Sonar hijacking sound card

Let the onboard soundcard do the media stuff.
I think the EMU hijacks windows sound, so reset to the onboard card.

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Try Options - Audio- Adavnced - tick 'share drivers with other programs' box.

This may be an EMu limitation if you set up your EMu to play window sounds and sonar.

"share drivers" doesn't work, hasn't ever in PE8.

for you, maybe, but i sure does work. I think it depends on how your drivers for your sound card where written. I think you need to look inside your EMu manual to see if there's a switch or button to activate. My motu will play pc sounds and sonar projects.
Cj

After investing in a new Windows 7 PC, I was getting this issue as well, and E-Mu gave the same solution as Rod. The cause was not this, but was in fact caused by incompatible sample rates between Windows and the E-Mu card.

Microsoft's error message ("The device is being used by another application. Please close any devices that are playing audio to this device and try again") is plainly irrelevant, and has resulted in a lot of head scratching. Looking around the internet I'm not the only one with this issue, so I'm posting here so that others may benefit.
What I found was that Windows 7 was defaulting to 48KHz and Sonar ASIO defaults to 44.1KHz, setting PatchMix to that when it does. Therefore Sonar plays through PatchMix at 44.1KHz, but Windows does not. I fixed this by going to Control Panel --> Hardware and Sound -->Manage Audio Devices, selecting the Advanced tab of the properties of the Emu card, and changing the sample rate to 44.1KHz. This keeps the sample rate compatable with that used in previous projects that I had imported from my old system.

This probably seems simple and obvious to some, but matching these sample rates is something that doesn't get done very often, and is therefore easily forgotten about.

Hope this helps

Douglas

I had the 0404 and it's not a great sharer

Those damn selfish cards

It's all me me me with 0404

Actually I was wet behind the ears back them, still a bit damp now, so ticking a few boxes or sharing drivers may or may not work. I can't recall what I tried. I'm sure though that I left the internal to do the windows and the 0404 to do Sonar. It was the downside to the card without a doubt.

What he's experiencing is a pain. It freezes, the infamous 1-2 second freeze, and you're locked and then a little later it'll BSOD. You have reboot regardless.

All sound cards and interfaces, softwares and Windows have settings that need proper  values.

It's wrong to blame without basis.

In the Cakewalk docs cited, they do state

"We're using 44.1 kHz, but if you plan to do all of your recordings at a higher sample rate you will want to choose it now."

The EMU cardsa are really powerful and flexible, "selfish" is a misnomer.

Even Cakewalk acknowledges it in the same doc:

"While this flexibility is really powerful, it does require knowledge of PatchMix DSP's routing scheme in relation to SONAR in order to take full advantage of it. In this guide we're going to cover the basics of getting input and output to and from SONAR using PatchMix DSP".

Baseless blaming preserves ignorance and ignorance is cause of suffering.

strikinglyhandsome1


It doesn't use patchmix btw - can we get that point sorted.

Yep, ignore the Patchmix stuff and simply compare your card settings against your Sonar settings. When I said Control Panel earlier, I meant the Windows Control Panel.

strikinglyhandsome1


btw who are we answering? The OP seems to have long gone. His symptoms are because it was not set to share. That EMU card won't work if you have it set to work as the internal card and as the DAW card. Trust me. It may work if you check the shared drivers box, I can't recall that bit but if you just set it up to do both jobs without any alteration then it clashes.

This is not necessarily correct.

EMU drivers are generally multi-users..Sonar has no control of that capability when the ASIO driver is multi-user per-se.