Sonar 5 glitchy and stuttering audio

[JKoeth]

I've got Sonar 2 and it works without a hitch.

I just got Sonar 5 and it plays back old projects perfectly. When I record new projects with it the audio playback glitches and stutters.

I've shut down all programs and the CPU is running at about 8% when idle.

I went through the Help section and tried some things to no avail.

Help!!!

[mavrick10_2000]

I'm not intimately familiar with Sonar, but usual popping and latency problems are associated with having a bad / incorrect driver installed or misconfigured. Are you using the latest driver (ASIO) with your interface?

[JKoeth]

Yup. Got the newest one.

[Guyote]

Here's a link to an audio stuttering thread at the Cakewalk Sonar forum. They're discussing a lot of possibilities and finally got a solution. Don't know if this will help you, but worth a look, eh?

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.asp?m=639145&mpage=1&key=audio%2Cstutter򜂩

Good luck

G

[GuitslingerTim]

I've got Sonar 2 and it works without a hitch.

I just got Sonar 5 and it plays back old projects perfectly. When I record new projects with it the audio playback glitches and stutters.

I've shut down all programs and the CPU is running at about 8% when idle.



It would help to provide the specs of your pc and drives.

How many processes are running in the background?

[JKoeth]

I used End it All 2 to to kill most apps. Shut down Norton and Zone Alarm.

The wierd thing is, I recorded 2 separate projects today. Both projects are just a single guitar track. The one with the effects runs perfectly but the one without effects is glitchy throughout.

I don't get it at all.

[GuitslingerTim]

Okay, let's try it like this:

Which soundcard do you use?

Do you have a second hard drive dedicated to audio?

Have you optimized your pc for audio work by turning off unneeded services and other functions in windows XP?

Are you sure you have enough memory and a fast enough cpu for Sonar 5?

[Brian D]

Also, check for sample rate or word clock conflicts in your recording chain.

[flatfinger]

Check this out..

http://www.musicxp.net/tuning_tips.php

Most clicking is caused by the video card and the sound card fighting it out on the pci buss. My system , which is pretty up to date w/ lots of ram and such , gets to a certian point and I'm forced to close vst windows down to cut the amount of rendering the video has to do. does'nt S5 have more eye candy??


one of the hazards of updaing seems to be that the programmers always write code that is more demandong as far as hardware goes; but then again , we want more bells and whistles, don't we?


best of luck, let us know what you find out.

[JKoeth]

Hey Guys!

Thanks for all your input. It seems that the problem was mostly solved by switching the location of the Audio Folder. In Sonar 2, I had the Audio folder on my second hard drive which was dedicated to the Audio Folder only and nothing else. Seems that Sonar 5 somehow switched the location. It may have been that I selected to save the data per project or something.

Things are working better now and I also included some of the XP tweaks listed above.

Thanks for all your help! Sonar 5 runs smoother much better than Sonar 2 for me.

[tunnelvisionmus]

Sounds more like a buffer latency issue. Post your settings and I will compare to mine.

Here is my setup
Tascam DM24 Digital Mixer
tdif to Motu MKIII
firewired to PC via Motu card
PC 3.2 processor with 3gig of ddr memory
standard ata drives

Glad to help!

[GuitslingerTim]

Check this out..

http://www.musicxp.net/tuning_tips.php

Most clicking is caused by the video card and the sound card fighting it out on the pci buss. My system , which is pretty up to date w/ lots of ram and such , gets to a certian point and I'm forced to close vst windows down to cut the amount of rendering the video has to do. does'nt S5 have more eye candy??


one of the hazards of updaing seems to be that the programmers always write code that is more demandong as far as hardware goes; but then again , we want more bells and whistles, don't we?


best of luck, let us know what you find out.

There is a long thread on the Cakewalk Sonar forum called 'Reclaiming SATA For Audio' or something to that effect. In it one of the members details how he solved the problems he was having due to pci latency timers being set to very high numbers by audio card manufacturers which causes the cards to be resource hogs. By using one of several available programs, the pci latency timers can be changed on the fly by the user to a lower setting, freeing up IRQ cycles for the soundcard.