Am I missing something here? (PC Issues)

Hi All,
 
Once again I'm having big problems with Sonar. Now my PC itself seems absolutely fine, I have super quick boot times and doing any tasks in Photoshop or any other program is a breeze but just not Sonar. I get audio engine drop outs all the time since re-installing 2 months ago when I had similar issues the program has slowed down and the problems more often, I think this time was the worst though as the actual round trip on audio has increased magically. I just seem to be having the worst luck imaginable with this program.

PC is a FM2+ Socket board with a AMD A10-7870K with R7 Graphics, 8GB RAM, Kingston SV300S37A 120Gb SSD, Toshiba DT01AACA00 1Tb drive for audio data, Line 6 Toneport UX2. 
 
The weird thing is that even though the program runs slow and crashes a lot the processor, memory and HDD indicators in Sonar never get anywhere near half their potential. Is anyone out there a PC - Sonar guru who could maybe Teamviewer on to my machine and see if they can at least see the problems, I'm really getting sick of it now, paid for my software and most of the time it's actually not usable.

Any suggestions or help as always massively appreciated, I don't know what else I can do now.

Thanks for the reply, out of interest when you get the drops what is the actual RAM indicator within Sonar displaying? I know it's not the most accurate thing in the world but I'm loading pretty small projects when this happens as well.

In fact on the weekend had a guy recording some acoustic guitar with me so literally a guitar and a vocal track, un-mixed and no VST's still got the drop out on audio and briefly after that a delay to the headphones that despite getting 15ms total roundtrip made it impossible to use whilst recording. Also then got a complete crash of Sonar and headphones fine when re-booted. Windows and background all seems absolutely fine when Sonar dies too, I shall put another 8GB in this weekend and see if that helps though.

Yeah drivers all up to date, unfortunately for the Line 6 Toneport UX2 that's still very old though. As I've sat here this morning I have plyed with the buffer within the ASIO panel and somehow things are now worse back on the exact settings they were to start with. Started off with 15ms round, increased buffer and got the round trip up to 25ms which is probably a bit too high, dropped buffer to previous 128 value and now round is 18ms???

Makes no sense, again thanks for the tips though :)

hey mattburnside . . . I hear your frustration, and I'd like to echo joakes on this one regarding raising the audio buffers . . . you've mentioned your live recording session and getting 15ms round trip latency, in my opinion that's living very close to the edge for your system specs as shown. Just because you can get 15ms doesn't mean your computer can record at that pace.
 
I've always found the reference for actually starting to hear mixing latency is somewhere around 33ms, so I think you could adjust your audio buffers upwards a bit and still be able to record without too much trouble.
 
Also, I'm not sure of your complete audio path setup to understand how or where you are monitoring your headphone mix . . . eg. are your headphones plugged into your audio interface or somewhere else ?
 
The fact that your computer can do amazing things in Photoshop doesn't mean so much, because audio leans on  totally different computer resources. The Line6 website says that your audio interface is Legacy, no longer supported . . . and you haven't said which version of Sonar you are running ?

mattburnside
Thanks for the reply, out of interest when you get the drops what is the actual RAM indicator within Sonar displaying? I know it's not the most accurate thing in the world but I'm loading pretty small projects when this happens as well.

In fact on the weekend had a guy recording some acoustic guitar with me so literally a guitar and a vocal track, un-mixed and no VST's still got the drop out on audio and briefly after that a delay to the headphones that despite getting 15ms total roundtrip made it impossible to use whilst recording. Also then got a complete crash of Sonar and headphones fine when re-booted. Windows and background all seems absolutely fine when Sonar dies too, I shall put another 8GB in this weekend and see if that helps though.

I'm not sure, because I don't have meter set to ram...I'm getting the reading from Windows Task Manager after crash. And I can see the bottle neck. From what I can tell, Windows isn't playing nicely with certain setups, when Sonar is running intensive mixes. I'm not sure how the memory is getting clogged, but Sonar gets stuttery when I've got a lot visually going on, even though the CPUs have plenty of power left. Now I've done all the troubleshooting, turned plugin load manager on and off, set up buffers, checked Windows hasn't turned on any Xbox rubbish after last updates. I've come to the conclusion that my machine or perhaps more succinctly...some component within my machine is no longer up to the challenge of being an audio computer. Something in Windows or Sonar or both has changed. My computer is over two years old now, and it could handle intensive mixes to a point in the past. I've started to do even more intensive mixes though lately, 64bit fp audio and mix...but it was after Windows 10 last update which broke the straw so to speak. I've even lost my switchable graphics card...driver. This lead me to the conclusion it was a bottle neck somewhere, involving memory and graphics. And hence my suspicion your having a similar problem, even though my audio computer is a laptop, but a decent 2000 dollar laptop, which was running fine, and I've got 16 gig of ram.

I've got my eye on an Acer gaming laptop with 32 gig of ram and an 8 gig graphics card, which I hope to get in a week or two to solve my problem.

Sorry I can't be much help. But hopefully we've worked out where the problem is.

Ben

I've had problems after upgrading to latest Windows Creator update with the audio playback not making any sound using my Tascam 20x20 interface. Tascam says there is a compatibility issue. You could try rolling back to the earlier version of Windows...Tascam suggested not updating until the bugs we're worked out by Microsoft.

mattburnside
Thanks for the reply, out of interest when you get the drops what is the actual RAM indicator within Sonar displaying? I know it's not the most accurate thing in the world but I'm loading pretty small projects when this happens as well.

In fact on the weekend had a guy recording some acoustic guitar with me so literally a guitar and a vocal track, un-mixed and no VST's still got the drop out on audio and briefly after that a delay to the headphones that despite getting 15ms total roundtrip made it impossible to use whilst recording. Also then got a complete crash of Sonar and headphones fine when re-booted. Windows and background all seems absolutely fine when Sonar dies too, I shall put another 8GB in this weekend and see if that helps though.

By default, the indicators in Sonar only show what Sonar is using, not what is being consumed outside of Sonar. You can change this setting, or use Task Manager to monitor your resources.
 
Regards,
Dan

Something Craig Anderton mentioned a while back might be worth looking into as well. Does you graphics adapter have any HD audio options? You will find that in Device Manager under Audio Devices, if so disable them. 
 
How many other USB devices do you have on your system? I had a bad bottlenecking issue with my Focusrite because all my USB devices (mouse, iLock, MIDI controller) were using the same internal hub. Once I moved the Focusrite to its own USB port/hub all those issues went away and I noticed even my CPU usage dropped a bit.
 

One more thing to add is that the Toneport has two settings that affect the round trip, the actual buffer size at the top of this and then the slider. Anyone any idea what the slider actually is doing? Fine tuning the buffer?
 
Image from current settings, also no change since disabling HD audio, still hanging and crashed since.


 
I think I found out that the memory is being used now as my graphics card recently went down. Obviously won't be helping but is certainly not the root cause as was like this when graphics were on a separate card too.
 
Thanks for the replies and to anyone who joins in with any info or suggestions.

Looked over the Scarlett range and watching one on eBay now. 

Just noticed after more testing this score on the SSD where Sonar is installed, these figures look awful??

Try disabling your WiFi dongle while using Sonar.  That has been reported to cause issues on some systems.
 
Also, run the free Resplendence LatencyMon to analyze the possible causes of buffer underruns due to DPC latency, which can cause audio dropouts, even without any other system bottlenecks.
 
It will analyze your system for real-time audio and report processes responsible for causing audio latencies which result in drop outs.
http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
 
If these suggestions don't help, then testing an alternate audio interface is probably a good next step.

So I'd be lying if I said I understood a fraction of this data I've collected with the latency monitor. Noticed when actually opening a project today for the testing though that it tookj around 4 minutes maybe more to open, again masking me think it's the PC itself and maybe not the Toneport although I want to replace that as well to be sure.

See results from Latency monitor below, has anyone any ideas what it all means? I mean there were no pops or clicks during these tests, also had 512 buffer with no WiFi dongle. As always thanks in advance.,

https://www.dropbox.com/s...tn/Conclusion.txt?dl=1



 

unfortunately for the Line 6 Toneport UX2 that's still very old though
 
This

Cactus Music
unfortunately for the Line 6 Toneport UX2 that's still very old though
 
This

 
It may be old technology and not the best sound quality, but I used one of these from 2007 to 2016 and never had any serious issues with it. In fact I still use it sometimes with my laptop. It works well as a portable device because it's so lightweight. I'm certainly not ready to discard it yet.

But I see your using Windows 7. 
One of the best way's to trouble shoot is to swap out potential troublemakers and see what resolves the issue. This can be a simple as a bad cable.
Not everyone has 2 audio interfaces sitting around but a trip to a local music store I'm sure they would be happy to let you try an up to date interface to see if it solves the issue.
Good reliable ASIO drivers are super important to Sonar. And ones that have been optimized for windows 10 might be the case here.