Hey guys, I recently purchased a Roland Octa-Capture 10x10 and it came with Sonar X1.
I have an electric drum kit plugged into channel 1 and USB out to the PC. I have buffer to 60mms and still get occasional lag, and even the metronome has slowed down at the end of a song during recording, wtf!?
I have task manager performance tab up to see if the CPU or anything else is being maxed and it doesn't appear as so, not even close, I don't think anything went beyond 5-10% usage.  
Since the interface is connected via USB, I do not have a sound card, just the one with the mobo. All research I do recommends ASIO drivers but those only appear to be for sound cards, but I don't think I'd need one since I have USB connectivity.
I looked at the input and playback which is at 44100 with 24 sampling, and made sure that matched the program. I basically can't record anything and feel comfortable unless the buffer is at 60 or 70, which is way too high to accurately record another track over the drums without excessive splicing.
Another issue is during playback, some parts will sound distorted, yet when I play the same track back a second time, that same part of the track isn't any longer distorted.
I'm completely at a loss, does anyone have any recommendations?  
 
Thanks!!!
-Ivan

Oh and I forgot to mention, i have 16 GB of ram, Intel 3.2ghz quad core, so I don't think it has to do with the hardware

Install the Octa-Capture's most recent ASIO drivers and use those.

I have driver 1.5.2 installed already which appears to be the latest, but the settings use MME 32 bit.  When I change to ASIO it says the output device used by the driver are not available
 
Edit:  I forced it through anyway.  It looks like it records but then the playback sound card disappears.  I can see it recording but I do not hear the metronome and there is no sound on playback, even though I see it is picking up the instruments

Sonar need to run with ASIO drivers or you'll have all sorts of issues. 
Your problem sounds like you didn'tfollow the instructions to install the drivers correctly. 
Make sure to follow what it say's. Sometimes it's a simple matter of not plugging in the device until told to do so. 
 
But still you are always best to install the most up to date ASIO drivers for your audio interface. 
You don't need your on board sound chip for Sonar. Some like me even disable it. 
I use my audio interface and ASIO drivers for all things audio with my DAW computer. 
What's happening to you is your timing master is POS re- MME,, , this will go away once you set your Octa capture up properly. 
 
Not sure which drums you have but my Yamaha's needed the supplied USB drivers to work correctly with Sonar. 
I record to midi via USB and use Session drummer for playback, If you have X1 LE it won't have very good drum sounds. Use your copy to upgrade to Artist, Professioal or Platinum. That's what I did. 

So I made sure the most up to date ASIO drivers are installed which is the case. I used the headphone out for the octa capture and I can hear the metronome in my headphones and it definitely is recording on the track.
During playback though, I cant hear anything, but I can still hear the program metronome.  What setting do I have to change to ensure that is working?
As for the install, I did make sure I didn't plug it back in etc. so I am 99% certain the install went correctly of the drivers.  At this point I can see the ASIO doesn't seem to have lag, but not my issue is that the playback has no sound through my PC speakers nor my Octa Capture headphone out, although I DO hear my metronome in the headphone out
 
 
thanks so far btw guys

And before anyone asks, the sound card is the onboard Realtek sound card, do I need to have an independent sound card?

imshirazy
And before anyone asks, the sound card is the onboard Realtek sound card, do I need to have an independent sound card?

What on earth do you need the crappy Realtek for? Make sure only the Octa-Capture is selected in SONARs settings,
both as Record and Playback timing master. It's practically never recommendable to use two soundcards.

Actually, lots of people run two sound cards with no problems, although disabling the onboard audio can avoid potential conflicts. Personally, I've always had the onboard audio disabled and use my external (Firewire-connected) interface for all sound. Like KR says, there is really no need to have the RealTek in the picture at all. It can be disabled via Device Manager.
 
There is no functional difference between an integrated audio interface such as the RealTek, a plug-in card like a SoundBlaster, and your Octa-Capture. They all do the same thing, and they all will run better on ASIO than MME, which has internal overhead that makes it unsuitable for real-time monitoring.
 
With your machine specs, you should have no problem getting 5.8ms or better. If you can't, it's because something is hogging resources. Topping the list of suspects would be your network adapter, especially if it's wi-fi. Get a copy of LatencyMon. Instructions for using it can be found here. This will measure DPC (interrupt-handler) overhead, which is not detectable via the Windows CPU monitor.
 
The intermittent distortion could be an indication of occasional high DPC latency caused by a hardware driver. If that's the case, LatencyMon will show you how bad it is, and help you identify which process is causing the most problems.

Thank you guys so much for your help so far!
When I get home, I will try to disable the realtek driver altogether and see if that helps.
Like I said I hear the metronome through the octacapture on playback but not the music.  Maybe disabling the realtek driver will help.  I will report back!
But also, I did have the octacapture ONLY selected last time I tried if I recall and still had the issue, maybe I missed something, will check back