I love Sonar's external insert

peter434
Hello
By curiosity, where do you insert your external device ? In the Master bus or do you create a special bus dedicated to it ?

Anderton
Sonar actually measures the latency and compensates. Here's the Cakewalk documentation on it. It's not always perfect (e.g., if the effect introduces delay) but you can manually compensate to tweak it. Another freebie is I wrote an article in Sound on Sound that's more oriented toward using external hardware keyboards.
 
Additionally, I wrote a section on using external hardware effects in my book "Guitarist's Guide to Sonar," and video #18 in my "Advanced Workshop" video covers using external effects.
 
 

SF_Green
Hi Silicon, I've been wanting to do this also, and was wondering how you determine the latency when going in and out to an external device. Thanks.

Silicon Audio

SF_Green
Hi Silicon, I've been wanting to do this also, and was wondering how you determine the latency when going in and out to an external device. Thanks.

As Craig says, Sonar works out the round-trip latency for you.  It sends a "ping" through the output pair and monitors how long it takes to return on the input pair.  It even displays the latency in the external insert GUI.
 
You just need to make sure the device is passing audio before you hit the button to measure latency.  If you you intend on using an external reverb or delay unit, just make sure its dry level is up and wet level is down to nil, otherwise the reverb/delay may confuse the automatic round-trip detection algorithm.

Razorwit
Hi Silicon Audio
Yep, External Inserts are cool. Just a couple quick notes about using E.I. I use external hardware all the time...maybe one of these will save you some trouble:
 
1. If you use an E.I. on a bus don't try and measure latency until you have signal routed to the bus. Until the bus has something routed to it latency measurements will fail.
 
2. Speaking of E.I. on a bus, there is a known bug (CWBRN-18719) where soloing a bus that has E.I. inserted results in silence. I work around it by putting the tracks that feed buses with E.I. into a folder and soloing from the folder instead.
 
3. Remember as well that Sonar will only allocate inputs and outputs in an E.I. in pairs. So, for example, I have a Distressor on Input/Output 45 and a TLA-100 on Input/Output 46. If I assign the Distressor to a mono snare drum mic it will make the TLA-100 unavailable for use anywhere else in the project because the entire stereo pair (45 and 46 in this case) is marked as "used" by Sonar.

All that said,generally speaking the E.I. stuff works pretty well. There are a couple of things to be aware of, but hopefully this doesn't come off as too negative...I certainly use E.I.'s all the time. Just pointing out some things to try and spare my fellow Sonarites some heartburn.
 
Dean

Phonic
I've found the external insert to be quite buggy - most of the time it will not show my inputs and outputs correctly.  I have to go to my device properties in preferences, clear all the input and output checkmarks and reapply them to get them to show in the external insert.  Sometimes while doing so, Sonar crashes.  This makes it very tedious to use the external insert function.