Sonar introducing strange noises into tracks...

Do you have Amplitube in the project on a guitar?  You mentioned track 3... is it the guitar? 

Since Amplitube is a plug in the underlying waves will NOT have the noise burst in them. It is added by the plug in while it is reproducing the effected audio in playback.

Amplitube does this until you register it properly.  Although it comes with Cake products, it is registered through a different server.... not a cake server. 

Once registered, that noise will go away. It's a protection scheme to keep unauthorized users from using it.

I had this occur once and it was recently. It was on a tom track. The waveform in this area looked nothing like a typical waveform. When zoomed in, there were lines of varying length hanging down from the top of the track and lines of varying length sticking up from the bottom. Fortunately it was in a section with no tom hits and I was able to delete it that section. And when it occurred, it was quite loud. Mine was definately digital white noise.
 
Mine had absolutely nothing to do with an unregistered plug. I was running a fully registered instance of Amplitube on a different track, certainly not a tom track.
 
Have used every upgrade from CWP8 thru 8.5.3 extensively and as I said, it's only happened that one time and was in 8.5.3.

Makes me wonder if I should upgrade to X2 when it comes out or look elsewhere... Any ideas?

X2 is not going to fix this problem. This is not a Sonar problem. You have either a demo plug-in or some other issue. I'll give it some thought, but I'm fairly certain the upgrade isn't going to fix it.  No one else has reported this sort of problem so this has to be specific to something you have or have done. 

It sounds like you've recorded the noise onto the track. Do you see the noise in the waveform? 
You might try disconnecting all inputs and then replugging them in one at a time to try to isolate where its coming from.  
Maybe you have a bad cable from your guitar. Check your cables out. 

If there are layers, I'd be shocked. The last time it happened (yesterday) the following things had been done: A) All tracks were imported one at a time from the raw stems. B) All volume faders had been lowered 10db (without automation on, just lowered the faders). That's it. No plugins, not even the Sonitus:FX EQs in the channels were turned on.

3rd song in a row this is happening... I HAVEN'T PUT ANY PLUGINS YET! First as I import the files... random noise in some track... delete track, reimport, gone... Then I change a fader.. .random noise appears IN A TRACK I DID'NT EVEN TOUCH... delete track, reimport, gone. I'm fighting a losing battle, and looking at Studio1 and Protools websites...

Sorry, Tkrain, to be flip in my last post, I really figured somebody had helped you peg this.  I'd agree that it's something on your end, but it could also involve something in Sonar that only shows under certain conditions.  The plugin theory makes the most sense, but if you're sure it's not that, I have two suggestions - first download a program called DPCLAT and measure the latency on your system. Keep it running in a window when you are working sonar, and see if there are latency spikes when the problem occurs. Systems act weird when they can't get real-time resources they need, and it wouldn't surprise me if that is what you're running into. Good thing is its easy to test, the program is pretty striaghtforward - run it and watch the graph.   The other thing you can do is download the trial version of some other DAW, or Reaper which costs maybe $50 US for the full version, and see if it shows when you import tracks into something other than sonar. But try the latency check first - DPLCAT.EXE.  

Also, are you running any security software  or connecting to the web on these machines?

Dave, I did try changing out the DI boxes... I use either the Toneport DI Silver or the M-Audio MobilePre. These aren't even tracks I recorded, though, these are either tracks from Indaba, or tracks that others have recorded for me to mix. When the noise "appears", yes, you do find it in the waveform of the track... but... this is after a -=playback=- not a record. If I stop right when the anomoly appears and -=don't save=-, I can go into the audio folder and play the stem in Windows Media and verify the sound is not in the original stem. If I -=save=- the project when the sound is present, it then appears in the stem in the audio directory. My new workaround is I keep the folder with the original stems I've been sent open, and if the anomaly appears in a track, I delete the audio in the track and re-import it from the original stem folder... and walla, the sound goes away. Of course... 20 minutes later, the anomaly appears in a different location in a different track. When this first started happening, it was once in a blue moon, and I really thought it was a plugin issue. Now it's happening often enough that it's really really impacting my workflow, and it's happening before I insert a single plugin, and yes, yesterday I was very frustrated and may have gotten a little vitriolic in my post. I've tried increasing buffer size, I've tried shrinking it to nothing. I've tried running in WDM/KS, WASAPI, and ASIO, I've tried with and without read/write caching. I've tested my memory and hard drives at the bios level. Today, I'm going to try completely uninstalling and reinstalling Sonar.

daveny5

these are either tracks from Indaba, or tracks that others have recorded for me to mix.

I have no idea what that means, but I suspect that this is related to the problem.  

and walla

This is a pet peeve of mine. It's "voila". 


Your workflow is too complicated for me to figure out so I'm out. I do all of my own work and don't receive files from others. Good luck with that. 

Dave you do not mess around. I am a little afraid of you, but I gotta tellya, I spell it 'viola', myself.   It's pronounced vai-ola, after the fashion of the hillbillies.  Ham it up as hard as you can when you say it this way, and you can get a lot of mileage...

This is an odd one. I wonder if the OP might have some device that is cycling in some way. A network adapter or some other time based device that is on the same IRQ. 

The notion of a plugin that is not authorized was a very good idea yet seemingly that has been ruled out. 

I can say this its not normal nor have I come across this in quite this way on this forum. 

One last thing to try is change the audio buffers either via the VST control panel or the built in slider for WDM drivers. 

Also make sure that all the files have the same sample rate. 

bvideo


How about file system corruption? Chkdsk? I don't think Sonar is known to overwrite files imported into the audio folder. You could check the timestamps to see if you can see it happening (i.e.upon save). Also, how about h/w disk or ram problems?

You know I am impressed with this post. Its a very insightful one. I must say all your points are superb.


What struck me so strongly is your noting the fact that Sonar never messes with the audio files unless it is made to do so. And that is often a copy.  

OP here. :)
 
I'm starting to go with the IRQ concept... something interrupting the processing... muddling with the memory. Actual bios level tests of the hard drive and memory come up clean, but that doesn't always mean anything. What I've taken to doing is when I'm planning on working on a file, I do a complete shutdown/restart, and the only thing I'm loading is Sonar. That seems to be helping. It may be that FireFox or Thunderbird is the actual culprit. I actually mixed a song yesterday without a single hitch, with nothing else running. I'm bugger as to why. I guess I need to do some more observation on what's going on in the background to see what I can correlate to this problem. It's got to be -=something=- going on, I just don't know what.  I'm at the stage where I'm mixing songs for locals, mostly for free, sometimes for gear... I've got to eliminate the obstacles... Can't build a local rep as a mixer if I hand out mixes with Squawks in them. For now, clean starts and just Sonar seems to be working.
 
Dave, the files at Indaba aren't bad. You can listen to them in Media Player, or just about any other listening environment, no problem. This corruption is occuring after import into Sonar, and usually long after I've played the tracks several times. As long as I don't save the project after I discover an anomoly, it doesn't write the anomoly into the Audio folder... lesson I've learned, save early, save often, but after verifying track integrity. :) I'm glad to see, by the way, that you found Indaba. For me, it's a great big playground of tracks to practice mixing and editing. I know I'll never win any of their contests (I um... don't dubstep) but there is a small community of serious musicians and it's helped me stretch my skills and work with music I'd never think of producing myself. How cool is this? I'm remixing a new Barry Manilow song!
 
"walla".. Hmmm.. you're right, it is voila. Sorry about that... I think my daughter's texting skills are rubbing off on her dad...

How cool is this? I'm remixing a new Barry Manilow song!

Well.... that's really not that cool... at least not in my book.