The audio engine has stopped unexpectedly

I'm regularly getting this Audio Dropout popup containing the message in the title with an idle machine after a few minutes of not doing anything - in the latest example, a Sonar project with two audio tracks and one soft synth (Sonivox 88) is open but stopped. The only thing running in the foreground when the dropout occurs is Sonar X1e. I've got a process monitor running now trying to catch a CPU spike or something. But, it would have to be a helluva spike since CPU is hovering around 8%. Haven't looked at DPC yet. But, regardless of what my machine is doing, I don't expect to get audio dropout if I'm not playing audio.... I can play projects with 50 tracks and tons of plugs, softsynths, etc with no dropout while the audio is playing but once it stops and the project is idle, the audio engine stops.  Ideas anyone???

good call CJay, or his latency is too low for what the card/project can handle, given the project scenario-

Lance

What sample rate do you run? A change in sample rate on the interface made by Windows or some other background audio process could make SONAR unhappy. 

If you go into the Preferences for the Audio configuration and then to "edit config file" you will see a latency tolerance measurement called DropoutMsec. The default is 250 msec and you can exceed this if you have an anti-virus program in your system that does idle time scanning. Obviously, if this is the case you can disable it while you are using your system. Alternately, you increase this value and that should prevent your audio engine from mysteriously shutting off.

Ken

brundlefly


What sample rate do you run? A change in sample rate on the interface made by Windows or some other background audio process could make SONAR unhappy. 

I run 44.1K/24 Bit consistently. Aside from the normal services, nothing else was happening in the machine at the time that I'm aware of - IIRC I was reading some hardcopy documentation. Somebody mentioned virus scan - that is relatively new on my machine (Microsoft Security Essentials) and could be related, I suppose.

jimmyrage


Are you using an external interface.  If so you may be losing your connection with the interface. I've  had that same message in the past due to a faulty firewire cable.

Thanks jimmyrage - so far, the power scheme tweaks have prevented the problem. The cables will be checked if it happens again.