Metronome does not work

sonar x3 studio x64
i7, 16gb, 2gb, win10,
alesis qs8.1
 
When you play the metronome, it works fine. However, when you record anything, you can see that the ticks are WAY behind the beat. This is plainly visible when you look at the bar lines in piano roll view. The metronome ticks occur way after the moving marker has passed the bar line. If you record anything, it is almost a whole half beat behind. But again, when you press play, suddenly the metronome is accurate and right on the bar lines.
 
When cakewalk used to give you real support, they kept saying it was latency settings. But clearly that's not correct, since latency has to do with your keyboard sounds/input. The metronome doesn't have anything to do with your keyboard. (I'm using audio metronome, not midi note, but it did the same lagging thing with midi notes. )
 
SOMETIMES, but not always, under preferences, project, clock, and source, setting source to audio fixes it. However, Sonar keeps switching it back to audio by itself. This is so stupid and aggravating. It lets you change the setting, and then it goes in behind your back and changes it back to a setting that doesn't work without notifying you.
 
Anybody have a fix for this? Or until someone can identify the real problem, is there any way to at least lock the source setting so that Sonar doesn't pull this beep on you?
 
thanks

bumphead
SOMETIMES, but not always, under preferences, project, clock, and source, setting source to audio fixes it. However, Sonar keeps switching it back to audio by itself. This is so stupid and aggravating. It lets you change the setting, and then it goes in behind your back and changes it back to a setting that doesn't work without notifying you.

If the project has any audio in it, SONAR must use the interface's audio clock. This includes the audio metronome, soft synths, and audio tracks that have input monitoring enabled. The 'Internal' clock setting will only work for pure MIDI projects where all sound, including the metronome click, is coming from direct-monitored hardware synths like your QS-8.1.
 
Audio clock is definitely what you want, regardless of your hardware setup. If there's a sync difference between playback and recording, you'll want to ensure that the Record and Playback Timing Master settings in Audio preferences are referencing I/O channels on the same interface.
 
If you're using onboard sound for audio I/O rather than a dedicated DAW  interface with native ASIO drivers, issue like this are more likely, and may be difficult or impossible to resolve.