• SONAR
  • Needing excessive buffers for Playback and Recording
2015/03/18 07:39:25
precisionguided
I'm having an issue wherein I have to have my buffers at 4096 to have no dropouts and even then, I still get the occasional dropout. This is with my CPU usage not even hitting 25%. This is particularly vexing because loading up a project that uses 85% of my cpu in Reaper with an obscene amount of plugins and such at a buffer of 64. 
 
For the sake of troubleshooting, the relevant computer specs are as follows:
4790K - overclocked to 4.7GHz
16GB RAM
Motu 1248 connected via USB
 
As I stated, the system is stable everywhere else and runs perfectly fine in reaper.
2015/03/18 12:11:40
DeeringAmps
C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\SONAR Platinum\AUD.INI
Rename AUD.INI to AUD.old or whatever you want.
If you're not running Platinum, open whatever version you are running (all Sonar's installed will be there).
Might not hurt to rename all the AUD files in the various Versions.
Try that, you can't hurt anything, you will lose any "friendly" input/output names (take a screen shot prior to the change).
You will also have to re-set some the of Audio settings in Preferences>Audio check them all.
AppData is a "hidden" folder, you might have to tell Windows to let you see hidden folders.
Solved a bunch of issues I was having with dropouts, snap, crackle, pop; simple projects, 2048 sample buffer; WTF?
My "Cat" is a little long in the tooth, but she still "purrs" up a storm, and RME drivers are rock solid.
I was at the point of contemplating a complete re-install of Windows; would've worked, that would have
deleted the AUD.INI file.
Best of luck, and don't ask me why it works.
I compared the before\after ini files (its a text file).
Order of "go", so to speak, was different; but I couldn't find a "problem".
"Gremlins"? That or Rockus and Rollus, the Gods of rock music, where just havin' some fun at my expense.
Again!
Tom
2015/03/18 12:22:21
Cactus Music
Run Latency Mon. 
http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
 
Disable Video card HDMI audio. 
2015/03/18 14:35:43
precisionguided
I tried renaming the AUD file and it seems to have improved slightly but still performing terrible. I've run latencymon. No issues there, and like I said, in Reaper it runs fine even on low buffer settings. All vid card HDMI audio are all disabled.
2015/03/18 16:37:46
brundlefly
Just to be clear, when you say "dropout", do you mean the transport stops with a "Toast" notification from SONAR? Or do you just get an occasional pop in the audio from a dropped buffer or some MIDI notes don't sound or...?
 
If it's an actual transport stoppage, you should either see a CPU spike or the disk I/O icon flash red in SONAR's performance module. Then, if it's a CPU spike, I'd suspect some driver causing a DPC latency to spike or maybe an interoperability problem between SONAR and a particular plugin. If it's disk I/O, you might just need to increase your playback disk buffer size.
2015/03/18 22:29:25
precisionguided
It doesn't completely stop but the audio stutters or otherwise glitches. No CPU spikes and Ive tried increasing playback and disk buffers, but no dice. Also, since it's a 1tb raid 0 ssd array, the disk activity is only around 1 percent. For those who might suggest that it might be a raid problem, reaper has no trouble using the same array and when it was a hackintosh, logic had no trouble with it. Really tried everything I can think of here.
2015/03/18 22:57:58
submarin
Motu drivers are really really bad on Windows, I´m running RME in my studio and have a Motu 828mk3 for live recordings,
RME rocks withb lowest latencies with Platinum
and the Motu always gives me problems..
2015/03/18 23:03:02
precisionguided
Except that I have user low latency in Windows on reaper and ridiculously high latency in sonar. This suggests that the motu isn't the problem.
2015/03/19 05:48:01
ston
RAID 0 should be OK (although I personally wouldn't bother with using a RAID array on a DAW or home PC, I prefer to backup).  Given your system specs, there is no way you should ever be having to use an audio buffer size of > 256 samples.
 
In my opinion, you should not be using SSD drives for your audio; system / application drive yes, but any drive that's going to have a lot of writes thrown at it should probably be a normal magnetic platter disk.  Was that your decision, or did somebody give you that advice?  Do you know the read/write speed balance for the SSD drives that you're using?  It's not necessarily that they'll wear out and stop being usable after a period of time (high quality modern SSDs have something like a 5 year whole-disk write warranty!), but that there's an awful lot of checking, copying, wear-leveling, and shuffling around of data required on each block write, and the minimum amount of data is always an entire block; SSDs have built-in data redundancy, so like a mini RAID system all to themselves.  What I'm trying to say here is that an SSD RAID array will not necessarily be a better choice for audio streaming than a fast SATA or SAS HDD.
 
FSB (i.e. RAM access) timings can be critical, and there's a relationship between the CPU clock speed and the FSB speed.  You are most likely having memory access/contention issues if you're seeing dropouts with a buffer size of 4096 bytes, so the first thing I'd suggest is to remove the overclocking from the CPU. 
 
If that doesn't help, try using a non-SSD drive for the audio, even a USB-connected external drive will do for this purpose.  Also, try removing the Motu interface and select a non-ASIO driver in Sonar (try using Windows WDM, i.e. crappy motherboard audio).
 
If none of the above helps to shed any light on the matter, it might be worth posting some more detailed specs here; mobo, memory, cpu, hard drives, raid controller, gfx card, OS, anti-virus s/w, attached peripherals etc.
2015/03/19 06:24:36
precisionguided
I appreciate your thorough response. I did the raid myself and I'm seeing 1000MB/s (double what a single drive would do) read and write sequential. I Don't really have issues with redundancy as I have a backup solution for the audio drives. Also, I'm not worried about the wear and tear because Ssds now Have tons of write cycles in them. The overclock is the first thing I'd look at for troubleshooting too, but for the fact that it wasn't problematic in either logic or reaper. So all other factors are equal except the daw itself and yet one works and the other doesn't. It's also the same when I use my axe2 as the interface, so it's not something with just the motu and sonar.

I've literally tried everything in terms of disabling, uninstalling my anti-virus, disabling network adapters, messing with the aud in terms of extra buffers, etc, and resetting it, disabling system restore, elevating the process to real-time and upping the it provisions in the system, trying different nvidia drivers starting a project from scratch, trying different USB ports, reinstalling the drivers, using mme and wdm drivers and a host of other things. I might have to just migrate to reaper until sonar becomes more stable (at least for my system. I know many of you have stable installations). Also I can't deal with the midi note dropouts.
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