Grem
And when sonar does crash, it never " breaks my link" to my audio card.

Hi Grem, and apologies for not being able to describe exactly what happens in better and more accurate terms.
 
It doesn't happen that often, but here's the usual sequence of events, my soundcard is a Line 6 TonePort UX2 (USB) running the very latest ASIO drivers:

• Whiteout occurs, usually when inserting a VST or moving a clip while the transport is running
• I have to close the program, and I get the message "SONAR has stopped working..." and an AppHang error (I'll take some screenshots next time it happens so I'll have all the info). Usually I can close SONAR normally, but occasionally I have to kill it in the Task Manager.
• When I reopen SONAR, I get the message about "There are no audio devices available" (or similar)
• I open up Preferences to reassign my Toneport and it's not there as an option - that's what I meant by 'breaking the link'. As I've mentioned, there seems to be nothing I can do to get SONAR to recognise it again, short of a reboot. 

Do you increase your buffers at all after you are done tracking, Steve? That was another thing that helped me immensely when I'd have problems with EXACTLY the type of stuff you are talking about. I don't know why editing or inserting VSTs/changing parameter values would affect the interface but I guess it does. Maybe the the Toneport is getting overloaded and it just says "Eff this. I'm outta here!".

Power-cycle the toneport instead of rebooting perhaps?

daveny5
How do you know Sonar crashed your project? It could have been a Windows problem. Good thing you had autosave on so you didn't lose much, if anything. 

 
Event Viewer reports SONARPDR.exe app crashed but ntdll.dll was the faulty module. So Windows module took it out I guess.

Beepster
I think I've seen others complain about Ctrl + S causing problems. IIRC a few people mentioned they just started using the global File menu to save. That's what I've always done and I've never had a problem. Is it right? Certainly not but it's better than crashing... especially when you are at a point in your project where you would manually save.
 
And I've never used auto save. I save constantly and create new versions every time I finish a task. My project folders get huge but if something goes wrong I lose very little work. Maybe an hour or so tops. I just get the feeling autosave is the type of thing that ends up saving the corrupted parts as well and I don't get a lot of crashes anyway. Just projects that slowly become unusable. If I see that starting to happening I just go back to an earlier version and delete the one that was going wonky.

No autosave for me yet, but I am going to enable it to see if I like it. For me, I am a OCD-style hitter of CTRL+S so many times while working (habit), it's probably no wonder it crashed!

And I hate to say it but moving clips or inserting synths while the project is playing isn't really a great idea. Unless it's imperative somehow you should probably avoid doing that. Adding a VST is like launching a new program so it's gonna cause a resource spike. The editing thing... well I don't why it does that but I've learned that trying to move clips during playback is asking for a freezeup... but it is less likely if the buffers are increased.
 
Maybe add the Performance Module to your Control Bar and do some tests to see if you are getting crazy spikes when you do those things. Try with low buffers then increased buffers.

Studious
Yeah, the classic "white-out" crash. I've waiting long periods, but it never recovers.  Check your Event viewer > Application after the crash to see if it gives any more detail. The error is usually something like: Apphang. Sonar has stopped communicating with Windows. Unfortunately this is a generic error, and tech support probably cannot assist, other than telling you to completely uninstall/reinstall Sonar.

I wouldn't have bothered putting this together if that was how we handled such issues: http://cakewalk.com/Suppo.../2007013262#CreateDump

We should encourage people to work with tech support, not act like tech support can't help. That mentality doesn't really help customers work nor Cakewalk create better products.

Soens, if you can capture a .dmp file and get it over to us we can take a look and see if there are any indicators of what might be hanging SONAR. I will admit these issues are a lot trickier to troubleshoot... but I don't personally tell people to just uninstall/reinstall like that.

BTW, when your interface drivers disappear like that because the program didn't shut down properly, one way of recovering them is disabling/re-enabling them from the device manager. It's still a pain but can save you from having to completely reboot.

lawp
Power-cycle the toneport instead of rebooting perhaps?

Yeah, that's a good idea.

SteveStrummerUK

Grem
And when sonar does crash, it never " breaks my link" to my audio card.

Hi Grem, and apologies for not being able to describe exactly what happens in better and more accurate terms.
 
It doesn't happen that often, but here's the usual sequence of events, my soundcard is a Line 6 TonePort UX2 (USB) running the very latest ASIO drivers:

• Whiteout occurs, usually when inserting a VST or moving a clip while the transport is running
• I have to close the program, and I get the message "SONAR has stopped working..." and an AppHang error (I'll take some screenshots next time it happens so I'll have all the info). Usually I can close SONAR normally, but occasionally I have to kill it in the Task Manager.
• When I reopen SONAR, I get the message about "There are no audio devices available" (or similar)
• I open up Preferences to reassign my Toneport and it's not there as an option - that's what I meant by 'breaking the link'. As I've mentioned, there seems to be nothing I can do to get SONAR to recognise it again, short of a reboot. 

I know exactly what your talking about.
you need to close sonar,
unplug/re-plug in your device in again.
then re-open sonar, go to preferences, look for your soundcard, check it and then assign the master buss to the vs 20 again.
and sometimes this doesn't always work the first time around so a second round of sonar/re-boot is needed.
it can be a real pain in the bum bum.
 
ive noticed atleast in my situations that if I get a crash and try to force it closed by "end task" in task manager (because we know SONARPDR is still running)
then I will lose my device as you have described.
but, if I simply wait after the crash without doing anything(don't unplug my device or kill sonarpdr) then about 5-10 minutes later after sonar finally decides to quit I can re-start sonar and all works fine.
this can be very time consuming and frustrating.
 
 
this has been happening to me since x1A
at first I thought it may have something to do with the vs-20, but even my focusrite saffire does the same thing.
 
the good news is, I don't crash that often, so I don't need to do this often. 
 

Regarding the WSOD my experience has been that it is almost always a driver issue but it may be really obscure as to what is causing the driver to have a hissy fit.
 
About 6 months ago I started getting WSOD regularly and duly noted that I had bumped my sample rate. I'm not 100% sure but after noticing clean projects with audio were fine I saw that my problems seem to be related to VSTi's such as Kontakt. I had to open the offending plugs in stand alone mode and reset the config to the new sample rate. The result was fewer WSOD.
 
Then I noticed that when I brought in some older track templates I would get WSOD and that got me to some additional plugs that had to be reconfigured. The result was fewer WSOD.
 
I returned to mostly stable until a few weeks ago when I reconnected a POD X3 Pro back up to my sound card via AES/EBU. I don't use this unit much anymore and not sure why I went to the bother but, you know, I have it so I think it should be connected ;-).
 
Suddenly I was getting WSOD again (LOL) and a very low level whining sound. I went through everything and was pretty much ready to check into the funny farm when I looked down and saw the X3 unit was on. I turned it off and the whine went away. As did the WSOD.
 
Just happens that yesterday I went into the config part of the X3 and changed the sample rate and the mode from S/PDIF to AES/EBU and played away to my hearts content with no WSOD.
 
Don't know if this will help but in every event the problem was with a mismatch in the sample rate in something other than SONAR. I can't honestly say whether the DAWs that I use had the same problem because one was always at 48K and the other I pretty much just use the internal VST. Also I use SONAR so much more than anything else I will always be more exposed to potential problems because I'm using so much external stuff in SONAR.
 
But generally speaking if you have WSOD in my opinion you have a sound card driver issue.
 
Regarding the Save versus Ctrl-S I'd be willing to bet that the exact same code executes no matter what you pick, one just seems to be more convenient.
 
Regards

Wouldn't the keybinding have to make its way through whatever part of Windows handles the keyboard input before hitting Sonar? The problem might be there. I've had other keybindings behave oddly before or just decide to stop working. It's never led to a freeze or crash though.