Sonar X1 shifting audio ahead of the beat

Interestingly, while overdubbing more audio parts in X1, there's no discrepancy between metronome and initially-recorded guitar part - nor between session drummer and the audio part when I add that in - both session drummer and the metronome are agreeing on the beat both when there's a problem on playback and when they seem to match up while recording overdubs.  If I just hit record and listen to the other parts play back, the guitar notes and metronome notes match up perfectly.

I'm only discovering this now because I've always done acoustic stuff and never activated the metronome on playback, so whatever cakewalk was doing to shift parts on playback, it did to every single part in exactly the same way and on overdubs there was no issue with the metronome.  My first inkling was when I decided to fiddle with the audiosnap quantize function awhile back and ended up deciding it was unusable because it seemed to be making things worse instead of better - now it's pretty obvious it was matching the same timing the metronome and instruments would.

Tried the same setup in Studio One 2.5 with metronome, then with a drum part programmed out on the piano roll... no problems of any kind.


Gonna throw it into Reaper and Ableton in a few minutes here and I've got the Cubase demo downloading now so I can try it on that.  It's funny, I might have gone on blissfully with X1 indefinitely had I not decided to start adding in instruments, which I really want to start branching out into at this point - I'm bored of manually recording  maracca parts and stuff.  Been with Cakewalk since Pro Audio 9.

Thanks for the suggestions

Offset is (and was) at 0
I was pretty certain offset wouldn't be an issue, since it is happening on playback but not while recording.

I'm not one to mess with the default settings unless there'd be a specific reason to do so - and there hasn't been, so it's extremely unlikely that I would have changed the settings to cause the problem, but I did go ahead and fiddle with it just now... just for the heck of it switched from chase lock to trigger & freewheel and it's better but visually I can still see the peaks in the wave file shifting to the left after I hit the stop button although not as far.  Still sounds a bit ahead although better.  I'm going to record the metronome and test with recorded metronome and playback metronome panned hard left/right on playback to make sure the perceived timing issue is still there.

Like I said, it of course concerns me that on overdub, metronome and audio match - if I just offset it to compensate, I assume I will have timing problems whenever I'm adding new tracks.  It's weird.  If it was an issue of latency of course my audio would be behind not in front of the beat.

Tested and Reaper also had no problems so I guess we could go on the theory that there's a default setting in Sonar X1 that is causing problems while Reaper and Studio One's default settings don't cause this problem.  Seems like a lot of X1 issues end up with "it is so weird that this is a default setting in X1..." 


Really, I was hoping someone had run across this already so I'd have some idea of what I was dealing with before I started fiddling with things.  While googling around for answers I did come across a cakewalk forum thread where someone else had been doing the same, recording the metronome and was seeing the same drift ahead of the beat, so I figured someone might know about it - on that particular thread they were referred to another thread where someone was having an issue with latency and that conversation ended so, not sure what the upshot was with that one.




Come to think of it a Run In Default Settings Mode option in Sonar would be a cool feature for A/B testing to see if someone has monkeyed around in some way to cause a problem for themselves.  Users could then follow standard steps starting from the defaults and if it works out, maybe an "apply new settings" button.  That would also allow you to reset to default settings without uninstall/reinstall.  (you could also include a few different settings templates so if you want to troubleshoot from specific modified settings you can at least start from there...)  So much of tech support is trying to guess what the enduser changed before they encountered the problem.