[Solved] Sonar Artist is defeating me

Help!
 
Sonar Artist was fine. It always worked on my machine (4.0Ghz Vishera. 16GB Ram. Windows 10. M-Track 2 USB sound interface, Asio4all drivers) running Sonar Artist. Only now it makes no sound unless I fiddle about with settings when it first starts up. 

If I go into preferences and do almost anything with the ASIO drivers... i.e. change any setting, (and even if I change it back as it was...) the track will play fine. But I have to do it every time I crank up Sonar. Sometimes getting into preferences takes a while. Sometimes 'Sonar is not responding' comes up.

I've done a clean install of Sonar. I've reinstalled M-Track. I've reinstalled Asio4all. I've gone to previous restored versions of my system as Sonar stopped finding M-Track. I've tried most variations of possible settings many times. I rolled back to previous versions of the software. The audio engine initialisation button doesn't. I've plugged M-Track 2 into various USBs in case I'd got in a USB 3.0 by mistake. No difference. I changed the lead with my printer's to no avail.
 
Acid Music 8.0, I notice, is working with the Asio4all drives just fine still. All my normal Windows sound, YouTube, etc, works normally through the M-Track. MME drives work normally if I can live with 30ms latency.
 
My attempts to pin this down have failed. Without a real person in Cakewalk support to ask I don't know where to turn. It's too weird a problem to find in a forum as an existing problem, I suspect, so if anyone can think of how this irritating behaviour might be fixed I'd be very grateful.
 
Steve

A driver update may indeed help. Or not.
 
I see this occasional weird scenario: if I forget to turn the interface (Focusrite) on before booting, and then bring up any audio program (WMP, YouTube, SONAR) there'll be no sound until I make some change to the interface settings. Usually, I pull up the ASIO panel and alter the buffer size. Audio returns immediately. My previous interface (Motu) did the same thing, but it was worse because nothing brought audio back short of a reboot. Why does my current interface recover more easily? I believe it's thanks to a better driver.
 
It certainly won't hurt anything to use a proper ASIO driver as Jerry suggests, rather than ASIO4All. You might experience lower latency as a bonus.
 
 

Why did you end up with asio4 all when there is a proper driver available? Asio4all is a last ditch effort if you cannot find a proper driver. Sonar is a bit picky about drivers which is not a bad thing, it's just how things are in PC land. 
  asio4all is NOT an asio driver even though the name implies it is. It is a wrapper for WDM mode. 
And it is also not that easy to totally un install. It is known to conflict with proper ASIO drivers. We now have WASAPI driver that is said to make asio4all obsolete for those unfortunate enough to own an audio interface without proper asio drivers. 

Sonar has a problem initializing ASIO4ALL (or ASIO4ALL has a problem knowing that Sonar has opened).  It has been that way since X1.  I fought this problem for quite a while until I changed interfaces to one with a proper driver.  Drivers load when hardware is detected.  ASIO4ALL is not a real driver and loads when your DAW runs.

I think that describes the Asio4all very well, Mr Colbert, although it worked for me without issue until just recently.

Cactus:  This is the one. It comes with drivers but I think it pushed Asio4all. Having said that I just found a text file list of drivers and it does have this: "MAudioMTrack_Asio64.dll    1.0.1.* (x64)". I can't see that in Sonar as an option. Maybe if I can find out how to get at it that might be the droid I'm looking for. There's a 'track device settings' menu but it won't open. I think this looks promising though. 
 
Steve

These are both M tracks. There are about 6 models. 
 


 
 

So you saying the drivers posted by M Audio are not ASIO? That's very weird. But then, M Audio is entrenched with Mac, Core Audio and Pro Tools. I had a M Audio fast track pro that was a terrible interface and wasted over year fighting with it. I would never buy anything from that company as a result,, just me. 
 
No No and double No to anything  by Creative,,, I been down that road too. PCI interfaces are a thing of the past unless you spend $1,000 on a Lynx. The majority of us use a USB interfaces supported by a ASIO driver without issue. 
Do yourself a big Favour. Sell the M Track to a Mac user who will probably be happy. And buy a proper interface that is known on this forum to perform without issue in PC land. 
You can get something from Tascam, Stienberg, PreSonis or Focusrite for $150 that would be the same as yours. 

I've just been to the M-Audio site and there's a whole raft of drivers including both 32&64 bit drivers for Win 10.

They don't say what type they are but typically they would be ASIO and whatever else might be included in the driver package.

I just googled m audio driver for m track win 10.

It does say that, you're right, but it isn't what happens for me. I've never seen an M-Track Quad ASIO Driver although they describe one. The only reason I knew Asio4all existed was because they suggested using it. 

The manual for my M-Track says, 'We recommend the free ASIO4ALL (Audio Stream Input/Output) driver for Windows.'
 
It's disconcerting that I have to do a dance in the Asio panel every time I use Sonar but the actual performance is now much better for having tinkered with the settings. I'm tempted by the Roland, Steinberg, Tascam, Focusrite alternatives. If it gets unstable or out of hand I'll pick one straight away. I've been looking at them on Amazon.
 
I was going to reinstall Windows 10 to see if I could clear the problem but that seemed harder than I expected. I started up with a USB to bring up the installation just fine but then I got some messages about how none of the drives were allowed. Something about OEM and GPT. No idea what the second one is or how to continue so I gave up on that. I would have liked to have tried it. I have a solid, tested Acronis backup of my current system so it isn't risky. It just wouldn't let me proceed. I expect if I read up on it via Google I'll see how to sort it out.
 
It's like trying to clean up a tiny paint drip and knocking the whole can over. You'd think that reinstalling Windows 10 - though a bit drastic and time-consuming - would, at least, be uneventful and simple. I bet it would work, though, as this is a very recent problem and the Asio4all drivers were doing a fine job for over a year. The M-Audio box looks nice and works for general sound: movies, YouTube, etc, perfectly. I'd be more than happy with it if Sonar came on with sound. My restore points don't go back far enough to help. Having cleaned installed Sonar/deleting .ini files, going through the registry and deleting references to ASIO and Cakewalk I felt sure this would go away.
 
What's annoying is that Sonar will work once I've changed an Asio setting and then changed it back again. As long as I do that it's all good. When I started this thread I didn't imagine it could be persuaded to run reliably but the workaround never misses. I'd have to say things aren't all bad. 'Worse things happen at sea!' as my mum said long ago, the night I got acute appendicitis.
 
As ever, thanks for giving my Sonar/Asio dilemma some thought and for all your sensible views and suggestions.
 
Is there a generic Asio driver anyone would recommend? That could be a simple fix, couldn't it? 
 
Steve
 
 

VinylJunkie
 I find it astonishing that M-Audio would recommend ASIO4ALL. 

Alesis does the same thing. that driver is like a cancer.
Years ago I thought it worked well with older OS' like windows 7 but for some reason with windows 8 and windows 10.  
I have seen more problems than productivity so I decided not to recommend it anymore.

FlameDruid
Hi again,
My problem just got resolved by Cakewalk support.

So much for "Cakewalk has no more support." Glad you got it resolved.