SL Pro 8 - Crash on Unmix Stems

Title says it all. System freezes immediately.

Just updated to SL Pro 8. System: Windows 10 Pro on an Intel Core i9-10980XE CPU with 64 GB RAM.

Hi, there were a couple threads about this hardware issue with SL7, the solution is a simple BIOS setting that fixes the CPU voltage, check the following threads starting at these messages:

Thanks for the info. I’ll have to investigate before I change BIOS-settings on my main DAW, though.

FWIW: The company which planned and built all my DAWs (… one of Central Europe’s most esteemed names in this market niche) strongly and explicitly advises against the workaround suggested above.

To roughly quote the answer I received: A properly coded app shouldn’t need a hack that might be feasible on an office clerk’s machine, but most definitely not on a highly optimised DAW.

Well - it’s not a workaround. It’s a fix for an hardware instability in your computer. A software cannot cause such a crash by itself (specially given all the sandboxing in the OS these days), it’s purely due to the CPU not being able to handle a heavy load of multithreaded operations, because of improperly balanced voltage at a given time. The hardware/BIOS is responsible for distributing CPU voltage, not the software.
There’s nothing that can be done on SpectraLayers side to fix that issue (or that would require slowing down the computation on purpose as a workaround for the hardware failure).

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You might want to talk to more knowledgeable guys than me about that topic. I’m just referring to an answer of the most hardware-savvy people I know. But as a matter of fact SL Pro 8 is the only app that actually crashed an otherwise stable and pretty powerful machine, up to now.

Did you build your computer to Steinberg recommendations or did you just buy an off the shelf or have someone put together a machine just because you consider it powerful ?
The reason im asking is i built my computer 8 years ago to Steinbergs recommendations and it runs every bit of Steinberg software as it should still to this day with ease .
I think before your start blaming Steinberg for your short comings you research and resolve and if Robins FIX turns out to be correct (which im sure it will ) then it’s definitely failure for you as a user to make sure your computer is setup correctly .
You either want Steinberg’s products or you don’t , you can always resale

Ho, ho, ho! Hold your horses. No need to step into the breach for Steinberg, I use their software since the 1980ies. At least a raised eye-brow is permitted when there’s a release that looks and feels a bit premature, I’d say.

This specific system is a built-to-the-task machine, specifically planned for 3D audio work and audio software development, bought from a company that specializes in this business - in close cooperation with Steinberg and other audio software manufacturers, one might add.

Sorry maybe i jumped the gun but i can’t see the issue here if you are running a closely designed machine with Steinberg and other Audio software companies , you are being advised by a Steinberg employee and top developer ? Surly this is worth investigating instead of your computer builder just completely dismissing this Fix . No ones perfect
I didn’t mean to sound so rude i miss read a little bit , just a teanny bit thou :+1:

Look, I don’t do this as a hobby. If there’s something that might affect the hardware I’m using for my main business at the moment then I ask people who specialize in questions like this. As a matter of fact my system builder even went so far to reiterate the possible (far-reaching) implications of a BIOS hack in a second mail, and I have no reason to doubt them.

There should be some more surgical voltage adjustments you can tweak, rather than just setting it all to Auto.

Look for LLC Vcore and CPU core. And only make very small changes at a time, like 0.05 volts.

And before you start, write down all the previous settings in case you need to go back. You can rapidly make your system unstable by changing this stuff. But as you have a fault now anyway, it is probably worth a go.

With some guidance from an expert, I managed to get my i7-8700K running at 5Ghz on all cores with AVX offset of 0, and it runs SL7 Pro (and everything else) reliably, including Unmix Stems.

I will shortly be trying SL8 Pro. I’ll let you know if that works OK here later.

And I totally understand and support your approach of being very careful what you do on a finely tuned DAW.

If that’s the case you could always share with Robin these builders reasons so you could solve your issue , but that seems like there’s no movement that side .
Good luck take care

I don’t pretend to know everything about hardware and software (who can ?), but regarding this very specific issue you’ll see in the 2 threads I linked in my first reply that it is the conclusion of months of investigation both from my side and from the user side, and it seems that all users experiencing this issue were able to fix it that way, without any side effect for their other softwares - what it does in the end is increase the voltage stability of your CPU without affecting its features or performances.

Yeas, but it may not be as easy as that. If the machine has already been factory/supplier overclocked, some of the voltages may already be close to limits.

My experience of overclocking is that AUTO almost never works on a high spec overclock, and any move to AUTO settings is perhaps likely to just negate the autoclock, avoiding the problems with SL, but in the process also reducing the overall performance of the machine.

This is the problem of running a manually overclocked machine when the owner/user doesn’t understand the overclocking process. Maintaining a reliable overclock becomes an issue when, in time, new requirements arise, such as this user is experiencing.

So I have just installed SL8 Pro and tested Unmix Stems on my highly overclocked machine.

All worked perfect in Standalone and ARA in Cubase.

I know that doesn’t help your problem, but it does at least indicate that it does run on a highly overclocked machine if all the deep settings are OK.

I would certianly start by manually tweaking some of the voltages as I indicated above in this thread - bu document everything, or you will be very sad.