As I work through a slew of older projects, I get quite a few that will hang my OctaCapture. SONARPDR.exe can be killed by cycling the interface power, but sometimes SONAR won't recognize it when I restart it, and a full system boot is needed. Is there any way around this? Having to power cycle every time I go on a bug hunt gets a little old.
 

I can get it to crash all the time... It has a problem closing if I use my (free) SpinnerLE (32 bit) Leslie Simulator... Which I use a lot as I can't afford to buy anything... And it sounds pretty good for growl and decent for spin... I use my Kurzweil K2500RS as I love it's KB3 mode... Which does have a spin fx, but not as compelling as SpinnerLE which really gives a good growl with control... ;-)

Have you checked to see if a plugin is causing the trouble?

Keni

Have you tried doing a Windows log off / log back on ?
It works for "most" of my occasional hangups, and is faster than the full re-boot.

Is BitBridge or JBridge running when things hang?  If so, perhaps nuking whichever of those is running would free things up.
 
Bob Bone
 

Make sure you have the latest Octa-Capture drivers.

Thanks folks. Answers:
Latest drivers: check.
Bitbridge: this is the 32-bit SONAR so it shouldn't be
Logout/in: I'll try that next!
 

sonarpdr.exe is, AFAIK, the only process SONAR launches. You can, however, have difficulty killing it. If that happens, it's most likely the audio interface's fault, and it can be either hardware (typically the USB port on either end) or the driver.
 
If SONAR actually crashes, the dump file can usually identify the faulting module and will say if it's the driver or not.
 
Make sure your USB ports are configured to never power down, as that can cause some interfaces to go to sleep and not wake up without a reboot.

Thanks for the tip, USB ports changed to never power down!
 
Here's what I recall the process being for finding the minidump file, please correct if I'm wrong!
 
users/*me*/AppData/Roaming/Cakewalk/SONAR X3 Producer/MiniDumps (is that right?)
 
I don't have any recent files, everything here is from January. 
 
So, next question, how do you read these things? I open it in Notepad and unsurprisingly it's all gibberish with a few recognizable words in them. Is there a section of this that breaks it down in, er, English?
 

+1 to Bit's analysis.
 
If you have a crash, kill in Windows then for hardware, try powering down the USB (or, shock, firewire device), and re-boot. That should put things back into order.
 
However, I would venture you have a software problem which is not probably Sonar's.
 
Software updates all round. jBridge update if necessary. Change 32 bit for 64 bit plugs etc.
 
Or, at your risk, delete all USB hubs, re-boot with nothing connected (mouse, keyboard excepted) then reboot again and after plug in your devices one by one then let Windows re-recognise them and re-install all USB software.
 
PITA, I know, but for Firewire it works. So why not USB ?
 
Cheers,
Jerry

Power cycle the octothing, releases the driver and sonar can exit