I am not a Windows programmer and I only know a very little about Windows programming. But I do follow the technical stuff and I was a system's programmer in Unix for many decades.

From what I gather happened was that somewhere between XP and Vista, the MS internals changed so that all GUI operations were done in user-mode, not kernel-mode. Originally this was done in the kernel for speed, but it meant that a bad video call could crash the system.

Now a bad video call just crashes the app.

As a result, just about every tool now has two or more parts - a kernel service or driver that does the work, and a GUI client that sends it messages and reads its output for display purposes.

This is why some tools seem to be sluggish now and then - they are just not running fast enough or at a high enough priority to keep up with the driver.

The threads that I see running when Sonar hangs always seem to be in the audio driver - wmaud.sys or whatever it's called. Usually in ASIO-land or somewhere like that.

So I think that that part of the kernel is immune from some types of task pre-emption - or  it never looks for the terminate message. Maybe these parts were never designed to be stopped by an outside process or are running in some super-user mode.

I don't know - just guess work. But it helps me understand things a little.

Another idea I just had that is related. When Sonar transport is running, it disables itself from being terminated. Perhaps when it hangs this is the reason.

I suppose there are several types of terminate messages - 'please terminate now', 'terminate if possible', and 'shutdown imminent go away'!  I don't know, just a guess.

This is by far the most irritating of all the sonar negatives. I can handle the crashes, what PC owner cant, but the whole reboot thing is pure frustration.

I cant comment on whether Cake has an official take on this as have never heard it myself or indeed be officially addressed, could be wrong.

Maybe its a necessary evil to make the program run correctly and thats why its never been 'sorted' ... (insert alien music and a general conspiracy theory here)

Bob's suggestion is definitely worth a try, sounds promising. Share drivers with other programs has always looked like a 'touch me and i will ruin performance' checkbox to me....... but then again, i know nothing about the finer points of programming.... or err women.

Im just thankful that sometime, somewhere, enough people got clever enough to write software that lets me do what i love at much less than £50 per hour and the price of 500 cassette tapes.

Progress is good :) Thats why we were never happy in caves.

Peace peeps

Bibs

I have a really fast machine, so if there is a performance hit to srahing the drivers with other programs I don't know that I would see it.

It looks in the posts above that 2 people - 3 counting me, have seen a decrease or elimination in hangs by trying to run after checking the box in Preferences that allows sharing the drivers with other programs.

The thread originator, 'nullobject', is one of those folks, 'Stevec' seems to be another, and I would be the third one.  I certainly do not claim that this will fix anything, but it seems worth a shot, as 3 of us seem to have found relief with this change made.

Markyzno - I certainly don't hope to end up in the 'gives crappy suggestions' list, but do you think you could please give it a try to check that box in preferences and see if it helps?

It is in: Edit>Preferences>Audio>Playback and Recording, and is the box that says: 'Share Drivers With Other Programs'.

Thanks - I have all my fingers and toes crossed on your behalf (and mine, cause I don't want to get that crappy suggestion giver label - yikes).

Bob Bone

markyzno


+1 million.

This drives me ****ing crazy and I keep barking on about it.

Whats your card? M-Audio?

I run Sonar X2 on two machines, my studio DAW and my home office, of course, not at the same time.  My studio DAW has MOTU 828mk3 audio and the home office computer has M-Audio firewire solo.  The DAW with MOTU never ever has this driver hanging issue; the home computer with M-Audio (AMD 955be with 8 gigs of ram) has it happen every day.  BTW, that is one of the reasons I switched from M-Audio drivers to MOTU.  Just my 2cents.

Hey - I just got off the phone with Cakewalk tech support, for a different issue with registration of a different product (not connected to this thread), but while I had him on the phone I asked him about that check box to allow sharing drivers with other programs.

We chatted about it for a few minutes, and his thought is that there are certainly some flaky weird driver things out there, and that trying to get relief from the hangups by checking that box is certainly a reasonable thing to do, and quite possibly would help.

So, again, please do give this a shot and post feedback on your results - thanks SOOO much, 

Bob Bone

Just FYI, I have the "share drivers" box checked on both of my machines.  It does not help my M-Audio set up, which still has the hang, and if it helps with the MOTU I would not know because it has been rock solid and never exhibted the problem.  This is just to give feedback.

Thanks, cecllius2.  I will stop suggesting making that change to folks who are experiencing the hanging Sonar issue.

Even the Cakewalk tech guy said he was not sure, just that it seemed reasonable to try, as there are some flaky driver things out there.

Unfortunately for me, I think your post may have gotten me promoted to the 'gives crappy suggestions' list that one of the other posters has.  My apologies to that person - I shall strive to redeem myself someday in his eyes. :) 

Bob Bone

Oh please! I am far from sour and also try to give my support to fellow users. this issue is just incredibly frustrating.

Jim Roseberry

The fact of this matter is this.  Its a Sonar issue thats hard to pin down in a 64 bit environment. So, Sonar...****ing well deal with it. Fellow Sonar users please stop posting ****ty work arounds that dont work.

You're on a user based discussion forum (not official support)...
Why **** at folks who are trying to help?
Someone may throw out a tip to help you effectively work around the issue.
If not, what are you out?
You don't like the idea of "workarounds"... but the situation is what it is (imperfect).
Trouble-shooting and problem-solving is a HUGE part of what we do (as folks working with audio/technology).
Sour attitude won't help...

Hey Bob...Yup, tried that. Still crashes on occasion. I had the Share drivers thang ticked ever since I upgraded to Win7 64 bit. Sonar crashes with or without.....*sometimes*

Basically I try to avoid 32 bit plugins like the plague. This kind of smooths things over somewhat but I still get crashes. Dim Pro is a bad culprit, sometimes Pro Channel sometimes the browser..... I wish I could pin it down. I do faithfully send in crash reports to the bakers tho.

robert_e_bone


I have a really fast machine, so if there is a performance hit to srahing the drivers with other programs I don't know that I would see it.

It looks in the posts above that 2 people - 3 counting me, have seen a decrease or elimination in hangs by trying to run after checking the box in Preferences that allows sharing the drivers with other programs.

The thread originator, 'nullobject', is one of those folks, 'Stevec' seems to be another, and I would be the third one.  I certainly do not claim that this will fix anything, but it seems worth a shot, as 3 of us seem to have found relief with this change made.

Markyzno - I certainly don't hope to end up in the 'gives crappy suggestions' list, but do you think you could please give it a try to check that box in preferences and see if it helps?

It is in: Edit>Preferences>Audio>Playback and Recording, and is the box that says: 'Share Drivers With Other Programs'.

Thanks - I have all my fingers and toes crossed on your behalf (and mine, cause I don't want to get that crappy suggestion giver label - yikes).

Bob Bone