Sonar 5 Producer Edition questions

A few stats on your PC may help

OS =
Sound card =
Sound card driver =
CPU =
RAM =
Latency =
Sample rate =
Bit depth =
number of HD's =

Those sorts of things may be of assistance in resolving the problem.

Hi Spacecat.

You could try a free program called ASIO4ALL:
http://www.asio4all.com/
All the setup info you need can be found on the website.

It's highly likely that your problems are because of using the internal soundcard.
I'd suggest a cheap upgrade like M-Audio's Audiophile 24/96.
And maybe a RAM increase too.

Take a look at my specs below =)

Hi chilldanny :) thank you! Why do you reccommend a universal sound driver, are the Realtek drivers not reasonable?

The soundcard isn't an onboard chip, it's a physical card we put in. SORRY :D I should've thought the term "Realtek HD Audio" itself says NADA about that. I can open up the PC and have a look :) but right now I'm typing this message and wanted to add that I had no problems with Adobe Audition trial or other ones, but I really would like to use Sonar... so I'm a little suspicious about it being the setup, if you forgive me :)

Also, are you sure 1.8Gb RAM is not enough for Sonar 5? That is really scary, the reccommendation is 512Mb o_o

Thanks very much!!!! ♥

This is straight from Cakewalks help file
Realtek audio cards are generally provided with your computer.  They are designed for general media playback and, though they will work with Cakewalk software, you would get better performance using a device designed specifically for audio recording.

What that means is that onboard sound cards not made to be used with recording programs. They lack the drivers, converters and proper inputs and outputs!!

You have had sonar for many years now, since your on version 5. Have you been using the realatec card for the past 3 years or so? If it worked before and doesn't work now, then you changed something in your pc, so change it back!!

Here is a list of some good sound cards.
http://audio-mastering-mixing.com/FAQ___Q_A.html#33

CJ

Hi Rbh!! Thanks so much for the information, explanation and reassurance, I could really use that :)! Great that you've used it for so long and it's been so positive! Again, thanks for breaking it down for me a bit. :) I do plan to invest a bit more in the system in the near future, and the info you posted really helps. ♥

Hi again Wookiee!! :) thanks for replying, yes by the time I posted it I wondered if I was asking myself a rethoric question 8) just to be on the safe side I should prob a) have the antivirus off when installing, and b) not have it on when using the software. Which should be quite alright. It just didn't occur to me before. Just like... ahem... *cough cough* I only remembered to update the audio driver for the realtek chip when I was noting down the info for here :D

Thanks everyone !!! ♥

Thanks tarsier! Interesting different advice! :) It actually concurs with my experience with the antivirus now (Bullguard). And thanks for the soundcard suggestion!!

So here is what happened: I couldn't disable all of the antivirus suite without my system becoming rather unstable. Since their tech support had advised me to reinstall it due to an unrelated problem recently anyway, I figured OK and uninstalled it. No change.
Then I uninstalled Sonar and reinstalled. No change, but at setup I noticed it tried to copy settings from the Sonar 7 PE trial I once had on the computer. I thought I had removed all of that... And some programs can't deal with demo leftovers. I dunno if this had something to do with it, but I uninstalled Sonar again, then did a registry cleanup of all things Cakewalk and defragged (there wasn't much need, but why not). Then I did a new installation (no antivirus present) and reinstalled my Antivirus afterwards.
And: It works!
No corruptions on recording new audio or playing existing tracks!!

I want to avoid this happening again though, so I wonder:
Did this happen because Sonar couldn't get through to the soundcard properly? It went through a setup screen with my Creative soundcard, and I don't know if it did that with the Realtek chip last time, or tried the soundcard but didn't quite make it (the card wasn't visible on my system, until we disabled the chip in the BIOS and slotted the soundcard into a different slot on the motherboard).

Or could remainders of a Sonar 7 (or 8!) trial have caused problems?

Or was my antivirus to blame?

Or yes, maybe the slot my soundcard was sitting in was somehow dodgy. Eventhough this is a brand new motherboard and behaving well otherwise o_o

Because if I upgrade to another sound card in the future, etc, etc, will I really need to uninstall and reinstall Sonar to pick up the card change?

:) thanks very much for all the help and advice so far!

♥

SoundBlaster cards prefer a sample rate of 48000, not 44100. Also, select bit depth of 16. All of those are in Options-Audio. In Options-Audio-Drivers, deselect all but the SoundBlaster ins and outs.