Hi All,
 
Once again I'm having big problems with Sonar. Now my PC itself seems absolutely fine, I have super quick boot times and doing any tasks in Photoshop or any other program is a breeze but just not Sonar. I get audio engine drop outs all the time since re-installing 2 months ago when I had similar issues the program has slowed down and the problems more often, I think this time was the worst though as the actual round trip on audio has increased magically. I just seem to be having the worst luck imaginable with this program.

PC is a FM2+ Socket board with a AMD A10-7870K with R7 Graphics, 8GB RAM, Kingston SV300S37A 120Gb SSD, Toshiba DT01AACA00 1Tb drive for audio data, Line 6 Toneport UX2. 
 
The weird thing is that even though the program runs slow and crashes a lot the processor, memory and HDD indicators in Sonar never get anywhere near half their potential. Is anyone out there a PC - Sonar guru who could maybe Teamviewer on to my machine and see if they can at least see the problems, I'm really getting sick of it now, paid for my software and most of the time it's actually not usable.

Any suggestions or help as always massively appreciated, I don't know what else I can do now.

Ram...would be my best guess. 8 gig isn't enough. I'm having a few issues with my system, and every time it crashes...it's a ram or bottle neck issue from what I can tell.

Thanks for the reply, out of interest when you get the drops what is the actual RAM indicator within Sonar displaying? I know it's not the most accurate thing in the world but I'm loading pretty small projects when this happens as well.

In fact on the weekend had a guy recording some acoustic guitar with me so literally a guitar and a vocal track, un-mixed and no VST's still got the drop out on audio and briefly after that a delay to the headphones that despite getting 15ms total roundtrip made it impossible to use whilst recording. Also then got a complete crash of Sonar and headphones fine when re-booted. Windows and background all seems absolutely fine when Sonar dies too, I shall put another 8GB in this weekend and see if that helps though.

Have you tried raising the buffers of your sound device ?

All drivers (sound, video etc) up to date ?

Windows up to date ?

Jerry

Yeah drivers all up to date, unfortunately for the Line 6 Toneport UX2 that's still very old though. As I've sat here this morning I have plyed with the buffer within the ASIO panel and somehow things are now worse back on the exact settings they were to start with. Started off with 15ms round, increased buffer and got the round trip up to 25ms which is probably a bit too high, dropped buffer to previous 128 value and now round is 18ms???

Makes no sense, again thanks for the tips though :)

Has anyone experience of the Toneport as I have the driver mode as ASIO but WDM/KS is also available plus WASAPI Exclusive or Shared then also MME.

Pretty sure I've always used ASIO on other DAW though.
 

hey mattburnside . . . I hear your frustration, and I'd like to echo joakes on this one regarding raising the audio buffers . . . you've mentioned your live recording session and getting 15ms round trip latency, in my opinion that's living very close to the edge for your system specs as shown. Just because you can get 15ms doesn't mean your computer can record at that pace.
 
I've always found the reference for actually starting to hear mixing latency is somewhere around 33ms, so I think you could adjust your audio buffers upwards a bit and still be able to record without too much trouble.
 
Also, I'm not sure of your complete audio path setup to understand how or where you are monitoring your headphone mix . . . eg. are your headphones plugged into your audio interface or somewhere else ?
 
The fact that your computer can do amazing things in Photoshop doesn't mean so much, because audio leans on  totally different computer resources. The Line6 website says that your audio interface is Legacy, no longer supported . . . and you haven't said which version of Sonar you are running ?

Thanks for the advise, upping the buffers is definitely something I can live with. Most of my sessions these days are loops and midi so no worries on missing the beat due to latency really.

upped to 256 buffer size and now getting 26.5ms round.
 
The version I'm using is SONAR Professional 23.8.0 Build 30 x64

mattburnside
Thanks for the reply, out of interest when you get the drops what is the actual RAM indicator within Sonar displaying? I know it's not the most accurate thing in the world but I'm loading pretty small projects when this happens as well.

In fact on the weekend had a guy recording some acoustic guitar with me so literally a guitar and a vocal track, un-mixed and no VST's still got the drop out on audio and briefly after that a delay to the headphones that despite getting 15ms total roundtrip made it impossible to use whilst recording. Also then got a complete crash of Sonar and headphones fine when re-booted. Windows and background all seems absolutely fine when Sonar dies too, I shall put another 8GB in this weekend and see if that helps though.

I'm not sure, because I don't have meter set to ram...I'm getting the reading from Windows Task Manager after crash. And I can see the bottle neck. From what I can tell, Windows isn't playing nicely with certain setups, when Sonar is running intensive mixes. I'm not sure how the memory is getting clogged, but Sonar gets stuttery when I've got a lot visually going on, even though the CPUs have plenty of power left. Now I've done all the troubleshooting, turned plugin load manager on and off, set up buffers, checked Windows hasn't turned on any Xbox rubbish after last updates. I've come to the conclusion that my machine or perhaps more succinctly...some component within my machine is no longer up to the challenge of being an audio computer. Something in Windows or Sonar or both has changed. My computer is over two years old now, and it could handle intensive mixes to a point in the past. I've started to do even more intensive mixes though lately, 64bit fp audio and mix...but it was after Windows 10 last update which broke the straw so to speak. I've even lost my switchable graphics card...driver. This lead me to the conclusion it was a bottle neck somewhere, involving memory and graphics. And hence my suspicion your having a similar problem, even though my audio computer is a laptop, but a decent 2000 dollar laptop, which was running fine, and I've got 16 gig of ram.

I've got my eye on an Acer gaming laptop with 32 gig of ram and an 8 gig graphics card, which I hope to get in a week or two to solve my problem.

Sorry I can't be much help. But hopefully we've worked out where the problem is.

Ben

mattburnside
Has anyone experience of the Toneport as I have the driver mode as ASIO but WDM/KS is also available plus WASAPI Exclusive or Shared then also MME.

Pretty sure I've always used ASIO on other DAW though.

 
Definitely use ASIO for the Toneport.