I hope you guys don't mind another newbie question.
I've used take lanes to accumulate takes - keeping the best and deleting the rest. Yesterday I actually used the comping function to piece together a good vocal track from about 7 takes. It was pretty much exactly as described in the video. However, unlike the video, when I selected "flatten the comp" the mixdown was not instantaneous! It actually took about 45 minutes. The system monitors in Sonar and in Task Manager showed only moderate CPU and HD use. My computer isn't a hot rod by any stretch, but it's not a slug either. Is it normal for mixdowns to take this long?
 
Cindy

Short answer, no. Sounds like something strange is up. Did you do lots of time stretching on the clips, or use clip fx? 

Hi. I think that sounded as a way to long time to have to wait. The times I have done it, it has taken seconds, and not minutes. I think it depends on the number of clips in the comp track. The more clips (splits), the longer it will take. Sorry to be of no more help.
All the best.

There wasn't any stretching or anything like that. I just selected the good bits (never more than a couple of seconds each) from the various track lanes. It was very much like in the video. There was silence between the vocal bits that I did not select and it seems to have kept the silence (headphone bleed) from the last track. At one point the screen saver came on and that seemed to stop the progress. I turned on mousejiggle and that stopped the screen from going to sleep.
 
I'm totally thrilled with the result. Just puzzled by the time it took.
 
Cindy

Hello again.
 
I think I remember the details of your thread (maybe post a link to it so folks can access it from here).
 
IIRC you were stretching the performance using the Slip Stretch method I described (or maybe you changed to another method).
 
Did you use the "Bounce to Clips" action to bounce the stretched clips BEFORE comping the takes together or did you leave the stretches "active" and then somehow do your comp and use "Flatten Comp"?
 
45 minutes is WAAAAAY too long for either action so maybe if you did not "bounce" each of your stretched clips before creating your comp and/or went straight to "Flatten Comp" (not bouncing the stretched clips beforehand) the action is confusing Sonar.
 
Short version...
 
All the takes you stretched should have remained isolated from each other as you did your stretching (so each take matched the desired tempo BY THEMSELVES).
 
After all the takes were stretched to your liking each one should have been bounced individually (as in you would select all the clips in that take whether they had been stretched or not) and done a Right Click > Bounce to Clips action. That would bounce the stretches and turn all those split up clips into one single clip (this can actually be done on multiple tracks/lanes as well at once and provide one clip per track in a bulk process but let's ignore that for now).
 
AFTER you have done all the required stretching to get all you takes/performances to the timeline THEN you would make your "comp" across the takes (that now do not have any stretching applied and started off as single clips).
 
After all that is done THEN you'd youse "Flatten Comp" on each track.
 
Not sure if that's the problem but I'd imagine using "Flatten Comp" on a pile of stretched clips might try to do multiple actions at once and bork out Sonar so do it in stages.
 
I've never tested it though but definitely 45 minutes is way too long.
 
I will say though that when I do multi track stretching that involves lots of splits across all tracks that when I do a bulk "Bounce to Clip" procedure the processing takes quite a while. Like let's say 9 tracks with a couple dozen splits all stretched takes maybe 5-10 minutes.
 
I am however using an i7 desktop with 16GB RAM and 7200rpm HDDs. A modest system these days but still pretty powerful and fast.
 
List your system specs and provide some extra info based on what I described but I think if you do it in stages you'll get better results.
 
 
Cheers.

Derp... I posted while you were replying.
 
If your screensave came up it sounds like you have system hardware going to "sleep" and/or have power saver setting issues.
 
Go into your Windows Control Panel and set all your hardware to "Performance". Especially things like USB ports, hard drives, CPU, etc and make sure your system is set to NEVER go to "sleep" or "hibernate".
 
Lots of articles out there to turn this crap off for audio.
 
Cheers.
 

The post with the slip-stretch was a different project. (which came out great BTW, thank you for your help!) I did Bounce to Clip and that took about 5 minutes which I thought was pretty reasonable. There was no stretching on this project - just a singer trying to figure out how to sing his part. (He just screams for emphasis on stage and I asked him to sing an actual backup part for the recording. I'm a dictatorial producer.)
 
I'll check out the system settings and see if I can find anything. Thanks for the suggestion.
 
Cindy

Awesome.
 
It's a little out of date now but I used the "Sweetwater Optimization Guide" (or something like that... a Google search should bring it up) when I set up my Win7 desktop DAW many moons ago. Some of it really shouldn't be necessarry these days on a modern system but the entries about setting all your hardware to "Performance" and making sure nothing is "falling asleep" is always good on any system doing streaming audio/video stuff.
 
Focus on the easier hardware/Win Performance settings stuff first then maybe poke at the more finicky aspects/ask the forum (the "Computers" area of this here Cake forum has some heavy hitting DAW builders/generally smart dudes).
 
45 mins for a simple mixdown as you are describing means something very wrong is happening. Hopefully not hardware failure.
 
You are using an ASIO interface, yes? Check for any driver updates for the device on your OS and maybe check your USB cables if optimization doesn't help.
 
Sometimes a simple reboot can help too.
 
Make plenty of "Save As" versions of your projects as you tinker as well.
 
Just tossing general stuff at the wall for you to fiddle with.
 
Cheers.

Could a hard drive problem cause this? Sometimes videos played from this drive stutter a bit. Is there a lot of fetching and writing with this process?

I'm not a computer techie but yeah... you're reading/writing a LOT of info from/to disk.
 
That's why for audio stuff people say to avoid "Green" drives (powersaver drives that shut down and other dumb crap that interrupt audio) and shoot for 7200rpm for HDDs (most laptops with HDDs and many consumer desktops will use slower drives... BUT a lot of nicer lappys are using SSD's and multi drive desktops are using SSD's at least for the OS/program drives).
 
BUT... I still don't think that would cause such a sloooow export unless the process is getting interrupted.
 
So yeah, maybe drive failure. I don't know much about diagnosing drives and whatnot but maybe a defrag is in order or a replacement. You should definitely do a back up/sytem image of everything currently on the drive if you haven't already. Seriously you don't want to lose your work.
 
I seriously think you need to get down to the "Computers" area of this site if you need help with drive issues and how to handle backup/restore stuff. I do not want to lead you astray.
 
There are of course a ton of computer dudes in this Sonar section too so maybe you'll get some answers here as well.
 
Serious about that backup/image stuff though. Very important and if the "worst" happens with your hard drive(s) then you can just load the image on a brand new drive and not skip a beat.
 
Cheers and good luck.