Sonar X1 Does Not Play Audio... At First

I always have to open a second file, play it, then close it, to hear audio from the first file. What gives?

Bump...

Have you tried opening the properties window (i.e. hit 'P'), then dismissing the window with "OK"? I have to do that every time I start X2 before I get any sound.

robert_e_bone


Hang on - I do not at all have this issue with X2, which would lead me to think some settings need reviewing and adjusting.

Can you please detail your software and hardware specs and settings?

If you were to open a new project, using the Normal template, and insert an audio track of any MP3 file and hit play, what happens?

Bob Bone

I'm with Bob on this, not seeing this problem here.
 
Can you give some more detail, as this should be fixable, and not a Sonar problem.

Dev might be MIA for a bit.

Just noticed the original post was from months ago with a " Bump " just done.

I agree with FBB and the others that say this not normal.

I suggest you give us a breakdown of your system and more detail on just what is happening. 

If you are recording MIDI from a MIDI controller it should be near instant. If you are playing back there should be no delay.  

A delay in recording that is a noticeable time delay for a note to sound this is known as latency and can be adjusted by changing your audio buffers for your driver. However some audio cards such as the Sound Blaster will not give you low latency. A card with low latency drivers will take of this.

It could be a system issue.  Where Sonar is installed wrong. Or how you have your project setup and what plugins you are using.

Without knowing what your card is its hard to go much further in this. 

I'm up!

So my computer is an HP T6400 notebook with 3gb of RAM. I'm not using an interface and this notebook has the IDT HD sound chipset. The drivers are horrid so I'm using ASIO driver instead - which works like a charm.

Bob Bone: If I launch Sonar, and create a new project with the Normal template and drop in an MP3, and click play, Sonar does nothing. The play button activates but gets stuck in the down position for a few seconds but playback does not begin. If I then open another audio project and click play, it plays fine. When I switch back to the NEW project it will now play just fine. This happens with any combination of audio track steps. The only thing that is common is that I must open a second file, play it, then go back to the first file.

Mike Leghorn: Which properties window?

I'm thinking the same thing you guys are. I'm not convinced this is Sonar. It's so flawless, right? :) And certainly there are no roadblocks with what I'm doing: once I open and play a second file, it all works fine after that. It's just...uh... quirky...

I like the plugins thought from John. I'll check the two files to see if there's a weird plugin issue.

You seem to be using the on board sound chip. It is fine for playing back media player songs but is useless for work with Sonar. You really need to get a sound card meant for DAW use. Until then you will have nothing but problems. 

As far as you using ASIO with this sound chip. That is an illusion. What ASIO for All does is wrap the windows driver to appear as an ASIO driver. It isn't. You are most likely actually using a wdm  or mme driver that Asio for all uses to access that sound chip. Remember this, that chip cost maybe $.50. It is not meant to run at low latency or provide quality sound input.

Its a waste of your time to trouble shoot this until you opt for something better.


Edit to add. it seems FBB has a totally different take on this. I still stand by the above post.

deved.com


Oh, yes, what I meant to say is that I am using the ASIO4ALL driver.

If you read my post I figured that out already. On board sound chips don't provide an ASIO driver.

Gotcha, John. I was replying to FBB and our messages must have leap-frogged. :)

I too have used ASIO4ALL with no issues - but switched to an external interface as soon as I could, to lighten the load.

The demands placed on ASIO4ALL, and on the CPU determine what the sound quality is.  For playing MP3 imported audio in Sonar, you would have no trouble.  For loading 20 synths and some audio and expecting that to cruise through might produce problems with audio quality.

So, I do not understand your comment about the solution you have working - is that solution that you are using Ableton Live instead?   Or did you mean that once you installed that the Sonar issues cleared up and now Sonar is working properly with regard to sound output?  Please clarify.

The fact that a simple MP3 playback of 1 imported track is still causing issues would indicate either a major problem with the drivers, and/or a major problem with the install.  Perhaps there is a sample rate mismatch between the ASIO driver and Sonar's setting in Preferences?

Bob Bone

Interesting.  I have the same issue, but my workaround is different.  Whenever I first open SONAR: no audio, start button sticks down for a bit, same as above.  I'm also using ASIO4all. My workaround is to click on the ASIO4all icon in the Windows taskbar notification area to bring up the ASIO4all control panel.  I then close that, SONAR tells me the audio interface has been reset do I want to troubleshoot it? I cancel that dialog, and now audio works fine.  This happens with the onboard soundcard on my laptop and on my desktop.  I'll try it with the Alesis USB interface I have and see what happens.
 
I saw it with X1 and now X2, x64 and x32 as I recall.  I guess I've just gotten used to it.  I don't think I'm going to buy Live to 'fix' it though!

Likely a SONAR-ASIO4all interaction of some sort. None of my other apps that use ASIO seem to have the problem (Reaper, Cantabile, Savihost, Geist standalone, z3ta+ standalone, etc.) And sadly, my laptop does have Live Lite installed, and still has the problem. I suspect that SONAR is doing more to negotiate start up settings with ASIO4all than most hosts, and something get's confused.

No, MS wavetable isn't selected (in MIDI devices output, I assume?)

However, I just played with things a bit, and as long as I leave the sampling rate at 44.1k in the drivers settings of preferences, when I start SONAR up again, things play right away.  I can change it to anything once the program starts, and things are fine, but if I don't put it back to 44.1k before shutting SONAR down, no sound starting up.  And it looks like the minimum to get sound back is to go to Preferences -> Driver Settings and select any frequency, even the one the same one, and that corrects the issue.

All of my hosts were set to 48k, and only SONAR has a problem with it.  I wonder if SONAR isn't initializing that in ASIO4all properly?