Just installed the newest Kingston and was surprised to see the audio engine stops when I reposition an audio clip.
 
This was a hot topic some years back, and I was under the impression the audio engine had undergone some revision since then.
 
...Not?

I remember when I used to be able to drag/cut/delete/whatever an audio track and nothing would stop. It felt stable.
Now, its like everything I do (even MIDI???) causes things to stop/start for a fraction of a second.

Hi. Which Audio Interface do you have? What driver settings are you using? Latency? Any plugins in the project that could cause a problem? Is it a problem in just one, or several projects?
Best of luck.

Fresh project, one 10 second audio track only: No problem.
Fresh project, 48 audio tracks of various lengths, longest 2.5min: Problem.
All audio only, just started comping so no plugs at all yet.
 
Somewhere between one and 48 tracks things get problematic.
 
And it stops dead, not just a pause. A pause would be acceptable.
 
"Audio dropout
The audio engine has been stopped unexpectedly"
 
Interfaces: Cakewalk UA-25EX, Edirol UA-101, Tascam US-1641, Tascam US-1800.
Acer laptop, i7, 12GB RAM.
 
Edit: Latency: Makes no difference whatsoever.
The Tascams only offer Lowest, Low, Normal, High, Highest.
The Cakewalk and Edirol allow me to set the latency up to 19ms.
Tried all settings, no effect.

If the problem involves high audio track counts, the issue is most likely with disk streaming. Try increasing your disk I/O buffers.

brundlefly
If the problem involves high audio track counts, the issue is most likely with disk streaming. Try increasing your disk I/O buffers.

do you know if sonar does any kind of "intelligent streaming", maybe based on available ram? ie, load as much as poss into memory (which is generally fairly abundant on modern pcs) before falling back to streaming, or does it just stream everything?

Audio is always streamed from disk. The data rate isn't generally high enough to make caching everything in RAM worthwhile. It would just take that much longer to initialize a project on launch or jump to a new position in a large project if the needed audio wasn't already cached. Disk streaming should work fine so long as the buffer is a reasonable size.
 
I'm not guaranteeing this will eliminate the dropout; there may still be issues with moving audio clips during playback. But it's a good place to start.
 
EDIT: IIRC, there's also a setting in AUD.INI that determines how many buffers/milliseconds of audio can be dropped before SONAR registers a dropout by stopping the audio engine. It might help to increase that if you do a lot of editing during playback. I've not experimented with it myself. 

Yes, that was it!
 
Edit/Preferences -> Sync and Caching
Then under File System there is a checkbox: Enable Read Caching.
Turn this on, restart Sonar and now I can move clips wildly around with no audio engine dropout.
 
The help does not hint at all that this could influence audio dropouts.
According to the Help, this is intended for older IDE or non-DMA systems.
Neither apply to my situation. I have SATA drives typical of the current generation of laptops.
 
They also say turning this on supposedly degrades audio performance.
I don't know what degradation one is supposed to experience, but
I notice no change at all. Startup time from button-click to rolling is
just as it was before.
 
It's all good.
Now my comping and pre-editing is fast and fluid.
Brundlefly, thank you very much. Much obliged.