Does anyone find that Drum synths are more prone to crashing than anything else? I'm still running Sonar 8.5.2 right now, everything 64bit, and this is by far my most stable setup I've ever had. Crashes are far and few between, however, I'd say 90% of all my crashes are related to a drum synth. The majority of my crashes are Session Drummer. Then a bunch of BFD2 crashes. And much less so, but still once in a while, Battery 3.

No other synth is ever at the root of any of my crashes. Is it this just a weird coincidence or are drum synths particularly crash prone for some reason?

No one huh?

I've been going back over some songs for my new album, doing some final edits and mixing, and I swear I've had like 20 crashes in the last 2 days, opening projects that have Session Drummer and/or BFD2 in them. Is it just a coincidence that they're drum vsts? So weird...

I would see if there is a crash dump file. It'll be the same fault/problem for all the crashes.

Just a thought - are any of the other synths you are using sample based, Kontakt for instance? If no it could point at something to do with RAM usage?

Well on any given song I could be using any combination of Kontakt, Battery, Absynth, Nexus2, Omnisphere, BFD2, Session Drummer, Play, and many other synths/sample players. As well as VST based effects. Once a project decides to not want to open anymore, however, it just doesn't open anymore (crashes every time) until I do safe mode on the project, load all the tracks except for the drum tracks, and it loads perfect. The error it always gives me before crashing is the .dll of either BFD2 or Session Drummer had a exception or mishandling or something like that... Not at the computer right now so I don't have the actual wording.

Usually what I end up doing is loading it all in safe mode. Load a new instance of BFD2 or Session Drummer, whichever is crashing in that project. Move the midi track over to the new one. Then freeze it, move the frozen track to an audio track, and then just deleted all instances of BFD2 or Session Drummer. Sucks but that's how I'm getting through finishing up these old songs.

that's how I'm getting through finishing up these old songs.

This sort of rings a nag bell at the back of my mind.


What's the behaviour of these Vsti's like on brand new projects?

Is there any difference running in 32bit Sonar?

With all those samplers, RAM exhaustion would be my first guess. If one of the samplers attempts to allocate a block of memory and is refused the request by the operating system, the dll would raise an error and SONAR would crash. I am not a BFD user, but I know that Superior Drummer can suck up a surprising amount of RAM. Omnisphere, Kontakt and Nexus of course, can also require a lot of memory depending on the samples being used. Of all the samplers I use, only Kontakt handles memory failures gracefully - Omnisphere and Superior do not.

Also copy the exact name of the crash and google it and add forum.cakewalk.

It's not a new problem and hopefully one will offer a solution. All sorts mentioned such as memory, rogue plugs, freebies, 32bit plugs, cronus.dll, c++ ..... and the list goes on.

yea i'm gonna try to start writing down some of the names the next time i see crashes and let you guys know. it very well could be a RAM thing. my projects are getting bigger and bigger these days. i have 12gb but i'm sure its possible that i'm filling up. the weird thing though is how its always a drum synth. seems so odd that nexus2 or omnisphere or something NEVER are the root of the crash, but always one of these drum synths (and this may be my imagination, but whenever theres a crash DURING playback, its always from a cymbal crash, regardless of which of these drum synths that cymbal is coming from haha... gotta be a coincidence on that part i'd imagine, but i dont know)

Send the crash dump to CW for analysis. They'll be able to tell you if it's a memory issue or something else.