Sync problems in Sonar

[martinw2k]

Looks like Im the first confused newbie to stumble across to here in search for help!Surprised

Ive been using Cakewalk Sonar for sometime but in the last week I have had a lot of problems recording tracks.
For example, if I have a drum loop on a track and I record some guitar to another track. When i playback it is very noticeably out of sync, the problem increases as track time goes on.
The recorded track then has the expected cracks/pops/skips and is shorter than it should be.

Im using a laptop with the usual rubbish Realtek 97 soundcard. I have tried using the WDM/SK, MME and ASIO4ALL drivers. Also I have tried virtually all different combinations of no. of buffers and size to try different latencies.
I find it so strange that it has just suddenly stopped working! I cant really find any help about this that seems relevant, since I know my system is able to perform these tasks!

Im very frustrated having tried all solutions I have found.
Please help.

Thanks,
Martin

[FajitaTone]

if you are recording the audio to the Internal drive, DON'T.


Anyone else?

[martinw2k]

if you are recording the audio to the Internal drive, DON'T.
I am.
For what Im doing its the most suitable thing to do and Ive had no problems up with it up til now.

[crunch]

Sounds like your drive might be getting rather full, and/or could use defragmenting. Also, you might review any new drivers you've installed.

There's usually some degree of latency with the lower end cards, not to the dysfunctional level you've indicated, and the crackling and popping (unless there's some kind of clock issue, which I doubt) typically indicate a hard drive running it's ass off. If you have firewire or a usb interface on your laptop, I highly recommend you put your audio data on that, and leave the system drive to just manage the system. Running hires audio off of a drive beats the crud out out of it, and I'm sure you wouldn't want to lose your system partition along with everything else...

[otek]

Along with everything that's been said so far, please oh please get yourself a real interface solution with real drivers. Stop being cheap about it. Put yourself in a situation where you can spend your time being creative and making music, instead of fucking around with your gear.

God speed,

otek

[axeman69]

Somebody been messing with their buffer settings? Try to increase them a bit.

[Fulcrum]

Defrag early and often.

Clean your audio disk, too. Maybe not as often, but as often as you remember to do it. There's a menu option to let you do that. Then defrag again.

How are you getting clock? You may have two or more options to play with here-- maybe Sonar can get clock from your motherboard, or from your sound card, or maybe it can even provide its own. Choose the least evil-sounding of these.

[Brendo]

I am.

Don't.

[SaltyDog]

There's stuff happening in XP that that can mess you up that doesn't even show up in the task manager. Ever had windows explorer time out? Nothing that says there is a problem in the TM.

Marc Russinovitch's sysinternals is a great site to have a look under the hood.(even though he has been bought out by Microsloth)

http://www.sysinternals.com

Ack!! a redirect to Redmond...anyhoo...go get filemon and process explorer and see what's happening.

There used to be a great little monitoring utility called GLINT...ahh, found it:
http://scitechconcept.com/glint.html

Also check your PCI bus and make sure nothing is hogging it...like the vid card.....rummage...rummage..rummage..

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=951#download
Good luck in finding the gremlins!

[omikl]

I hate to state the obvious but stop everything that's not associated with your recording.

Disconnect from the internet, disable your friewall & real time virus scanner. Get shut of MSN/Yahoo messenger/Skype/whatever else IM you might have lurking there. Clean that machine down to the bare bones while you're recording.

Are you running XP or XP Pro? Eiother way, go to the Services menu and disable all the crap the MS seems to think you want to waste memory & processor interrupts on, like Web server, RPC server, Windows messaging, etc.

Then it might work.

Like the guys say, laptops are not ideal for this sort of thing. At the very least you need a decent soundcard that will take some of the processor load and a second drive on a different IDE channel where you can put your audio files.

[martinw2k]

I managed to get recordings done last night that were all in sync.
The system must have been doing something strange the last few days, although the CPU usage wasnt high at all. Plus I defraggd a few days ago, and there is still a lot of free space left.

Anyway thanks for most of your replies.
I am getting the Alesis IO|14 firewire audio interface whenever the shop decides to send me it!

I record music for my band, and my projects arent going to be up to pro standards. I have had no problems with recording onto my system's internal drive and see no reason why I should be buying an external one, especially for the type of work Im doing. Besides, I have more important purchases to save for such as acceptable mics and monitors.

[FajitaTone]

you'll be real pissed the day your HD crapps out and you lose your entire Laptop. but keep recording to the system drive.

Roll eyes

[otek]

I have had no problems with recording onto my system's internal drive and see no reason why I should be buying an external one.

Martin, you're going about this the wrong way.

Here's where you should have asked yourself why several more seasoned recordists are telling you, recording to the internal drive might be a bad idea.

Better yet, you should have asked said recordists why they consider it a bad idea.

I'm holding off on the answer until it appears you actually want to listen.


Cheers,

otek

[dwoz]

There's two things going on here. First off, if there's lots of stuff open (including audio files within your recording app), then the recording app itself can get into too much memory, and the operating system starts paging memory. That requires HUGE cpu work, so it ends up glitching your audio. Remedy is to close down as much as you possibly can... mixdown/render a single guide track to use during recording, and mute all others, close all other apps, especially apps that might use the audio system.

The other thing that causes this, is if you have some contention for the audio system. It can be caused by anything on the PCI buss...network card, video, ATI or SCSI controller, whatever. I have found when this happens, that I have to close all audio apps, and restart.

Certainly, a disk that needs defragging is also a likely cause.

I'm making the assumption that you've added no new programs or drivers.

dwoz

[martinw2k]

you'll be real pissed the day your HD crapps out and you lose your entire Laptop. but keep recording to the system drive.
This is why I back up my projects to another computers drive and also DVDs Coolio.


Here's where you should have asked yourself why several more seasoned recordists are telling you, recording to the internal drive might be a bad idea.
I did, I figured they do this because it gives your system better performance than trying to read/write audio data from the drive your OS is spinning on. Also it gives you more space, but I delete my old project data once I have backed it up/stopped working on it.

[FajitaTone]

I did, I figured they do this because it gives your system better performance than trying to read/write audio data from the drive your OS is spinning on. Also it gives you more space, but I delete my old project data once I have backed it up/stopped working on it.

Bingo!

it has nothing to do with space. Hell, an OS drive can be 250GB, I still wouldn't record audio to it.

[otek]

I did, I figured they do this because it gives your system better performance than trying to read/write audio data from the drive your OS is spinning on. Also it gives you more space, but I delete my old project data once I have backed it up/stopped working on it.

Oh, then so you do see a reason why you should do it. You just don't give a shit. :)

Dude, it's fine - taking the piss here.
:lol:

[Barish]

Have you tried these tweaks first?

http://www.musicxp.net

Secondly, make sure that your project's sample rate matches the loop clips sample rates. Sonar won't do sample conversion during import just like Pro Tools does.

Thirdly, check the Global properties to see if the program locks to audio rather than MIDI Time Code.

B.