MIDI droput issues

By "dropout" do you mean tracks go silent as the transport continues to run, or the audio engine actually drops out with a Toast notification and the transport stops?
 
If the former, and your MIDI Prepare Using Buffer is already 700ms or more (500ms is usually sufficient), try changing the tempo of the project very slightly or moving hard-quantized MIDI slightly off the grid.
 
If the latter, download the free LatencyMon, and check your Deferred Procedure Call Latency. The most common cause of dropouts related to DPC spikes is WiFi drivers; they should be disabled when running SONAR.
 
 

Yes, by "dropout" I mean that the playback stops completely and the red "DROPOUT" flag is lit at the bottom of the project window. I had already upped my MIDI prepare buffer from 500ms to 750ms. I've never had an issue using 500, with many, many, more MIDI tracks running, so this had no effect.

I have also disabled any background services that I don't need in case they were interrupting, and that didn't change anything.

I downloaded Latencymon and it gives me no indication that anything is wrong. The one thing that is strange though is that it shows my page faults are really high. I've looked in the task manager and performance monitor, but can't see anything unusual.

My swap space on my disk, which I've also never had to worry about, was set to about 2GB, so I upped it to 4GB and that had no effect.

I tried "save as," closed Sonar, reopened it, and opened the new project. It played though once fine, then ran it again and it dropped out.

I'm having a hard time understanding what could be causing this. With so little going on in the project, it shouldn't be an issue.

Yes, I do have it set for background perfomance. I'm using an Edirol UA-25 and that's what the manual said to do. I have been running it this way for about 7 years with no problems, but if it's not doing anything, I can change it back. I'm running on Sonar 8.3.1

I did manage to narrow the problem down to the instance of Sonitus Reverb. When I turn the reverb off, things go fine, when it's on they go awry. I upped my ASIO buffer from 6 to 9 and the problem seems to have disappeared. Still strange because I'm only running this one effect, although I'm new to using the ASIO drivers.

This is  somewhat disconcerting. I use the basic reverb presumably because it doesn't place a lot of load on the machine and I play live through Guitar Rig with my backing tracks rolling and want to my buffer to be set low to get the least latency possible.

I'm going to try changing to "program priority" and see if I can get any further improvement.

Thank you all for your help so far!

Tim

Well, I changed the priority which on its own didn't do anything, but I switched to WDM drivers and then back to ASIO, and I think I unplugged the Edirol and rebooted somewhere in there and the problem seems to have gone.

I don't have the double-precision switch on.

Is the Lexicon Reverb lighter than the Sonitus? I like that one better, but I assumed it would be heavier on the CPU.