Using Sonar X3 with Guitar Rig 5 and a Focusrite 6i6.  I'm adding lots of guitar tracks with effects and GR, etc., even on buses, it's taxing my CPUs greatly.  I've got an older (3.5 yrs old) Intel i7 laptop with 8GB and I'm getting pops and scratches.
 
So, is there a way I can use a track with GR on it as the effect and record the resulting audio onto a dedicated track as if I were mic'ing a real cab or record the audio from a bus that has GR on it?  Or do I have to use the 6i6 to loop back into Sonar.  I'd prefer not to do that to avoid any latency.
 
Thanks.

Why not freeze each guitar track after you have recorded it this will result in just audio being played back for each frozen track.  Each track can have an instance of GR in as when frozen the GR is affectively taken out of the CPU load loop.

utopiastudios
So, is there a way I can use a track with GR on it as the effect and record the resulting audio onto a dedicated track as if I were mic'ing a real cab or record the audio from a bus that has GR on it? 

Another option is just to record into the track with GR, or the one feeding the bus with GR, and bounce the part to a track (which would incorporate the GR effect) if you're happy with the part. An added advantage is that you can mute or archive the original track if you decide you want to tweak GR later on in the recording process. Even if SONAR could record bus audio, I'd still consider bouncing as preferable.

Thanks both!  Freezing the tracks makes sense to me once I'm happy with it.  This is for pre-prod so I'm not crazy picky with the sound.  What I can do in this case though is clone the track with the clean sound performance and archive it into a folder should I need to go back and use it for later.

utopiastudios
What I can do in this case though is clone the track with the clean sound performance and archive it into a folder should I need to go back and use it for later.

 
Exactly! Basically, amp sims are always re-amping.

I'd like to back up a second here.  In the original post, you indicate you are adding a bunch of guitar tracks, with effects and such, and now you are getting lag and crackles and whatnot.
 
I am imagining that if all of these effects are loaded into tracks and you are still in the recording phase of this project, that there may be a simpler fix.
 
Some of these effects may be ones that are actually not meant to be used during recording, but are instead considered 'mixing' effects.
 
Try this - hit the letter 'E' on your computer keyboard, to toggle on/off 'Bypass All Effects', and then hit play and see if all of your noise and lag goes away.
 
If it DOES, then you are either out of computer processing horsepower, OR some of the effects are spiking your DPC latency or chewing up a bunch of CPU.
 
(hitting 'E' again will turn the effects back on, by the way - so not to worry)
 
You may well be able to swap out some of the more 'costly' effects for ones that run more 'lean' and can be used during recording without spiking DPC latency, and if you can - that would be one path you could follow - the other choices being either keeping all effects bypassed while recording (but that will sound pretty bad with no effects like no guitar rig, etc), OR you could do as others here have suggested and freeze things etc.
 
If you wanted to try the swapping out of some effects, you would want to know which ones to swap out.  If you could perhaps post back with a list of all the effects currently loaded into the project, myself or other forum members could guide you through which ones you might want to swap out.
 
Effects that are designed for mixing and not for use while recording typically do things like use 'look-ahead' processing where they read the audio data ahead of what is playing, so they know what to do with it for the effect, or they may simply by design just chew up a bunch of memory or CPU.  Swapping these effects out during recording would potentially bring things back to where you could continue to record without having to freeze and all of that.  Then, when ready for mixing, you would want to jack up your ASIO Buffer Size (I use 1024) and you could load those swapped out effects back in and they would work fine during mixing (you don't need to worry about latency during mixing).
 
I hope that gives you some additional info to think over.
 
Bob Bone