SONAR will favor the audio driver when resources become scarce, at the expense of other threads such as video updates. This manifests itself as sluggish graphics, and sometimes sluggish response to mouse movements, mouse clicks and keypresses during playback. 

When this happens to me, it's usually after the computer has not been rebooted for a couple weeks, and a reboot nearly always gets things back to normal. If it's consistently like that, though, you'll have to do some Windows troubleshooting to find out what's eating system resources.

stickman393


No, seriously, have you accidently pushed the PAUSE key?

From the help file:

"SONAR has a CPU conservation mode that reduces the number of GUI updates with no effect on actual playback quality and rendering. This maximizes CPU resources for the audio engine and can be useful while playing projects that consume a lot of CPU, to help avoid dropouts.
Like the Scroll Lock key, the Pause key now works as a special GUI throttle toggle key. When the Pause key is pressed, SONAR runs in a CPU conservation mode by reducing the frequency of GUI updates. For example, VU meter updates, Now position pointer and progress updates will appear to update less frequently.
During CPU conservation mode, the UI is only updated once per second."

Thank you sooooooooo much! This was driving me crazy cuz I'm running a 3.2ghz quad core w/ 8gb ram and I knew it couldn't be resources. I must reiterate though its the pause key on the keyboard cuz I got confused with the pause button in the console(duh!). I must hit that dang pause button when I hit delete. Super Annoying!

Hi,
So I was having the exact same problem and I noticed that under the Performance my disk load was running at red.
(Note: This only happened when I started to add more audio tracks with more plugins)
 
All I did to fix the issue was uninstall some hefty games that took up a lot of space and boom, my playback stop lagging and responded fast again.
 
I think Sonar has a hard time loading audio data when the disk I close to full. Keep an eye on your performance monitor in Sonar.
 
hope this helps,
thanks