I am aware that Vista has been reworked from the ground up. Is this the reason why many companies are struggling to support it. And if I am correct, that means codes have to be written to meet the standards of the new operating system. Does this then mean that Sonar 6 which is compatible with Vista are still using old code on a new operating system?

I am not a computer proghammer so could some one clarify this point for me.

Thanks!

ORIGINAL: sms

This particular case had a happy ending - I uninstalled the plug-in and all was well with the project again. But that's not the optimal solution. And the saving crashes were happening during the save process (and not when initiating it), so every save corrupted a file (this was clear, since the files went from ~3MB to 800kb or 900kb.) That could have been a real nightmare had I not noticed it.

I do appreciate that the intermingling of so many technologies from so many vendors has to be a nightmare. Plugin-related crashes are all about that, and since many of the crashes I've had end with an error box that tells you what plug is at fault, I've been able to figure out what to nuke in order to work around the problem. That's still not good, of course, and I don't know if PT or Cubase or whatever suffer from similar problems, so I'm not making comparisons. I just wish it would stop!


Thanks to all for your suggestions, by the way.

I can confirm that Nuendo3 (as well as Cubase3) suffer the same problem with Plugin Crashes. Don´t know about Cubase4. I had exactly the same problem on Nuendo with Waves Sound Shifter and also NI Kontakt, strange lockups, and the Nuendo project file size was decreasing, channels muted without pushing any button etc. At a certain time the project file was completely broken and unusable.

Both Steinberg and Cakewalk should work out a way to isolate plugins so only a plugin can crash but not the whole application.

Hmmm. A couple of things (well, more than a couple)

1. The discussion on pause was interesting. As the author of a (free) control surface plugin for the BCR2000 that has proven reasonably popular with Sonar users (go to sourceforge and search) - and which I couldn't live without (which is why I wrote it in the first place) - I hadn't really considered the now time issue. As you can set markers on the fly this issue hadn't really bugged me but then I do have jog wheel functionality in the plugin and that really DOES make life easier when auditioning pieces of material. But Sonar is a bit cumbersome in terms of overall transport control - being able to set multiple loop points and switch around them would be handy for instance, but I know of no way to do that.

2. Until I played with a certain product whose name begins with 'R' I hadn't realized how handy it was to have your most recent project automatically reload whenever you start up. If you can do this with Sonar I don't know how - and it is a very 'musician friendly' concept. (I can be tuning the guitar while it loads, not having to wait and press alt+F and 1 or what have you....

3. I can't understand why Edirol haven't exploited their relationship with Cake much more fully. I think ACT is a potentially good idea but it is not 'full duplex' and therefore of limited utility. If Edirol produced a range of keyboards and control surfaces that were cost-effective and tightly integrated with Sonar, then Sonar is now a viable option to the 'all in one' ProTools hardware and software offerings, but at present the relationship seems very arms-length. An Edirol control surface designed for Sonar could be a thing of beauty.

4. Regarding the Mac. I can see the appeal. Macs are much more standardised than PCs and although I'm not a Mac expert, I'll bet OS/X is much smarter handling audio peripherals. For instance it drives me completely mental that if Sonar crashes my external USB (Edirol) audio interface will be left in a state that often leaves it either (a) non-functional for audio and MIDI, but if I disconnect the USB cable and plug it back in, it'll work again (but with the wretched monitor switch turned back on by default... grrrr!) OR (b) as for (a) but MIDI has now gone somewhere weird and a total reboot is necessary. This is a total creativity killer and if Macs are more resilient to this kind of thing, well, you can see the appeal.