What instance do you keep open. Play back and record are 2 different task in sonar. If your using a reverb like perfect space, of course youll get latency, cuase that reverb is for mixing and mastering. Not tracking.
Of course you wont have latency durring playback, because its already recorded. The plugin doesn have to process the reatime signal. 
Disable all plugins and mmake sure you have no virus'es and make sure your latency is under 5ms
Cj

Hit control-D before you record and then angain to play back...

Yep, i promise you it will solve all your problems! Just remember to disable it again when you play back, otherwise your recently recorded material will be out of sync. Good luck!

I will never know why this happened !?!

Err ... have you changed any plugs or even changed where a plug is sitting in the audio signal chain?

I am about to give up!!!  (I am slowly switching to Live, which has a decent latency)

Now the latency is ALWAYS there, Even If I put it to 256 samples (5ms)  It is just unplayable.

What I did in the meantime was :

-I instaled Trilian VST
-Installed JBridge to get some of my 32 bit plugins to work
-JBrige made Trilian dissapear!?!
-uninstalled Jbridge
-Trilian still gone... lost 1 registration $%?&$?$

These are the only things I did...

No, Where is that?  I tried to find it in the transport tab...  Can you be more precise?

I found CTRL-D to turn it on or off, but where do I see If it is actually on or off?

This is the solution to my nightmare!  I must hit Ctrl-D once in a while when I try to save.  That would explain why it is sometimes there , sometimes gone...

Thank you!  I really was about to throw the towel on Sonar.

I have seen similar strange random latency problems with older versions of Sonar. I have not seen this recently. What would happen is that without changing anything in the project, out of the blue Sonar will suddenly add quite a large amount of latency, even without recording (you can tell by playing on the MIDI keyboard). The way to temporary "fix" this was to stop and restart the engine. At that point the latency would go away but would mysteriously re-appear a while later, again without making any changes to the project. At the time it drove me nuts, but as I said fortunately it doesn't happen anymore on my system at least.

As far as latency during recording, it is sometimes difficult to visualize why you get latency during recording but not during playback (ignoring the bug described above). Here's an example:

Let's say you have one track that has a VST effect that adds 441 samples of delay (10ms at 44.1KHz). Now you put that track into record mode and record the input from a mic. Ignoring latency introduced by the audio interface, etc, you can now see that whatever comes into the track will be delayed as it goes through the VST effect. When Sonar plays it out to the audio interface, the signal will now be delayed as expected. But now let's say you are done recording. The input to the track is now an audio clip. Since Sonar knows exactly by how many samples the signal is being delayed as it goes through the VST effect(s) (because the VST spec says the plugin should report this value back to the host), Sonar can now shift the clip in time so that it plays ahead by the total amount of calculated delay within the track. In fact it can even add some additional shift to compensate for the audio interface's output delay, etc.

So, the reason why you hear delay at recording time but not at playback time is because when recording, the input to the track is "rooted in reality" (as I like to call it), while a recorded clip has no such limitation and can freely be shifted both forwards and backwards in time to compensate for any delay in the signal path. As a side note, a track that is "rooted in reality", can have its signal shifted backwards in time (delay added), and Sonar actually adds additional delay to such tracks in order to line it up with other tracks that are also "rooted in reality" but that have an even larger amount of delay in its signal path. In the end, all such tracks will have the exact same amount of delay, whether by VST plugin delay, or via artificially added delay so that they at least all play back in sync, even if they are delayed.

In fact, if you had a second track that has no VST effect (and hence no delay), and you put this track into record mode while having the first track play back with its recoded clip (and 10ms delay), this time you would not have any recording delay (once again ignoring audio interface delay, etc). This is because Sonar only needs to add as much delay as the max delay within any track that is "rooted in reality". Since the first track is free to have its input shifted both forwards or backwards in time, Sonar can do this for the first track, resulting in zero delay for the second track that is being recorded.
 
EDIT: As an additional side-note to latence: Latency and CPU usage are two completely different concepts and one has no effect on the other. One plugin could have almost no CPU usage, but high latency, while another might have high CPU usage and zero latency.  Just something else that somtimes trips us up when we think about this stuff. 

batsbrew


makes me long for the good old tape player days.

You can certainly make Sonar act like a simple tape recorder by only using audio tracks and not using any plugins

I just GIVE UP.  It's been 3 months that I work with this %?&?%&%&?%

It's a %?&%& nightmare.

I now work with my old XP-50... no more VST.  Still having this latency problem.

What's up with that???

Tried everything above.

If someone can tell me the magic setting...  Would it be the MIDI interface in Fireface 800?

That is the only thing left I can think of...

All this for the Damn Fireface 800 MIDI interface... Just plugged my M-Audio Uno, works like a charm...

 
I was just going to suggest you try a different interface. But I was also going to ask you to clarify what you buffer setting is. I think Yourolpal suggested 512 samples on the previous page, and you said that's what it is.
 
That's too big for input monitoring (or playing soft synths) by my reckoning. Ideally you want to be under 128 samples. I run 96, and a lot of people run 64 with RME interfaces.
 
The M-Audio may just have installed with a lower default setting.
 
But it could be a problem with your firewire port or Fireface drivers (both audio and MIDI). All of that is testable by doing some loopback recordings of MIDI and audio separately. From everything I've read, the Fireface should outperform the M-Audio USB both in low-latency performance and sound quality.
 
 

and as said lower you buffers to 64 the lowest and see if that changes the recording lag it should for shure

Just a wild guess, but could it be the firewire cable?

That's because my 1T firewire drive came with a cable that did not fit my laptop.

So I bought a cheap one and I could read directories and do certain things OK.

But when doing bigger transfers to record mainly, I started getting problems that were unexplainable.

I bout another fw cable. It was fatter and no problems since then.

Aside, on laptops, the firewire does seem to have a rather insecure connection, easy to come loose, but that's the design of the little beast. But it is OK if not bothered.

I re-read this post and sadly, one year later I never found the solution to this poblem.  I'm sad because I bought Sonar X1 thinking all the problems would be fixed, but no.

Anyways, I didn't use sonar much during the past year (it only does it with Sonar)

BTW I bought a PCIe firewire 800 card and plugged the FF800 in it (this was my last reply last year) but didn't fix anything.

I'll post on the RME forums for more ideas.