SONAR 7 Waves PLUG-IN problem

Hi there Bob (?) and welcome to the Cakewalk forums.

As it happens, you've dropped into the Guiatr Tracks forum, not the SONAR forum - however, you're problem, input monitoring latency, is a common problem found in all recording software to some extent or other.

I assume you're running Guitar Rig as a VST plug in the FX bin of a track.

With the 'Echo', or 'Input Monitoring' button switched off, all you will hear is the clean, unprocessed signal coming from your guitar. Importantly, this dry signal is also what SONAR will record. When you hit the playback button, SONAR now routes the dry recorded signal through Guitar Rig and you will here the processed signal.

To test this, turn off Guitar Rig during playback and you'll just hear the dry signal again.

If you enable the Echo button when recording, SONAR routes your dry signal through Guitar Rig so you can hear exactly what the effect is doing; however, it will still record the DRY signal - the effect is NOT added to your guitar at this point.

The idea is that you can record while listening to the processed signal - most guitarists prefer to do this it seems.

But, and this is a big but, the time taken for SONAR to do all this on the fly processing takes up a certain amount of time - the delay between your hitting a string and hearing the processed sound is called latency.

Obviously, as you are experiencing, this delay can sometimes be too long to work with - ideally, you need to get that latency down to as short a time as possible, if it's impreceptable to you then this is just about as good as can be accomplished.

There are many variable that cause latency, the efficiency of your soundcard and the processing speed of your PC are probably the two most important though. In these cases, large latency can normally be directly traced to recording through a stock built-in PC soundcard.

It would be of great help to us if you could list your PC specs - operating system, processor type and speed, amount of RAM, and the make and model of your soundcard, and which type of driver it is using.

First off though, you might try opening up Option>Audio>General and sliding the latency buffer slider across towards 'Fast' in increments and then check to see if the delay time comes down enough to allow you to work OK; however, be aware that you might push it across too far and your CPU may become too overworked resulting in drop outs and the like when you're recording.

Hope that helps

Steve

No need for a soundcard, everything work like I wanted, thanks a lot, you make my day :P !

I just put my latency down and I have the perfect feed back when I activate the echo. But now I prefer record my clean guitar, and change guitar rig setup while I'm listening the track. Thats so much usefull.

I was just wondering, my soundcard is a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, and it's difficult to get a great sound with guitar rig, thats sounds good but not great. I was wondering if a external sound card like M-Audio stuff will make the sound better ? If yes do have you some suggestions ?

Thank you!