Frustrating - why would I have drop outs with such a fast computer....

I know there is a few threads about this topic.
And yes i have searched the forum, tried everything that is mentioned still have drop outs, sonar wouldnt playback for more then about 20 second before just dropping out without any warning.
So here is my set up.
Sonar studio 8.5 with the latest up date, a Tascam US-122L USB audio interface, 
Computer is Dell with windows 7, Intel Core 2 QUAD Q9400 2.66Ghz, 4 Gig of Ram, 500 Gig hard drive 7200RPM, with a Radeon HD 4350 graphics card. running sonar in 32bit.
I have been using sonar 8 for quite awhile and only when I have upgraded my computer has the problem with the drop out started.
The song i am working on has 10 tracks with a total of 8 plugins, i did have about 25 plugins running but thought that was the problem so i got rid of a few but it still does the samething, my cpu usage in sonar shows them running at about 12-13%.

I thought maybe the audio interface may not be compatible with the computer Im using.
Any help would eb appreciated and sorry for posting about this topic again, but im getting very frustrated. cheers.

I disabled the onboard audio and Im using WDM/KS, I installed ASIO drivers and it was worse. When I have onboard enabled sonar is recognising both audio devices.

Yes i have run the wave profiler

Cheers thanks Phil will try those suggestions.

Quote"Also dial back the latency setting in the WDM driver settings and see at what stage the drop outs stop."


Just tried every increment with the latency and it drops out at everyone within about 20-30 seconds of play, also tried different usb ports with no success..... oh well ill keep trying different stuff.

Here are the screen shots, hope they help.

jedipunk


may have fixed it, adjusted the playback and record buffer to 512kb buffer size, song played all the way through without dropping out, so hopefully that has fixed it.

Cool. I was just about to suggest that after checking the audio options dialog in the help files.

"I/O Buffer Size. This value determines the buffer characteristics for transfers to and from the disk. Changing this value does not affect audio latency, but will affect the disk throughput for audio tracks. The default setting is 128. A higher value causes more audio to be buffered from the disk ahead of the playback cursor. If you are hearing consistent dropouts/clicks in your audio and if your project contains high bit depth (32/64 bit) or high sample rate audio (88.2K or higher), it may be indicative of a too small I/O buffer size. If so try a higher I/O buffer size like 256 or 512. If audio problems persist, reset to 128 and try a different remedy."

I also suggest increasing the Record Pre-Allocate File to 600 (that's what I use).

"Record Pre-allocate File (seconds). When this option is set to a value greater than zero, SONAR will pre allocate the file to be recorded to the size specified (in seconds). This means that the file will not be resized while recording until it reaches the allocated size. The setting has the potential to reduce disk activity while recording and allows for more possible tracks. The valid range is 0–14400 seconds and the default value is 0. A reasonable setting would be 10 minutes (600 seconds) to 30 minutes (1800 seconds)."

Hope changing that buffer size solves your problem though I'm still puzzled why you had more problems in ASIO mode, which is supposed to work better than WDM.

have you tried running the DPC latency tool? http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
you might have some device which might be behaving badly.

As has already been mentioned, the problem is likely DPC Latency Related. High latency and spikes can cause dropouts/glitches/etc. Check your DPC Latency and make tweaks to reduce/minimize it.

Yup definitely check DPC latency. It's the first thing I check on a system with dropouts and/or crackles, pops, etc. Otherwise you may very well end up on a wild goose chase.

And forgive me if I missed some pertinent information, but I'd try using the ASIO driver and turn your realtime dithering off.

daveny5


Why aren't you running Sonar in 64-bit? Otherwise you're wasting some of your memory resources.

Yes i re installed sonar and installed the 64 bit-bit version

Well it seems to be fixed, I just increased the playback and record buffer size up quite a bit and have played the song through 5 times with no problems at all, so hopefully the problem is fixed, thanks for all the help and input from all cheers and much appreciated.