Sonar 8PE Needs To Go Back Into The Oven For Another 15 min. At 350 Degrees

I love Sonar 8PE and want to see it work but the optimizations need to be worked on some more. Dropouts at low latencies are my concerns and triggering Beatscape slices on the keyboard (or mouse) sucks. I’ll quote fresh101:
Beatscape bug.

”When playing the slice trigger section in Beatscape in quick succession the audio becomes riddled with pops and clicks, also the first note/beat in a sequence is cut off on playback”.

Cakewalk please listen and take notice to these problems. Thank you!

(Alesis io2 USB 2.0)

I'd be willing to bet you a cold can of Pepsi cola that your problem relates to this.

What is PIO mode? How do you find and disable it? billruys or anyone else please feel free to respond. Will this improve my performance?

In the days before IDE controllers were able to bus master, they performed all transfers using Programmed Input/Output transfer mode. This requires CPU intervention for the entire transfer and as a result will use a large number of CPU cycles, causing bad spikes that will disrupt audio.

All disk controllers are bus mastering controllers these days and do DMA transfers. As a bus mastering controller can control the address bus directly, it takes care of the data transfer without heavy CPU intervention. Sometimes an IDE or SATA disk controller can fall-back to PIO mode after a system crash or hardware problem.

Go into device manager and expand out your disk controllers. For every primary and secondary channel, click on the advanced settings tab and check that nothing is set to PIO. Everthing should show either DMA or SATA transfer mode (depending on the controller/disk technology), but not PIO.

Thanks billruys and Pwal,

I will try what both of guys have said. Also to pwal (or anyone else), where is a good place to find "asio4all drivers" online?

Yah, I realize that was a stupid question after I posted it. The jury might still be out on the “asio4all drivers” but so far I am able to play all the Sonar 8 demos at a lower latency with a dropout.

Well, the PIO suggestion is always worth checking because Windows has a mind of its own about this. Sometimes for no apparent reason it will reconfigure drives to run in PIO mode so its always worth checking, regardless of how modern your computer is. Also wifi is definitely a Bad Thing, as has been mentioned. It really screws things up on most machines.

It seems like my performance has improve some what after I started using the "asio4all drivers". If I had more money I would differently get a better interface. I agree with you all that Alesis has drop the ball when it comes to their audio interfaces. Also I will start making sure that I leave the wireless card off when using Sonar. Thanks!

I've had the issues with Beatscape, too.

I've tried different buffer settings and latencies, all to no avail. Any track I do with Beatscape gets about 30-40 seconds of clean sound, then the pops and crackles start. They seem to happen when one of the loops is triggered, but it's not always the same loop (eg. say I'm using the "FunkMe" group of loops. I lay down a pattern that includes, say, 6 of the 9 loops in that group. When I play it back, sometimes the noise is caused by the kick drum sample being triggered, sometimes it's the organ loop, etc.)

I'd really like to use Beatscape, but as it is now I've been unable to do anything with it that doesn't have this problem.

I've got a few more issues too, mostly small stuff.

The "Insert Send Assistant" is not showing up (no biggie, I don't need it, but still...)
The "Aim Assistant" or whatever it is, isn't working either. Like the Insert Send, it's just not there.
It's like my copy of S8 has some code missing or something. I know that's not true, but that's the way it behaves.

There are a few more things, like I'll be mixing a small (6 track, about a dozen plugs) project and everything is going smoothly, when suddenly the cpu meter spikes and I get a dropout. This happened to me just last night. I have mixed projects with up to 30 tracks and a couple dozen plugs on this same machine with the same settings in Sonar 5, 6, and 7 and never had problems. And I've not added any new plugs or anything, the only thing new is S8.
Now, this doesn't happen all the time, in the couple of weeks I've had S8 it's happened maybe 3 times, and I've never had a crash or lost anything because of it, but it's kinda unnerving, ya know?

Especially since the last 4 versions of Sonar have been just about as smooth as I could ask.

I'm just sayin'.....