Session Drummer 3 X64 Loop - Beat falls apart without Metronome running

Noob Alert!
 
When I loop a few measures of an SD3 beat (any beat) it seems to play ok the first time through but every time it loops the instruments start wandering or dropping out and eventually they all disappear -  unless the playback metronome is on. Then the beat stays in sync and continues no problem. Its as if SD3 is looking at the metronome to stay in time.
 
It also does the same thing in the matrix view. If I drop in a four measure beat, things start wandering right away, but the instruments don't drop out like they do in the track view or step sequencer.
 
I tried this on a fresh project with nothing but SD3 and had the same results.
 
(W764, Mackie Onyx 1640 Mixer w/ firewire interface)

Usually only see drifting like that with Sound Blaster cards. A timing issue if you know what I mean.

Something with the playback/record timing master in Audio preferences?

RESOLVED!  WDM drivers loaded by default when X1 installed. Changed to ASIO and the problem went away.  Happy Happy!
Thanks brundlefly and Bub for taking the time to read and respond!
-p
 

I'm with perfectprint. Im using asio with my delta 66, and my vsts still drift out of sync unless the metronome is on.

All of my vsti's

I will use battery 3 and use the step-sequencer in x1 with massive or z3ta+. After a few loops "everything" is severely out of sync. It goes back in sync when I start over. I just tried using and audio loop with massive, same thing every time. None of my other daws are doing this.

I reported a bug against 8.5.3 that I think persists in X1 that Bitbridged 32-bit synths would have an extra empty buffer added to the beginning of the track when bouncing/freezing, effectively making it play back on buffer late. If the buffer setting was large, it would be audible.

I'm wondering if this issue could pertain to real-time playback, too, since SONAR buffers up soft synth audio in advance, possibly using the same code that it uses for freezing. Could be an extra buffer is getting added with every loop.
So the question is are Maschine and Battery Bitbridged, and does buffer size have an impact on how fast things get out of sync?

BTW, this is  Bitbridge bug. JBridge does not exhibit this problem.

If its not to late, I'd like to Join this discussion. Since upgrading from my very old Sonar (2.2) to Sonar producer 8.5 with session drummer years back, "looping" to build up a song idea has become a frustrating and nearly impossible venture because of the very issues all of you are discussing. Sadly,  I've tried no less than 10 times over almost 2 years now to get help from Cakewalk. Over and over all they do is thank me in email and tell me of the support I'll soon get, and there never is a followup. Sometimes they have replied with all the usual checklists for me to follow, but eventually they abandon me, never considering the remote possibility that they may actually have a bug! 

In any case, Let me offer some specifics, along with one work-around that so far seems to work. I'd also like some more info on this "metranome on" solution, as I've not had any luck with that. 

Now I've been using ASIO drivers with my M-Audio Delta 24/96, which is pretty basic but a good solid card and driver just the same. In my setup I would often drop in an 8 bar drum pattern that was "close" to what i wanted, and loop it. This would (hopefully) allow me experiment and build up a groove through mods, additions, and deletions. But like some of you I started noticing things drifting out of sync. Most notable, all the session drummer drums would start drifting out of sync with each other. I too found that stopping and restarting re-sync'd everything, but what good is that? 

Well it took me all this time to  notice this (no thanks to cakewalk), but I've been in the habit of using the the capability of SD3 to output different drums on different channels, so that I could process my snare, kick, and 'all other" drums separately. WELL... if I go back to the SD3 mixer and instead rout all the drums through one channel, the drums now stay in Sync! 

I don't know if this is a good work around or not yet, because I'm still not 100Y sure the drums will stay in sync with other tracks. But just to at LEAST get the drums to stay together makes the process workable! I can always re-rout the drums again later when I'm no so much in the experimental stages of the song.

Obviously, what is going on is that the different tracks (at least from SD3 anyway) are each either losing or gaining some time markers with each repetition. As a programmer I've dealt with issues like this before, and the solution is usually a dual approach... (1) do everything you can to make sure all processes stay in sync, and (2) as a back up, resynchronize everything wherever possible.  Now thankfully, this is being done, or Sonar would be a totally useless product. BUT equally obvious, in the case of looping, that second safeguard step is not being done. So it would be NICE is collectively we could find a way to pressure Cakewalk to at least take a LOOK at this BUG, and agree to fix it. There ought to be some other acknowledgement of something as severe as an instrument timing/sync issue in SOME other place on the cakewalk website than just in the forums!

Finally, I'd like to try the "metronome during playback" solution too, but so far it hasn't worked for me. But maybe that's because SD3 doesn't even know about my  metronome ?  If i set it to MIDI output, I don't hear any metranome coming from the SD3 track (or tracks). And if I set it to Audio, I'd think it wouldn't even take part in the timing? But what did you guys do to get it to work? 

Thanks for listening to my Rant!