Jerky behavior of the now marker

Every now and then I experience that the now marker behaves perculiarly. During recording and playback it jumps from every measure rather tan running smoothly. Latency increases as well. This phenomenon will not disappear until I restart computer. Has anyone experienced this and has been able to solve it wihtout rebooting?

equality


Every now and then I experience that the now marker behaves perculiarly. During recording and playback it jumps from every measure rather tan running smoothly. Latency increases as well. This phenomenon will not disappear until I restart computer. Has anyone experienced this and has been able to solve it wihtout rebooting?

it happens to me every now and then. If a reboot solves it.... hummmmm..... could be something has corrupted the program in memory.... since most of the processes are running from memory and not from disk..... I've experienced this as well and when I see those symptoms I know a complete system shutdown and a cold boot are required to get back to a stable system.


another thing that will cause a jump now marker in playback is a project that has the processor running hard to keep "all the balls in the air". If you have a bunch of synths and processor draining audio FX running in the project...... try freezing them temporarily. Freezing prints the FX and synths to the audio track and eliminates all the real time processing which sucks the CPU cycles. The DAW tries to keep everything running and audio to the speakers in real time and it sacrifices the video updates to do so.....hence you see a jumpy now marker. Freezing to audio eliminates the processing and if the marker runs smooth, you simply had a heavy load on the DAW. 


I see this as well from time to time and when everything else is running normal, I will freeze things and see if that makes life better. If not... the reboot is the answer. 


Once something gets shaky in the memory resident parts of the program (perhaps not in Sonar but in the OS) .... the best... the BEST thing to do is to take the time to reboot. What does a few minutes matter when if you continue, you might end up with a more serious crash that takes hours of work with it? 

Jerky or sluggish video, sometimes accompanied by slow response to keyboard commands (e.g. hit spacebar during playback, playback doesn't stop immediately) is most likely a sign that the CPU is just barely keeping up. Priority will go to processing audio, at the expense of UI responsiveness. Next time it happens, pull up the DPC Latency Checker and report what you see.

Do you use MIDI sequencing to any hardware synths? I've noticed this as well when a MIDI buffer on a synth is messed up. I have seen this after playing around with X1's arp. Bouncing the synth cures it for me.

Regards,
Dan

I only use software synths nowadays. Could this really be a CPU-issue? I mean upgrading to an Intel i7 processor was probably together with two SSD-disks the most effective change I made from the computer I had before with Sonar 8.5, with which I never had a jumping Now Time marker.

Just tested and re-verified that the Pause/Break key will toggle Sonar from smooth cursor to jumping by measure. It is easy to hit this key by mistake.

Pause/Break key! That's it. Thank you guys!