Help with Sonar X2 Producer

Hey guys!

In beforehand, I'd like to firstly say that I'm really new to this producing world and I bought a condenser microphone and soundcard to begin recording and producing my own music. 

My brother let me try Cubase 5.1 at his house and it all worked perfectly. Although he did have problems with his metronome, so it kinda felt like it was pointless to keep using it.

I've been browsing different forums, and at last I purchased Sonar X2.
Alas, I am having problems with my set-up. Under "Preferences" there's the Driver Mode setting, and those available are: WDM/KS, ASIO, MME (32-bit) and WASAPI. The only one that worked was MME (32-bit), although my OS is 64 bit. Problem is that once I recorded vocals, the audio was lagging and it was like listening to a robot. 

My question would be: can someone PLEASE help me with all the set-up I need to make things work? I have the following equipment:

Roland UA-55 QuadCapture: http://www.roland.com/products/en/QUAD-CAPTURE/
sE Electronics SE 2200a II C: http://www.thomann.de/se/se_electronics_se_2200a_ii_c.htm

As I firstly wrote, I am new to this, and I don't really understand all these keywords like sampling rate, bit depth and so forth.

Set-up for dummies anyone?

Thanks in advance,

Sincerely,

Thomas. 

Hi Thomas,

Welcome to the world of Sonar

I too have a QUAD-CAPTURE. I have set it up in Sonar to run in ASIO mode, and that is best for this audio device.

In Preferences > Driver Settings, set Sampling Rate to 44100. You could set it higher but I find that is fine for me.

In Preferences > Playback and Recording, set Driver Mode to ASIO

Back in Preferences > Driver Settings, click on the ASIO Panel... button and on the QUAD-CAPTURE control panel select Driver Settings from the Driver menu and then set the Audio Buffer size to 4 (you can experiment with different settings to get the best results in terms of latency). Apply settings and close both dialogue boxes.


You should now be able to plug your condenser mic into the QUAD-CAPTURE (phantom power switch on) and set levels and start recording.

cheers

andy

I believe you are asking about using multiple interfaces at the same time in SONAR. The reason you are limited to using one interface is because you are using the ASIO driver mode. The ASIO specification restricts software to one input/output device at a time. This is the case regardless of the software that you are using. If you could use one of the other driver modes, they do not have that restriction.

Update: It worked! Thank you so much guys. This is going great now :) Last question though, is there any way to listen to the tempo of the metronome in beforehand? Seems a bit silly to press record each time I want to listen to the metronome.

Once again, thank you so much! 

You have to start playback or recording in order to hear the metronome. But you can set a count-in in the Preference dialog so that you can listen to the metronome before SONAR actually starts recording.

Right-click on either of the metronome icons in the Control Bar Transport module and in the Preferences, enter a value for the Record Count-in parameter.

Scott

--
Scott R. Garrigus - http://garrigus.com - SONAR X2 Power! - http://garrigus.com/?SonarX2Power
* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar and Sony Sound Forge Power book series: http://garrigus.com/?PowerBooks
* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar ProAudioTutor video tutorial series: http://garrigus.com/?ProAudioTutor
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