Hello all,

I´m working on a quite large project with plenty of softsynths, plugins, audiotracks & Melodyne instances. Since a month or so, I´ve been suffering from occassional drop-outs, frequent pops or short gaps (not enough to make Sonar drop out) and, worst of all, Sonar lockups. When working on this particular project, Sonar has to be shut down every 15 minutes or so on average.

To make matters worse, the problem is very random. Sometimes I can work without any problems, even at 64 samples buffer. However, the problem with gaps in the audio is evident when running 2048 samples buffer as well. Quite often, I can play the project for a minute or two before the gaps start to occur. On lower latencies, there are audible gaps every few seconds. If I increase the latency to 2048 samples, there are maybe 10 or 15 seconds between the gaps.
 
The problem can appear for no apparent reason. Reboot does not help.
 
 
I´m also having another issue that might or might not be related to this issue: sometimes when I press play, there´s a large POP in the speakers and the VU-meters in RME Totalmix & Sonar output bus peak and stay red while the project is playing. Quite often, pressing stop and play a few times cures the problem. Sometimes, I have to restart Sonar.
This issue have been following me through 3 different computers running Windows 7 (AMD PhenomX4) and Windows 10 (Xeon). This is making me believe that it might be something wrong with my RME Babyface.
 
 
Any suggestions what to do?


Specs: Latest Sonar Lexington, HP Z210 Xeon workstation (original setup with Nvidia Quadro 2000 GPU), 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD, RME Babyface, Win 10 64bit, everything fully updated.



Edit:
ASIO / WDM / WASAPI does not make a difference. I normally run ASIO.
 
 

So, it seems that I managed to solve this very annoying issue. After turning off hyperthreading in BIOS, I haven´t had a single gap or pop or click, despite playing the whole project a few times at 64 samples buffer.

Thanks for the follow-up. I wonder if this is a universal issue with hyperthreading, or not? Maybe the esteemed Noel Borthwick can chime in.

My recollection is that I turned off hyperthreading during my initial system setup because I noticed Sonar primarily uses the 1st core (core 0).  Hyperthreading actually reduced performance, especially the time it took to open a project.
 

I did the following Google search on this, and a BUNCH of promising links came back:
 
site:forum.cakewalk.com hyperthreading
 
In particular, the thread that contains the following post has some really good discussion, and some comments about hyperthreading from Noel, and configuration modifications you can make to Sonar to help:
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/2998674
 
Bob Bone
 

Anderton
Thanks for the follow-up. I wonder if this is a universal issue with hyperthreading, or not? Maybe the esteemed Noel Borthwick can chime in.

I doubt it. Well, I've never encountered this problem and have always had hyperthreading on, with the relevant .ini file set for 4+ cores at least.

I can't remember many people ever raising hyperthreading and thread management as an issue in any DAW other than Logic Pro.

I did some tests a while ago with hyperthreading off and the general increase in cpu load and system "lag" was noticeable.

Just some more follow up information:
While disabling hyperthreading did improve things a lot, I still had some occasional glitches now and then.
 
When mixing (in the final stages), I´m often using Foobar 2000 for playing audio files for the sake of comparision. When chasing possible sources of the problems I was having, I realized that Foobar 2000 was loading a VST wrapper and some plugins which obviously wasn´t a good idea. After removing the wrapper, things improved even more.
 
I do have one remaining issue (the POP one I wrote about in the starting post) but I believe that might be caused by hardware out of specifications. I will try to grab some useful screenshots and honor it with a new thread & subject.

BTW, I found the link below in my pursuit of mor information about Sonar / HT:
 
 
Very similar to the problems I was having, including the intermittent nature of the problem and the hair pulling part...
 
Edit: It seems I´m not allowed to post URL´s. Anyway, if you google "gearslutz sonar spike cpu" the thread comes up on top.