So, I'm working on a mix, focusing on the drums. Adjusting levels, tweaking FX and so forth. When I stop the transport, after a few seconds, and it varies how many seconds, the snare track will suddenly spike completely into the red, sending a crack of noise into my monitors. It started with the hi hat, and now the snare is also doing it. Pow!

No idea what's causing it. Any ideas/thoughts? Sonar is just sitting there at an idle, the transport is completely stopped, and there will be this loud crack and the meter will completely peg all the way to red and stick there.

Afraid I'm going to damage my monitors, or that will my ears out if I'm in headphones. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

I'm having te same problem on my Toshiba laptop win8.1 (i3).  Too many plugins I think on drum tracks in my case.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hi. I can sometimes get this on my laptop, if I push it. It is an underpowered laptop, using WASAPI drivers for the internal sound card.
I have never experienced this on my studio pc, which uses an external Audio Interface (my signature).
Do you use ASIO drivers for your 2i4? Are the drivers up to date? Does this happen in every project? Do you have share drivers with other programs checked in Preferences (P), Audio, Playback and Recording? 
That is all I could think of now.
Sorry to say that I do not have any explanation as to why it happens. 
All the best.

Thanks everyone for weighing in. I probably am pushing an under-powered laptop too hard. Too many plugins running at once? This is my first project, so I don't know what my system can handle. Routing tracks to a buss and using a plug in there (shared) would reduce the CPU load, but you lose some sound-shaping ability. 
 
I tend to fixate on getting the best drum mix I can and am maybe just getting too d%*# granular for the system resources I have. I've done all the "performance" tweaking recommended by Cakewalk and Focusrite, but I guess there's only so much one can do. I'll try to come up with some kind of acceptable workaround.

Here's a follow up: My drums are all digital, either playing my Roland TKV-11, or finger-playing samples in Addictive Drum via a Novation Impulse 25. Safe to assume all those samples/sounds have already been sweetened by the the makers?

I have had this problem and it has always come down to a pro-channel module. Usually happens if I have a console emulator in a track. Disabling or replacing it can sometimes fix it.
 
Are you using the pro-channel console emulators?

reginaldStjohn
I have had this problem and it has always come down to a pro-channel module. Usually happens if I have a console emulator in a track. Disabling or replacing it can sometimes fix it.
 
Are you using the pro-channel console emulators?

No. Steered away from the Pro-channel strip when I found out I could only work with a matchbook-size EQ interface (the big pop-out is in Platinum only).
 
I've got multiple plugins inserted in individual track FX bins: a transient shaper, compression, Waves H-EQ, Isotope Neutrino for kick, snare, hi-hat, cymbals. No toms in this cover of T. Petty's "A Face in the Crowd." Plus, a bunch of there plug-ins in various other tracks' FX bins.
 
Wouldn't doubt I'm crushing my over-matched CPU. The four bars in the "system resources" meter are all dancing. Seems I'll have to re-think how to best get a decent mix with limited CPU and RAM. Shared FX on busses will be my next avenue.
 

Bounce all the tracks with cpu-hogging effects to individual aux tracks.  Then archive the source track.  Use your aux tracks to mix.

GregGraves
Bounce all the tracks with cpu-hogging effects to individual aux tracks.  Then archive the source track.  Use your aux tracks to mix.

Thanks for the suggestion... Is an aux track the same as a bus? I'm confused by the aux track/patch point routing procedure. 
 
I've frozen all the tracks I can. As I understand it, freezing is essentially a temporary "bounce in place" that reduces that tracks (and its FX bin) load on the CPU, basically creative a waveform locked with the FX of the track . Do I have that right? Does freezing achieve the same thing archiving would?

Aux tracks are similar to buses in that their input is one or more tracks or buses. They differ from buses in that they are capable of containing audio clips.
 
You are correct about the freezing process. Where freezing differs from archiving is archiving effectively removes the track from the project; the plug-ins are not loaded into memory and the data is not read from disk. The default freeze does disable all plugins like an archive but still reads the "bounce in place" audio from disk.
 
Before freeze was available, to save resources, it was commonplace to bounce tracks to another track or tracks and archive the originals. Freeze does this all in one step in one track.