Recently upgraded PC, installed cantabile and moved my presets over and re-installed all my plugs.
All of my old songs work fine. My setup is not particularly complex: used for vocal chains only.
New songs I have created have the annoying habit of causing Cantabile to crash as soon as Cantabile loses window focus (clicking anywhere outside the application). Sometimes re-saving the song, or switching to a working song and back to one of my newly created songs will prevent the crash from happening but it’s not a reliable solution (works 1 in 10 times or sth like that). The new songs are all using the same plugs as the old ones. They are also using the same general Cantabile config but I’m at a loss as to why certain songs virtually always cause a crash.
Also, Cantabile crashes on exit about 30% of the time.
I’m on Windows 10 Home (latest) and this issue has persisted since re-install and across the last two major Win10 versions.
Don’t know if this is the somewhat same problem when I upgraded my laptop. It was attributed to my graphic card settings. I disabled the default “high contrast” in my Personalize screen settings. The high contrast settings didn’t play well with certain plugs. It took 6 months to finally find it. It runs smoothly now. Just an idea. Hopefully that works for you.
An interesting idea, but I think if that were the issue, if I even had something personalized, then I would be seeing this issue across all my songs and not just the ones that I’ve created on this new machine.
Edit: I double checked, only personalization I have done is to change the desktop wallpaper. Also, I don’t even have to open any plugs. If I load up a song and immediately click anywhere outside the application, it crashes.
Again, this is similar to what I was experiencing. The graphic card used the high contrast setting as default. I changed nothing until I realized graphic settings were the culprit. That’s when I fixed it. Not saying that is your problem…just letting you know what I ran into.
Are you using the same Cantabile version, as was on your older machine? Sometimes, an upgrade can act differently with your older version, but rarely. Moving to a newer machine can be a bitch, especially if you don’t use the same exact locations for everything, as on the older machine. It took me quite awhile to line things out.
Have you followed @brad’s advice in “Glitch Free”, and Derek Cook’s “Cantabile Guide” free on site? Very good advise when setting up a new machine, and will save you many headaches.
I personally do not install Windows updates.
Everytime I did in the past, something went wrong. The only reason I would even consider being online, would be to update a vst, or iLok. Most of Win updates are security related, so I am not missing anything I really need. I have another machine for internet use only.
Sorry if none of this helps. Hopefully, one of the resident gurus will chime in with better ideas.
Did you send your crash report to @brad? The log file may have some clues, but a lot in there only Brad understands. To find the files, go to Tools->Options and there is a button near the top “Open Settings Folder” that will open the directory your files are in. Sometimes I have a problem sending crash reports because the files are too large. Brad has a Dropbox for such an occasion. Or, use your preferred cloud provider and send Brad a link. He tries to get to them fairly quickly. He will for sure has an answer.
Meanwhile, @Corky’s advise about the graphics card is something to look into. As far as Windows updates, I haven’t had a problem since the debacle Microsquish had a few years ago. It’s been pretty smooth. I install updates on my Studio machine almost immediately, then my Live machine after C3 is proven out on my Studio machine. I’m running the latest Windows and the Stable C3. I’ll update C3 to the latest after practice tomorrow.
I just checked for crash reports from you but haven’t seen anything since early March. Crash reports will be the best way to get a handle on this so do as @RackedBrain described above and send them through and I’ll check them.
@Corky I will look these items up and work through them as I’m able to find the time. Thank you.
@RackedBrain@brad Yes, I have not sent the report in some time. I’ll make sure to send the next few when I’m next using the application: the issue is easy to reproduce.
I did peruse a few logs and nothing jumped out at me. It just appeared to decide to unload everything and shut down (without saving changes to the current song, if any were made). When it crashes and I fire it back up, it loads the previous song that was up when it last shut down gracefully.
High contrast is off in Windows. This was a platform upgrade along with going from Windows 7 to Windows 10 but the GPU I carried over for now, so same GPU but different driver package. I do not see anything in the NVidia panel regarding high contrast outside of 3D application settings and I have some colour tweaks there in conjunction with the colour profiles from the respective monitor manufacturers. As part of my troubleshooting I disabled GPU acceleration in Cantabile and it made no noticeable difference.
What is weird is I can get around the issue by loading an old song, saving it, loading a new one created on this machine, saving it, then and old one again and saving it before loading any song of my choice and having it work correctly. This is probably related to my earlier issue of the application crashing on exit (with or without save confirmation dialog for the current song). That started happening immediately after a clean install of cantabile without creating or loading any songs at all. Was one of the first things I set up after I got Win 10 up to date and my drivers all installed.
I also went from Win 7 to Win 10 Pro. The setting on the graphics was at Personalize>Screen Settings. Repeating…it may not have a thing to do with graphics…just similar to my problem.
Since you are able to recreate the crash, it is best to let it crash, and send the report to @brad. That would save a lot of time and misery in solving the problem.
Ping me when you’ve sent the crash report and I’ll immediately take a look at it.
fwiw: I’ve always found installations of Win 10 upgraded from Win 7 to be less stable than clean installs. That’s probably not what’s causing this, but something to be aware of.
@brad Most recent report sent is with regards to the issue in question. There is also a previous, recent report related to the crash on exit. They may be related or stem from the same issue and maybe some info in it will be helpful.
By upgrade I meant the machine, Win10 was a clean install from genuine media to a brand new clean SSD. I backed up files to my old OS HDD before teardown and installed it as a secondary after Win10 installation and updates were completed in the new machine.
High contrast is not on, and was never on, as I already said. I did test your solution anyways by turning high contast on, rebooting, loading a song and having it crash, to turning high contrast back off, rebooting and testing against just to have it crash again.
Strangely enough the issue went away over time for the newer songs after several cycles of loading them and saving after adjustments. The issue just reappeared, however, after making another new song and the behaviour only exists on this song currently. It appears to load the song up without issue, I can use it normally, but as soon as I click anywhere outside cantabile, there is an unhandled exception in an unnamed module that crashes cantabile.
I can prevent the crash from happening by loading up at least two older songs and saving them before loading the problematic song. Workaround has about a 95%+ success rate. Once I do this, I can use cantabile freely without issues for many hours.
Is there any difference in how songs are saved on Windows 7 vs Windows 10? Relative or absolute path pointers or anything in the saves to VST locations or configuration file paths? I know windows 10 has a slightly different structure for application data and configuration data paths. All my older songs where I never experienced issues were created on a Win7 machine. It’s only the newly created songs on Windows 10 that have exhibited this behaviour, whether from scratch or started from a duplication of an older song.
Thanks for sending that latest crash report. From what I can tell this is related to the plugin DC1A after it’s been unloaded (ie: something not being cleaned up correctly).
Some ideas:
Try with the latest build of Cantabile. I see you’re running build 3665 and there’s since been a number of fixes for various issues with VST 3 plugins.
Try using the VST 2 version of DC1A which shouldn’t have the same VST 3 issues as mentioned in point 1.
Make sure you’ve got the latest version of DC1A. Although I’m pretty sure this is related to that plugin, I couldn’t reproduce it and perhaps they’ve changed something since you last downloaded it.
Hack it. Failing all of the above, you could try putting an instance of the VST 3 version of DC1A in the background rack. That should keep the module loaded regardless of which song you have loaded and should prevent this crash.
@brad I have this plugin on all songs and the rest do not exhibit this behaviour but I will replace with VST 2 version and make sure I’ve updated everything again and try it out and report back.
It also seems that the the 21H1 May 21 Windows 10 update did not get installed for some reason after I thought I had done it, so I will do that as well.
@Corky Yeah I sent a bunch, just bumped the topic as it’s been a while with no response and I wasn’t really experiencing any more problems for a bit anyways, until I made a new song
