[Solved] How to eliminate playback lag when repositioning cursor?

Hi-
 
My audio interface is a Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6. I have it set to 44100 Hz, 64 samples, 4 ms USB buffer for all three tests below.
 
I'm running the latest 64-bit versions of the 3 DAWs I tested on Win 10 x64.
 
I'm wondering if there's a way to eliminate the lag I'm experiencing in SONAR when I relocate the cursor during playback. I might be missing a setting somewhere.
 
I created the test tracks by exporting the audio from SONAR's "SONAR_AudioDemo.cwp." Then I loaded those tracks in a new project in SONAR, REAPER and FL Studio.
 
Here are my results in SONAR (the video starts kind of late, sorry):


In REAPER:

 
and in FL Studio:

There's an obvious lag in playback in SONAR, but not the others. Does anyone know how I can get rid of this? As I said, my audio interface settings were identical for all three tests using these identical audio tracks with no FX.
 
Thanks much in advance-
 
-Susan

Hi Susan,
 
The good news is: I don't get that, so it's fixable. The bad news is: I don't know why, and it might be hardware, though I'm not running anything state of the art.
 
If it's only the display that's lagging and not the audio, my first thought is maybe you have Windows visual effects disabled that SONAR depends on to animate the Now time cursor. I recommend setting them to 'Adjust for Best Appearance' to keep Windows from changing things dynamically.
 
If the audio is also lagging, I would think maybe you need to raise (or lower) your disk I/O buffers. But I experimented with that, using the same Audio Demo project and didn't really see any difference in behavior at different settings.

brundlefly
Hi Susan,
 
The good news is: I don't get that, so it's fixable. The bad news is: I don't know why, and it might be hardware, though I'm not running anything state of the art.
 
If it's only the display that's lagging and not the audio, my first thought is maybe you have Windows visual effects disabled that SONAR depends on to animate the Now time cursor. I recommend setting them to 'Adjust for Best Appearance' to keep Windows from changing things dynamically.
 
If the audio is also lagging, I would think maybe you need to raise (or lower) your disk I/O buffers. But I experimented with that, using the same Audio Demo project and didn't really see any difference in behavior at different settings.

Hi Dave-
 
The audio lags along with the display. I tried raising and lowering disk I/O buffers, but no difference. I did find what I might think my be a buglet where changing the Device for Record Latency Adjustment didn't stick, but I'll post about that separately.
 
Occasionally I'll get a loud buzz from my interface when I relocate the cursor which goes away when I click somewhere else on the time line. Since this is only happening in SONAR, it still seems like it must be a setting I'm missing; I just don't know which. I've tried different buffer settings on my interface and the CPU and Disk performance readings in SONAR are very low.
 
Thanks-
 
-Susan

Susan G
I did find what I might think my be a buglet where changing the Device for Record Latency Adjustment didn't stick, but I'll post about that separately.
 

 
That's come up before. IIRC the display in the Record Latency Adjustment should not be a drop-down as the relevant device is ultimately controlled by what you have selected for your Record timing Master. My Record Latency dropdown only shows MOTU PCI ASIO.
 
For the other issues the only thing I can suggest is that you try renaming your AUD.IN file, and starting fresh.  also maybe run LatencyMon, and look for DPC spikes when you're changing playback position. Even though you're not seeing it in SONAR's performance monitor, it sounds like some combination of disk access, graphic updates or other system activity is interfering with SONAR's ability to keep the buffers filled or is maybe conflicting with the audio driver directly.
 
You might try putting SONAR in CPU Conservation Mode with the Pause key, and seeing if delaying the graphics update helps with the audio streaming side of it.

Adq
Hi, Susan!
Usually I can see something like that on heavy loaded projects, so your situation looks strange, especially if you say that CPU and Disk is not very loaded. There is only audio in your test project. Do you use SSD? Or if you use HDD, have you done defragmentation? Also, if you have few or one track in a project, does it behave the same?

Hi Anton-
 
The audio isn't on an SSD drive, and yes, the drive is defragged. 
 
I tried deleting all but one track and there was no delay. I then added them back one by one and the delay increased very slightly with each additional track until it was back to what you can see in the video. I wouldn't expect any delay at all with only 9 tracks.
 
Thanks-
 
-Susan

OK seen it. I think it's driver related even though other DAWs may work perfectly.
I know I had this for a while with my Focusrite drivers until I got an update.
 
Update audio interface and firmware. Update motherboard BIOS and chipset drivers. Delete AUD.INI in Sonar.
When updating audio interface driver uninstall and then install (regardless of whether you already have the latest or not).
Might as well update the display driver whilst you are at it.

I get the exact same thing (with the "record scratch" noise and all) when my projects start getting larger/more complex.
 
The way I minimize it is by flattening any completed "comps", dragging the clip into a new track and archiving the original track with all the takes (thus removing all those takes from the resource load).
 
Sonar is expecting you to be muting/soloing/fastcomping/etc ALL of the takes/clips in ALL of the tracks in the project so it has to make sure they are all available before it starts playback. By minimizing the amount of clips it needs to get ready for such on the fly editing you free up the program and system to react more quickly to transport commands.
 
Even if you aren't finished editing a track you can use that method (I label my tracks as Scratch (for writing/practicing into), Trck Fin (for tracking finals into), Edit (for editing my final takes in) and Final (which is the track with only one of two flattened comps for the final mix). I will often recycle the tracks at various stages instead of actually creating new tracks for each of those stages but the end result is the same. Any takes I recorded into/used for editing/comping get archived and the final mix tracks have as few clips (contiguous clips with no splits and all edits like fades preferably done). If I want to go back and create a new comp I access the original takes I just unarchive the original track and yank what I want.
 
I say all this because I noticed almost IMMEDIATELY with the introduction of the new comping features in X3 that those types of lags got pretty long (they were there before but not as pronounced).
 
That should help reduce quite a bit of what you are experiencing BUT other things to try/consider are active synths and FX (all of which can obviously contribute to lags and latency... especially anything with "lookahead" properties). For those you can just momentarily freeze the synth (in the synth rack) or FX (on the track) or both OR if you don't like/trust freeze you can just do a temporary bounce of the synth performance/FX to a clip and work around that until you are ready to move on to your final mix (where you'll likely want access to all parameters of such things... but I try to get my synth tweaks done first then focus on the mix FX in the final mix as if I recorded a live mic'd instrument and am stuck with the result).
 
Another thing to look at are your Read/Write hard disk i/o cache buffers in Preferences. Mucking around with those seems to have an effect on how long it takes for playback to begin depending on the project (of course they can screw up other things too).
 
And then there are your interface buffer settings which can be tweaked a bit to minimize lags/increase performance/etc.
 
Disabling "realtime protection/scanning" on your AV software is likely to help to or at least whitelisting anything to do with Sonar/audio files.
 
Just some crap I've found over the years that seems to affect this behavior. As I said though the MOST helpful seems to be reducing the amount of clips/take lanes being processed at once. It makes an ENORMOUS difference when I widdle down my projects to "one clip per track". So much so sometimes after I edit I start an entirely new project and import the Audio/MIDI clips I have edited in the original project. I generally reserve that for REALLY crazy projects though (like approaching 70+ tracks and many hundreds of clips).
 
Cheers.

I definitely get a glitch like you when I enable "Set Now Time With Full Restart" and it disappears when it's disabled, so I do think this might be the culprit: I'm not actually sure why it's needed (I think it might be for some plug-ins that need to know exact MBT setting at all times - eg. drum synths playing patterns - but I don't know for sure); I have no obvious problems with any plug-ins when it's disabled.

I have a sneaking suspicion it might be the default (I think it's per project, so maybe with just some templates SONAR ships with?). It probably shouldn't be if it is, as it would give a new user a bad experience!

This thread made me paranoid so I went looking for that setting. Never encountered this issue, and that setting was off.

Interesting, I jump around the timeline all the time (marker jumps, etc.) and certainly never felt a need to shut the audio engine down. I also work primarily with audio (not sure if this contributes or not).

Does that setting affect audio FX and MIDI? I am wondering of a situation where on is a "must."

Other weird thing as I was digging for that setting (track view options) it seems the menus are bigger/more complex than I remember.