About the crashing, sound master has problems when importing too many chants at once and/or when saving with the menu save function during edition and can corrupt the audio.big file with missing commentary, sound, chants (or everythig combined) with crashes as a result. The crash likely happens when after the match you want to return to the regular Fifa menu and get booted to the desktop instead, sometimes also a BOD (blue screen of death) or freezing (you'll have to reboot the PC) as a result.
This behaviour occurred also in Sound Master 06 and is a result of importing too many sound files at once and/or saving during edition and then resuming edition without leaving the program and restarting it.
I wrote Rinaldo several times about this problem but unfortunately he couldn't reproduce the problem on his machine to try and solve it. Yet several people are affected judging the bunch of mails I received asking for help on my sound packs, if it's any comfort I'm affected also lol.
Safest thing to do is to import every chant manualy, but that is a long job as you have to assign every chant to every team and event manualy.
Besides the hard manual labor you can also try the following but in any case always make two different backups of the audio.big file (one prior to import and one after) :
Import one smp file, do not save in sound master itself, but choose exit instead, a box will pop up asking to save your changes, answer yes and then be patient and let the program close itself, it will then save the audio.big properly. When using the in-program save from the sound master menu, most of the times (especialy on audio.big with many chants in it) the function will close itself down before having saved all changes leading to the corruption and crashes described in the first paragraph of this post.
Go check ingame if the chants and commentary work, if yes, close Fifa, take a backup of audio.big and do the same for the next smp as described above. If no, it's audio.big restore time and you'll have to try again until it works.
Also, NEVER close sound master using the "x" on the upper right of the program window, this can cause corruption also, instead chose exit in the menu, choose yes on save changes and let it close itself, this can take several minutes on Fifa's with many imported chants, sometimes you even believe SM has frozen/is blocked but this is not the case, let it do it's job and go grab a coffee in the meantime.
Hope this helped.
P.S. : To know how to import chants manualy in sound master go read my old sound pack readme's at breamster for fifa2005 or 06, the procedure is still valid for 07 and I bet it will be for 08 also.
The infamous crashing bug is the only reason I made my mega italian pack as an .exe patch instead of smp patches, the audio.big that gets installed with my .exe file is guaranteed crash-free, and will prevent many people from pulling their hair out due to missing audio. If ever Rinaldo manges to squash that nasty bug I'll switch to smp immediatly to preserve compatibility with the other sound editors from the Fifa scene.
Download the Italian Mega Patch it's worth it, it installs 20 chants average per team for all Italian teams from Serie A and B as well as the National Team. Just make sure you install it prior to Bruno's packs as it is an exe patch that modifies the audio config too.
