• SONAR
  • Intermittent Loss of Transport Control
2010/12/16 01:38:51
brundlefly
This issue is kind of nebulous at this point, but I've had the transport get "stuck" a few times; both failing to stop when I try to stop it or stopping spontaneously while in playback, and refusing to restart until I rewind. In all cases, it was before or after any active track content was reached/passed - in other words while playing through empty measures (I always have Stop At Project End disabled). When it happens, the transport won't repond to Spacebar or GUI buttons. In the case if it not stopping, I had to end SONAR from the Task Manager.
 
I remember logging a problem report for this back in S6 or 7, but it got fixed with the next release. Seems like it might be back.
 
Anyone else seen this with X1?
2010/12/16 03:06:57
ba_midi
Dave,

I haven't seen that here _yet_.  I've been doing a lot of testing with very large projects (I find them the best to shake things out with) and the transport has been fine so far.


2010/12/16 03:08:29
ba_midi
Are you seeing it on more than one project?

If not, watch those tiny animated CPU meters to see if anything is 'taking over'.

I had one project in 8.5.3 that had one plugin causing serious weirdness (probably a denormal issue) and it took a while for me to figure it out because I wasn't watching the meters when it would cause this drastic bump in cycles.


2010/12/16 14:30:26
brundlefly
ba_midi


Are you seeing it on more than one project?

If not, watch those tiny animated CPU meters to see if anything is 'taking over'.

I had one project in 8.5.3 that had one plugin causing serious weirdness (probably a denormal issue) and it took a while for me to figure it out because I wasn't watching the meters when it would cause this drastic bump in cycles.

Thanks for the feedback, Billy. Interesting points. I've mainly been testing with two demo project becasue they are complex enough to really see how stuff works. Lance's project gave me the most trouble in this respect, especially the 9-bar lead-in. The tranpost would run right up to the end of the last lead-in bar, and then stop.
 
I have an idea now that it might be related to disk buffering. When I first saw this, I was running projects off my usual audio drive with 256kB I/O buffers, and disk load staying under 25%. This morning for grins I put the Cori Yarckin demo on my new cheapo USB 2.0 external drive that I bought with money saved by not ordering the physical kit for X1 . It ran fine with 256kB I/O buffers, peaking at about 62%.
 
I lowered the buffer to 128kB, and things still ran okay (somewhat surprisingly) until I set up to loop about 8 bars. The loop would run right up to the end, and then the transport would just stop. It was quite repeatable, and after a few passes, I noticed that the disk icon was flashing red when the transport stopped, from which I concluded I was getting a dropout due to disk load when SONAR was preparing to jump back to the beginning of the loop.
 
It may be that something like this was happening with my regular audio disk when getting to the beginning of audio track in Lance's demo, though it shouldn't have been a problem with the disk running at a nominal 20%. Next time I see it happen, I will check the disk load.
 
Denormal errors are also a possibility, as I turned off denormal protection a while ago, 'cause I didn't like seeing all the "noise" in BitMeter.   I probably shouldn't have done that. I never encountered a problem with it running that way for the last 6 months or so in 8.5, but it may be that there's something in Lance's project that's causing them.
 
2010/12/16 15:03:19
ba_midi
Fwiw, Dave, I've run with 512 I/O Playback buffer since the beginning of my journey with Sonar and it's served me well as a value for that buffer (I use 256 for record i/o buffers though).
 
Also - X1 is way more graphically intense.  So that may play a role too.   Hard to say what's causing your problem.
 
BTW - how do you "turn off" denormal protection?
 
 
2010/12/16 15:16:19
brundlefly
ZeroFillMethod=0 in AUD.INI. I think the default is 2, but I don't know what the different "methods" are other than that 0 disables it.

Strangely, the thread I learned about this from is no longer accessible:

forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?&m=2054046

You can find links to it by Googling "clone transparency flaw" site:forum.cakewalk.com, but none of them work.








2010/12/16 15:27:08
ba_midi
brundlefly


ZeroFillMethod=0 in AUD.INI. I think the default is 2, but I don't know what the different "methods" are other than that 0 disables it.

Strangely, the thread I learned about this from is no longer accessible:

forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?&m=2054046

You can find links to it by Googling "clone transparency flaw" site:forum.cakewalk.com, but none of them work.




Ah, ok - I think I have that info around here SOMEwhere :)
I haven't needed to change it though.

 
2015/03/12 00:58:55
bitman
Brundlefly, stop / run the audio engine works to work around this. And you don't have to kill sonar.
2015/03/12 01:50:05
noynekker
 . . . a thread from 4 + years ago, brundlefly may have this fixed by now.
I miss Billy Arnell
2015/03/12 02:57:46
brundlefly
Wow. Blast from the past. Yeah, Billy was a good guy. IIRC, it turned out there actually was some issue in X1 that Lance's demo project exposed. But I also changed interfaces not long after that, and haven't seen the unresponsive transport thing since. And FWIW, I definitely would have tried resetting the audio engine before killing SONAR, but that doesn't usually do anything when the transport's running.
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