SONAR X1 Essential: Is my equipment responsible for dropouts/slow loading?

This is a fairly common question and an adjustment of buffer size isn't the issue.  A DAW is a very CPU intensive.  If you use your PC for things other than a DAW then many of your problems will be related to all these additional applications and services requesting as much from the CPU as any DAW application.

As such an out-of-the-box installation of Windows 7 is not designed for DAW use.  I know.  I've tested this theory and proved it.  My system specs are below.

Please refer to this post that has links to tweaks to improve performance and a little tool to help see the progress.

Hello John,
 
This is much appreciated.  I'll let you know how it works out.
 
Have a good evening!
 
Dan

Be sure to use ASIO drivers. If you're not sure how to set them up, check out the ASIO Configuration video here ... http://www.cakewalk.com/CakeTV/SONARU.aspx/Get-Started

SP

Hello Seth,
 
I have the ASIO drivers configured, thank you.  Will I be able to have a MIDI controller running through one USB port and have the UA-1G through another?  When I configured the ASIO driver, I couldn't hear anything through my speakers; I had to use the headphone jack on my UA-!G.  There was still a lot of popping.
 
Thanks!
 
Dan

Hmm...

Reading your first post you said you had no problem until adding sound files and starting more complex projects. To me that sounds like you are running out of memory. Do not forget Windows 7 use a LOT of memory just to get some basic things running. If you add a memory-hungry program like Sonar you can easily run out of memory - especially when using large sound files. If you are running short of memory the swap memory get used. As this memory is disc based (a big "swap" file on your hard disk), it is painfully slow compared to RAM. This slowness can be easily be the source of your problems (drop-outs etc.).

My advise is to invest a little in more memory. As you are using Windows 7 64 bit, you are not restricted to the 3,5 Gb maximum value. Memory is cheap these days, so anything in the range 4Gb to 8Gb is affordable. As I don't know the type or brand your motherboard, I cannot say if you just can add memory (if you have more then 2 memory slots) or have to replace your old memory.

As for using two sound devices at the same time. When you are using ASIO I am afraid that is not possible (as far as I know). You can try using another driver (WDM or something), but I don't know if this has negative effect on your sound performance.

Yeah I'd bump up your RAM for starters.

Ringing out a DAW can be a mind-destroying experience. Accrued gack, registry issues, driver issues, hardware gremlins, cables and connections, inadequate power supplies, RAM problems. Eesh.

For starters, I'd do a few of the following things:

• Defrag your hard disks
• Run Memtest, a RAM diagnostic tool
• Find a few of the optimization tips (one was linked above) and make a few tweaks. You'd be surprised how much power you can recoup by disabling unnecessary services
• You don't say what your hard drive situation is, but if you're only using one I'd consider a dedicated audio drive...which are absurdly cheap nowadays
• You don't mention what graphics card or whatnot you got, but take a look and evaluate. I upgraded mine when I got X1 and was shocked at my across the board performance gains
• Run msconfig (or whatever the Win7 equiv is) and analyze your startup items. You'd be surprised how many programs have TSR items or agents that run at boot time and just hang out idling in the background ALL THE TIME

And then report back when all this breaks your system so we can help you fix it. That's how I learned anyways. :-)

Hello All,

Thank you so much for all of your input.  It turns out the issue was I simply did not have enough RAM.  I upped my RAM from 2 GBs to 6 GBs and everything is running smoothly.    

I hooked up my speakers directly from my UA-1G and everything sounds swell.

Thanks again!

DAn