Can I disable the transport stopping when a dropout is detected?

scook
Dropouts are fatal to the audio engine. The transport has no recourse but to stop. There is no indication of whether you are running 32 or 64 bit and how much RAM you have. Superior Drummer just like any of the better drum synths wants to use a lot of RAM. Superior Drummer has several settings to reduce the RAM needed. Ultimately, you might need to freeze as soon as possible to free up the resources used by the synth. Running up the DropoutMSec in Aud.ini to 700-800 is not a bad idea. Not sure about tweaking the record/playback buffers. If 512 did not help, I would take them back to default.

bitflipper

Getting dropouts with that light a load may be an indication of excessive DPC time. Get a copy of DPC Latency Checker and see what it has to say. If you still get dropouts after setting DropoutMsec to 800, that means the engine only gives up if dropouts exceed 0.8 seconds. An 800ms dropout isn't your usual click or pop, it's silence for half a measure in duration (!), and indicates something other than normal CPU exhaustion.

 

You could also be running out of address space if Ivory is taking a gigabyte of RAM. You've only got 2GB to work with, and sonarpdr.exe can easily take a gig on its own. Check the Windows Task Manager to see how much memory SONAR's using.

 

BTW, you can reduce SD's RAM usage even further by enabling caching, which loads only the samples that are actually used. The downside is you have to play the song all the way through one time before exporting, to make sure all the samples get loaded. Another technique for reducing SD's memory requirements is to limit the use of bleed samples. I don't like a lot of bleed except to the overheads, so RAM usage for me with SD is usually < 400MB using 16-bit samples (which I use for everything, even final render) and can be < 150MB with caching enabled.

 

I don't use Ivory, but I'm guessing it has some memory-management features as well, as most sample players do. In a pinch, there's always the technique of using a less-demanding synth (e.g. TTS-1) as a placeholder during composition and then substituting the real samples before exporting.

bitflipper
The key number is not necessarily total available memory, but how much memory sonarpdr.exe is using. If, for example, you load up a project and Task Manager shows that sonarpdr.exe has 1500MB allocated, then you only have 500MB available for loading a sample library regardless of how much memory is available system-wide. It appears Ivory is pretty memory-hungry, taking up 700MB.
 
I have dealt with similar issues here, also running 32-bit SONAR on XP. It never was a big problem until recently, when I installed Orange Tree Samples' Rickenbacker bass library (32 velocity layers!). I had to reduce the number of layers as well as reduce the DSD preload buffer size in Kontakt in order to use the library alongside Superior Drummer. Sounds like Ivory is an even bigger hog. Hopefully, it has some memory-management features of its own.