Clicks in Sonar when a project has a LOT of tracks

Hi

First, sorry if this has been posted before. I tried doing a search and didn't find anything. I found a few messages about crackle but they were old or unrelated.

My problem is this: When I have a lot of audio tracks, say over 80, I get clicks and crackle while playing back audio if I do anything to the screen, like drag it forward a bit, or scroll down, or resize a track, pretty much anything graphical. 

The funny thing is that everything works perfectly until one day (when I have a lot of tracks) I do something like that and it clicks while I'm doing it, as if the computer is struggling to keep up (just a guess at the cause, but honestly I don't think that's it. More info later) playing audio AND doing complex graphics at the same time. What's funny is that although the clicks initially happen while I'm moving things on the screen, after I first hear them they happen every time on playback even if I'm just sitting here watching it, not touching anything. In fact, they continue to happen EVERY time I hit PLAY even after restarting the program! It's almost like I've programmed them in or turned on the click and crackle generator.

They happen in random places, different for each playback. They are not in the audio. If I mix (bounce) down the audio is perfect. They are digital-sounding clicks. In fact, it sounds almost exactly like playing a vinyl record that's all scratched up. And they get worse and worse (more of them) each time I hit Play.

Doubtful it's the audio engine or computer trying to keep up. I checked in Process Explorer and it never goes above 53% CPU usage. And like I said, it's fine until I happen to move something on the screen during playback. Once it starts, it never stops. It just gets worse.

Also, I'm not actually filling all the tracks. There are usually less than 15 tracks playing audio at a given time. I just like to keep each sound on a separate track. 

Computer is

Core 2 duo, E8400 CPU at 3.00Ghz
3gb RAM
Xp Pro sp3, all updates
Radeon HD 4550 graphics card
Cakewalk Project dir is on a new 1tb SATA drive
Sound card is Emu 1212
midi interface is Midisport 8x8

Any ideas would be much appreciated. Most of my songs end up being 80-120 tracks, mostly audio and this is REALLY annoying!

Thanks
Scott

MIGHT need to increase audio buffer size IF you are streaming a lot of audio data. Increasing this setting only effects how fast the playback happens when you hit play. It's only annoying when you have to increase it to a large amount. Usually when recording 8 or more tracks of pure audio, like a band and now you're in the mixing phase. It's the only time I encounter the need for such an increase.

Also, like Fog mentioned, might be your audio is on a shared IRQ and needs to be changed to a new slot. You would uninstall the driver and patchmix first. Delete anything in the registry pertaining to Creative Professional. Then move the card then reinstall.

I run the E-MU 1820m and I sometimes get something like you are describing when I am in piano roll view and working with NI Kontact5. One of the things I am suspecting as the culprit is the audio driver itself, which is most likely the same driver you are using.

I recently decided to install zonealarm free firewall, thinking I would leave my recording comp online 24/7 so I could pass audio around easily. It destroyed my audio... I was SO upset. I had to uninstall Patchmix, then the audio driver, delete everything pertaining to Creative Professional, reboot, reinstall the driver then P-mix and things went back to normal. SO... there is a good chance your current driver install was corrupted by something and ya have to do a "virgin reinstall" as it is called on the "unoffical" E-MU site at productionforums.com. You MIGHT have to do all that AND uninstall your 1212 reboot the comp, shut it back off then  put the card back in... and reinstall driver/P-mix. Why a firewall install would corrupt an audio driver is beyond me... BUT it happened.

Hey

Preliminary results: Excellent! That might be it!!

I increased buffers from 256 to 350 and so far no clicks! Although Enable Read Caching was turned off so maybe just turning it on was enough.

Thanks a lot guys, This is sooooo much better!

Scott

I was just working on a mixing contest project this week that had 82(!!!!!) stems. What a mess. With my M-Audio Mobile Pre, even setting buffers up to 2056 (not kidding!) didn't do any good... the mix was rice crispies in any attempt to play it within Sonar. Switched to my Line6 ToneDirect, was able to bring the buffers back to 512 and mix to my heart's content with only an occassional pop. As always the mix downs were fine...

Well, I was just about to report back that after adding even more tracks and effects everything is running absolutely smoothly and no clicks or crackle at all!!! 

Then Sonar crashed. 

This happens every couple of weeks. I ctrl-click and drag an effect from one track to another (put a copy on a different track) and as soon as I let go of the mouse button sonar locks solidly. You can't even click the red X to close it. 

And after killing it in Process Explorer I still can't restart it. I have to restart the computer before I can do that.

This doesn't happen every time, btw, I copy effects all the time but it only locks up once in a while.

Anyway, it just did it. After restarting all the clicks and crackle are back again. I checked the settings and everything is still as I set it before and I even increased the buffers again but no change. 

Cakewalk giveth, and cakewalk taketh away!

2 other things while I'm here:

1.  EVERY time I start the program and load a project and hit play, 5 seconds later the audio goes BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT and then everything is normal. EVERY time!

2. Every time I move the cursor to a different place Sonar thinks the file has changed and wants me to save it again. That never happened before! I just noticed it recently.

Thanks again for all the suggestions. It was great while it lasted!
scott 

EDIT: Good news!! I'm getting clicks in Youtube videos as well! Obviously this is a sound card issue, not Sonar! I'll do some testing and update later.

It was VERY good news. It was an important clue. From that I knew: 

A: It's not Sonar
B: It's not permanent (since it was working fine before)

I thought it over (slept on it) and realized what the solution was: Restart! 

The trick is to not just "reboot" but to actually shut the computer off completely. Power OFF. I've found this before when I have hardware issues like keyboard or CD-ROM problems. You need to completely power down, let it sit for at least 20 seconds, then restart. 

I just did that and Sonar is click free again! 

And in regards to your problem Tkrain, I agree. I had a similar problem with Chrome recently where it wouldn't load Flash web pages and would crash (I forget the details) and read about other people having the same problem. Eventually I realized that something else was using the audio drivers (or something along those lines) and was preventing Chrome from using it. As long as I shut the other thing down first, it worked fine. 

I disagree with the idea of limited file handles though. I often have many many files open at the same time  while working. Considerably more than 20. I'm sure it's often well over 100. Also Windows itself, along with other programs running in the background all have a lot of files also opened at the same time. Could still be a useful clue though.

My first suggestion to you (and this fixes a LOT of computer problems) is to clean up old Temp files. 

Start - Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Disk Cleanup. 

You can do it manually if you know where they are. I also recommend clearing the cache/browsing data in Internet Explorer (even if you don't use it just to be sure because it is integrated with the system).

Then have windows do a disk scan (chkdsk) on restart just to be sure there are no file system errors. You can do that from Windows Explorer. Right click on the Drive letter and choose Properties - tools - Error Checking - Check Now... - then check Automatically fix File System Errors. If you do that on a drive that is in use it will ask you if you want to do it the next time you restart. Click Yes and then restart and let it do the scan.

Scott

reboot cures almost anything in life..

Hi - I have had prior problems on previous machines running on both XP Pro and Win 7, and even some laptop-specific issues.  All of the issues I refer to are latency-caused audio problems.

My current computer is running X1 Producer Expanded, with 16GB of memory, a 512GB solid-state primary SATA 3 hard drive, 2 additional 2 Terabyte SATA 3 hard drives, with liquid cooling, and the fastest processor you can buy (Intel i7 2600K). Joy :)

Anyways, back to the prior problems.  Maybe some of this will help you.  There is a program you can download for free called DPC Latency Checker, and it will analyze and display current and maximum latency, scrolling along.  Anything below 500us is fine.  as you approach 1000us, it is still fine, but getting up there.  Above 1000us, you will begin to have latency that will begin to affect audio processing, causing pops, and dropouts, and such.  What's nice is that you can see the big spikes (if you have latency issues) and when they occur on a regular interval basis, there is usually some badly written device driver, interference by a running application - such as your virus software - or one or usually a bunch of services that are running in the background (print spooler, various network services, Apple and Java services, etc).

One of the things you can do is to try to eliminate as many of the non-music application and services that are running when you are preparing to do audio processing (using Sonar).  You can exit out of things like OoVoo and Skype, and some of the other applications that live in your system tray (you can also look at things in Task Manager).  Anyways, this is the easiest place to start.  As you are exiting out of these applications, you can look at the DPC Latency Checker to see if your latency seems to have dropped.  It will have retained whatever your previously recorded highest latency was, but there is a reset button you can click at any time after altering what is running to get a more current picture of the latency.

If you are still having high latency, you can do the same sort of thing with a lot of the services that are running.  This takes a little bit more effort, as you should look up what services can be safely temporarily turned off.  There are several ways to look at services - I happen to go into Computer Management and click on Services to view them.  You will find Computer Management by clicking the Start button, then right-clicking on Computer and then clicking on Manage, or you can click the Start button and type in Computer Management in the search box.  The results will display above the search box, and you can actually either just click on Computer Management at the top of the screen's returned search results, or you can drag Computer Management from the returned search results down to the task bar, which will forever pin it there if you plan to go into it on a regular basis.

Anyways, once you get the list of services displayed, you really only want to look at services that are currently running - so if you look at the top of the displayed services, you will see several 'tabs' at the top of each column.  Click once on the 'Status' tab, to display the services sorted in ascending alphabetical order of status.  Click once more on the 'Status' tab, and it will reverse the sort, so that you will be looking at the list of services in a descending alphabetical order of each service's Status.  This will result in you looking at the services that are actually 'Running', as that is the highest alphabetical status value.  Since you are in descending alphabetical viewing of the statuses, this will show you all the services with a current status of 'Running', which is precisely the ones that are potentially affecting your latency.

Now comes the tricky part.  Some of these are no-brainers 'Print Spooler' and such, but some of them you might want to leave running.  After looking up some of these services on the web for being ok to temporarily stopping them, you can proceed to click on the 'Stop Service' link, and Windows will attempt to stop each service you have clicked on the 'Stop Service' link.  This is one big giant pain in the behind, so my being a programmer, I wrote a couple of quick C# programs that allow me to create 'Profiles' (saved sets of services to be turned off), and then with just a couple of mouse clicks I can dynamically turn on/off whole sets of services (I think one of my profiles has something like 67 services in it).  Doing some of these one at a time is a pain, but it does work to temporarily stop the services you target for turning off.  You can turn them back on after you are done with your audio processing session, or you can simply reboot, and they will cheerfully start back up, since you did not change the start up settings for any of the services.  So if they normally start, they will do so all by themselves if you simply reboot when done with Sonar.

A lot of the time, turning off applications that are not needed when running Sonar, and temporarily turning off services not needed while running Sonar just buys you back whatever memory these applications and services are chewing up during Sonar use.  If enough things are running, the cumulative memory usage can begin to cause dropouts and pops and such.

I had turned off everything I could think of, including going into Device Manager and disabling some of the things I didn't need while running Sonar, such as my ethernet card and things like that, and I STILL had horrific latency spikes.  While in desperation turning off each potentially device possible, I discovered that my BATTERY devices for my laptop were what was causing latency spikes of well over 2600us (anything above 1000us will cause dropouts and/or pops).

So, all of this can be one giant pain, but once you get it figured out, it will work consistently well for you.    I would be happy to provide the little C# applications to anyone who might find them helpful.  I don't know if you can contact me directly through this forum, but if not just post a reply to that effect and I will post my email or facebook id or something like that (don't know if the forum weeds out things like that).

I certainly hope some of the above helped anybody.  Let me know if you have any questions about what I attempted to explain.

You mentioned YouTube so the first thing that comes to mind is your sharing the emu with windows. If that's the case you might configure windows to use the motherboards sound card. That way Sonar can have a dedicated sound card. I know there's mixed opinions on this forum about this. But that has always worked good for me. If you want to listen to YouTube etc through monitors you can use a small mixer. I know I've always had general glitchiness when using Aardvark Q10, Edirol FA-66 or RME Fireface as windows sound card. 

scotteh


Hi

First, sorry if this has been posted before. I tried doing a search and didn't find anything. I found a few messages about crackle but they were old or unrelated.

My problem is this: When I have a lot of audio tracks, say over 80, I get clicks and crackle while playing back audio if I do anything to the screen, like drag it forward a bit, or scroll down, or resize a track, pretty much anything graphical. 

The funny thing is that everything works perfectly until one day (when I have a lot of tracks) I do something like that and it clicks while I'm doing it, as if the computer is struggling to keep up (just a guess at the cause, but honestly I don't think that's it. More info later) playing audio AND doing complex graphics at the same time. What's funny is that although the clicks initially happen while I'm moving things on the screen, after I first hear them they happen every time on playback even if I'm just sitting here watching it, not touching anything. In fact, they continue to happen EVERY time I hit PLAY even after restarting the program! It's almost like I've programmed them in or turned on the click and crackle generator.

They happen in random places, different for each playback. They are not in the audio. If I mix (bounce) down the audio is perfect. They are digital-sounding clicks. In fact, it sounds almost exactly like playing a vinyl record that's all scratched up. And they get worse and worse (more of them) each time I hit Play.

Doubtful it's the audio engine or computer trying to keep up. I checked in Process Explorer and it never goes above 53% CPU usage. And like I said, it's fine until I happen to move something on the screen during playback. Once it starts, it never stops. It just gets worse.

Also, I'm not actually filling all the tracks. There are usually less than 15 tracks playing audio at a given time. I just like to keep each sound on a separate track. 

Computer is

Core 2 duo, E8400 CPU at 3.00Ghz
3gb RAM
Xp Pro sp3, all updates
Radeon HD 4550 graphics card
Cakewalk Project dir is on a new 1tb SATA drive
Sound card is Emu 1212
midi interface is Midisport 8x8

Any ideas would be much appreciated. Most of my songs end up being 80-120 tracks, mostly audio and this is REALLY annoying!

Thanks
Scott

I've experience this sometimes too in large Project over 4GB-6GB use of RAM and over + 100 track count.
I use SONAR X1 x64 Windows 7 x64. I change the graphic card to this and it seem to help. I run 2x 28HD + 1 24HD all in full HD 1920 X  1080 and set to all the best graphic quality on. No glitch whats so ever.
 
Highly recommended and you can't hear the fan during any load games SONAR X1 what ever...
http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/NVIDIA_Series/GT6402GD3/
 

Thanks for all the extra replies guys. Hopefully they will help other people, but like I said, everything is perfect now. No clicks or pops or crackle at all. It was mostly just enabling the Read Caching that did it. 

The second problem was due to the crash and because I didn't shut the computer down, I simply rebooted. Again, power has to be completely OFF for a full reset and that's what fixed it the second time. 
I agree with pretty much everything though. BUT... I use reverb and or delay, chorusing, flanging plus some pro-channel EQ and compression (also volume and pan and other envelopes) on a LOT of tracks (probably 80 out of 100) and I leave all of that on all the time. And again, now that I've enabled read caching, ZERO problems.

As for soft-synths, I wont say much other than I REALLY don't like using them or any midi at all. When I do (mostly just VB3, best B3 organ I've heard yet) I record a phrase, then freeze, then copy the audio to another standard audio track, then either delete the synth track folder or unfreeze and delete the midi data. I do this because in a previous version I found that every time I un-freezed, sonar would just disappear off the screen. Seems to work fine now (in X1)  but it still scares me. And like I said, I don't like working with midi, I prefer having a finished audio file. But that's just me!

Anyway, everything is perfect now so no worries!

Well.... maybe not EVERYTHING! It's pretty close though. Overall I'm very happy with Sonar X1 and spend VERY little time complaining. It takes a lot of getting used to but it's really nice to have all the flexibility.

Thanks again!
Scott