Recorded audio out of sync from midi

Are you  triggering an external device from SONAR via MIDI and recording it via a loopback cable? If so SONAR has no idea about what the latencies imposed by the device itself are. You should get better results treating it as an external insert since that measures delay and compensates for it.

No, you're doing it the conventional way. What Noel was talking about would not be applicable to a hardware synth because there's no closed audio loop for the External Insert to measure latency on; half the "loop" is MIDI. I think he misunderstood that the the Arturia is just a keyboard synth.
 
Normally, assuming your audio latency compensation is dialed in, the audio from a hardware synth will be recorded late by maybe 3-6 milliseconds relative to the MIDI driving it due to MIDI transmission and synth response delays. There's a Timing Offset setting in Sync and Caching that can compensate for these small MIDI delays with hardware synths, but looking at your screenshot, it appears the audio is early relative to the MIDI by a significant amount. This suggests either audio is overcompensated or MIDI is being sent early. But a discrepancy that large and in that direction might indicate some sort of driver issue.
 
The first thing to do is to make sure your record latency compensation is dialed in so you have a point of reference. The easiest way to do this is to use ASIO driver mode, and download the free CEntrance ASIO Latency tester (or use the External Insert that Noel mentioned) to measure the actual round-trip latency (RTL) with an audio cable patched directly from an output and input on your interface. Then you enter the difference between what CEntrance measures and what SONAR reports for RTL under Driver Settings as the Manual Offset under Record Latency Adjustment on the Sync and Caching page (not to be confused with Timing Offset in milliseconds mentioned above - that should remain 0 for now).
 
Once you've done that, the next thing I would suggest is that you set the  Arturia to use Local Control between its keyboard and synth engine, and record simultaneous MIDI and audio from it into SONAR to check for a timing discrepancy at that point. In that scenario, MIDI should be late by a few milliseconds because the audio latency will be compensated while the MIDI delay is not.
 
If that checks out, try recording audio from the Arturia driven by a MIDI track in SONAR again, and see what you get.
 
Check back in here at that point, and we can determine what needs to happen next based on the results. One thing to try if there are still problems is to connect the Arturia via MIDI DIN connectors on your MOTU interface instead of by USB. Sometimes there can be sync issues between audio and MIDI drivers on different devices.
 
I hope that's understandable. It's a lot easier to do than to describe. There might be faster ways to resolve the problem by trial and error, but it's a good idea to understand what the MIDI and audio latencies are with different devices throughout your system so you really know what's going on. It'll pay off in the long run.

Hey guys
 
I got ASIO drivers running, its a MOTU Ultralite Hybrid interface.
44100 Sampling rate
Buffer 128/2.9 msec 
 
Will check in later tonight at this, but its very annoying... Thanks for your help!

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
Are you  triggering an external device from SONAR via MIDI and recording it via a loopback cable? If so SONAR has no idea about what the latencies imposed by the device itself are. You should get better results treating it as an external insert since that measures delay and compensates for it.

Hello Noel.
 
Please bare with me, as english is my second language and also I struggle with some of the terminology, as I am rather new to using Hardware.
 
I am not sure what you are meaning by "treating it as an external insert", but guess you mean "Audion IN"? As you probably know, the Microbrute is an analog hardware synth. I have connected a mono cable from OUT on the Microbrute into mono IN 3 (left) on my audio card. This is what I have chosen as IN in the audiotrack in Sonar. 
 

Yeah, the MOTU driver responds oddly to CEntrance; I forgot that. Just hit Cancel instead of OK in the MOTU Console, and it should work correctly after that.

Hmmm.... that's possible. MOTU's drivers will have changed for Win8 so canceling the reset may not work the way it used to even though CEntrance seems to be recognizing the driver.
 
In that case, you can do it the old fashioned way by re-recording an audio track, zooming in and using "nudge" to align the recorded  track to the source track, and noting how many samples you had to nudge (typically about  1ms = 44 samples). That's your manual offset. Note that you'll have to trim the beginning of the clip a little to allow nudging earlier.
 
Or you can add SONAR's External Insert to an FX bin, set the I/O channels, and click the Delay button to measure latency. I'm not exactly sure why, but I've found that you have to add the ASIO buffer size (128 in your case) to the reported value to get the correct total RTL.
 
BTW, have you re-checked the MIDI-Audio sync now that you're using ASIO drivers? The bulk of the issue may already have been fixed by that.