Hi all,
 
Title says it all.  When I start play or recording, I hear a popping noise, rather loud.  Also when I mix synth to an audio track it sometimes "skips" like a record skipping, or I'll hear slight distortion.  This is a piece with 11 synth tracks 4 buses, automation, 4 audio tracks.  I've disabled all but a few plug-ins.  Have no idea what's going on.  I've been working on this blasted piece for over 2 years, little by little.  Entirely finished.  Now this!  btw, I got very good advice here to dump the Fast Track Pro; that helped.  But now this other stuff is cropping up.  Finally, CPU use is pretty low.  It's a powerful machine.
 
Any help would be great.

If the .sig is correct consider updating to X3e. The update is here http://www.cakewalk.com/S...13361/SONAR-X3e-Update

Please post back with:
 
Driver Mode
Sample Rate
ASIO Buffer Size
 
Also, as a test, if you bypass all effects (hit 'E' on your computer keyboard), do the issues go away?  If so, then one or more of your remaining plugins are causing the problems.  (hitting 'E' again will toggle effects back on).
 
If you are still recording tracks, then you will want to minimize usage of effects, particularly those that use look-ahead processing, and you will want to use a small ASIO Buffer Size - maybe 128 (that's what I use for recording).  When you move on to mixing/mastering, you will no longer care about latency, and to take advantage of the more robust effects, meant for use in mixing, you will want to jack up your ASIO Buffer Size - maybe 1024 or 2048.
 
Bob Bone
 

Loud pop, sounds like you may have joined segments that were not split at zero crossings. It might help to examine the troublesome regions at sample level zoom.

Thanks all  On the road but looking forward to trying it.  incidentally the derned thing crashes a lot too when I start transport in the middle of the piece.  interestingly if I start transport at the beginning and move it around while it's in motion by clicking on various locations, no crashing.
 
slartabartfast I didn't understand your post 😬

If you split an audio clip but the split isn't where the waveform crosses the zero line you will get a loud pop or crunch.

You can see what is meant by this if you zoom in on an audio clip until it's so zoomed it shows as a line rather than as a blocky graphic. The "zero line" is where the waveform crosses the horizontal centre line which shows where the clip volume is zero in track view.

If you split that clip anywhere other than at one of those zero points then move it or delete what's in front of or behind it the result is that as Sonar (or any other DAW) reaches that point there's a substantial sudden jump in gain and frequency as Sonar reaches that clip (or the one after it, depending). The result is a click, pop or other audio glitch.

Some synth envelopes can do the same thing if they have a very fast minimum attack (Waldorf digital filters are an example of this).

The answer is to split clips at the zero crossing line (there's a preference setting to arrange for this automatically) or to use extremely short fades at the beginning and end of every split clip. Or in the case of synths to slow the attack just enough to get rid of the noise,

Bob, 
 
Driver mode is ASIO; 
Sample rate is 44100;
ASIO buffer size is...I don't think I am sure - the Focusrate USB 2.0 ASIO Driver Panel says "10ms"...I don't know if that's what you want?
 
 
PS Scook my signature was incorrect; I do have the x3e

Have you checked your system with Latency Mon? This sounds like interference from background processing. If I turn on my Wi FI I certainly will get pops and crackles on my laptop. 

Johnny V, I've hunted around for the latency monitor or something called Latency Mon.
 
I can report that the ASIO Reported Latencies are:
Input: 23.2 MS, 1022 samples
Output: 33.2 ms, 1464 samples
Total Roundtrip 56.4ms, 2486 samples