains stable, and that's a good thing!

V.

Vinny
Could you tell me how to enable the cronus.dll file please?
I am having exactly the same trouble with V-Vocal. I have looked in Tools-Cakewalk Plug-in Manager but can't see the file.
Any help would be appreciated.
wm0203

Thanks for your prompt reply Vinny. following your instructions, I found the cronus .dll file and enabled it and everything has been working well for a couple of hours with loops involved. I haven't changed my NVIDIA based card, so it couldn't have been that, that caused the problem.

wm0203

THIS WORKED FOR ME!!!  Great job brutha.   Not sure but I think mine bombed after I deleted a V-Clip w/o undoing 1st.  Who knows - thanks a bunch

do you teach math in university?

No, but in a previous life I taught electronics math at a vocational college. That was a long while ago; we used slide rules back then!

Registration of ActiveX DLLs is a deeper topic than you might imagine. As a software developer, over the years I have had to spend a lot of time troubleshooting ActiveX problems such as unexpected interdependencies and version mismatches. Many late-night telephone conversations with on-site installers. They don't call it "DLL Hell" for nothing.

ActiveX DLLs differ from conventional DLLs in several ways. One of those differences is that it doesn't matter where the ActiveX DLL physically resides. Applications that call the DLL are able to find it by looking it up in the Registry, where the DLL has previously written crucial information such as where it physically resides.

The calling application doesn't refer to the DLL by name, but by a unique identifier called a CLSID (class ID). Every DLL must have a unique CLSID. Cronus.dll's CLSID is "{0E7C41F0-68A2-45F5-B9C2-CC37BA99810D}", quite a mouthful. But that's how V-Vocal is known inside the computer, not as V-Vocal or cronus.dll but as "{0E7C41F0-68A2-45F5-B9C2-CC37BA99810D}".

Maybe that would be a cool forum handle. Just call me "{0E7C41F0-68A2-45F5-B9C2-CC37BA99810D}" -- or just "0E7" to my closest friends.

This is what is meant by "registration": the DLL is checking in and introducing itself to the Registry. When you invoke the REGSVR32.EXE utility, it's simply calling the DLLRegisterServer function within the target DLL, which every ActiveX DLL must include. DLLRegisterServer creates some registry keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, the most important one in \software\classes\clsid, where the DX/DXi writes its unique CLSID, its primary entry in the internal "phone book".

Software installation programs normally take care of this as part of the installation process. Sometimes, users fix problems by re-installing software packages, which can be quite time-consuming when all they really needed to do was re-register one or more DLLs.

If you're not sure if a DLL is ActiveX or not, just run REGSVR32 against it. It doesn't hurt anything if it's not an ActiveX DLL, it'll just tell you that the DllRegisterServer entry point was not found. It also doesn't hurt anything if the DLL has already been registered (as long as you're re-registering the same DLL - you can get into trouble if you have multiple versions of the same DLL on disk; re-registering a different one de-activates the previous one.)

Cakewalk gathers most DX (ActiveX) effects and instruments under a folder named "shared dxi" under the main Cakewalk folder (usually program files\cakewalk). In there you'll find V-Vocal and most of the other DXi's such as TTS-1 and Dreamstation. Not all of the DLLs in there are ActiveX, though. V-Vocal, for instance, consists of 3 DLLs, only one of which (cronus.dll) requires registration. But again, there's no harm in attempting to register a DLL that doesn't need it or re-registering one that's already been registered. So register away.

Want to explore further? DLLs often call other DLLs. Those other DLLs are called "dependencies", because the top-level DLL depends on them to be present in order to work properly. Sometimes, an ActiveX DLL will fail to register because a dependency is missing. Or worse, the DLL registers OK but subsequently crashes because a dependency is missing.

There is a tool you can get from Microsoft that shows file dependencies for any DLL or EXE. It's called DEPENDS.EXE. If you run Depends against cronus.dll, you'll see that cronus relies on 10 other DLLs, and each of them has their own dependencies, and their dependencies have dependencies. Fortunately, for cronus.dll the dependencies are standard Windows files, so they're unlikely to be missing.

DEPENDS.EXE can be fun. OK, fun if you're a total geek. Use it to see what dependencies SONARPDR.EXE has - a boatload of 'em!

Mmm, this was kind of a rambling response, but maybe it's piqued someone's curiosity and taken a little mystery out of DXi registration.

j boy


V-Vocal is still not ready for prime time.  I don't really care --why-- it crashes, I just care that it does.  We paid for something that doesn't work as advertised is the bottom line.  CW needs to fix it once and for all or bundle Melodyne LE next time, please.

I concur! V-Vocal was one of the main selling points for me to get Sonar. I've now bought Melodyne as Cakewalk doesn't seem to be interested in fixing it 

Hi...I have this problem with cronus.dll too, and I get not open my project because this problem. when i open my project it appears and reset my computer. I tried to enable the the cronus but not resolved. What do i do? I need to continue my project! thanks...