What do you have to do to talk to a human around here? I paid for the product!

I have a new ASUS M32BF computer and just upgraded to Sonar Artist.  It does not recognize my sound card and I get no sound on playback and I cannot record.  No one answers the phone during business hours and I have been screwing around for days reading off line help (has been no help, as usual) and getting runarounds from robots asking me inscrutable tech questions.  I want a person to call me or else I want my money back!
Luke - 305-945-6826 - no texting

Lucian Williams
I have a new ASUS M32BF computer and just upgraded to Sonar Artist.  It does not recognize my sound card and I get no sound on playback and I cannot record.  No one answers the phone during business hours and I have been screwing around for days reading off line help (has been no help, as usual) and getting runarounds from robots asking me inscrutable tech questions.  I want a person to call me or else I want my money back!
Luke - 305-945-6826 - no texting

Hi Luke!
Nobody in the forum can give you your money back - but we're glad to help!
You say you upgraded to Sonar Artist - what were you using before?
Have you tried switching between ASIO and WDM drivers?
Have you tried ASIO4ALL?
 
As stated above - tell us a little more about what devices are in your computer, and I'm sure we can help!
 
Brian

We also need to know your level of expertise and how familiar you are with computer-based recording. Also note that phone support does not operate 9A to 5P but 1P to 6P eastern time:

1 PM - 6 PM Eastern Time

Monday through Friday

617.423.9021 (Boston)

323.370.6701 (Los Angeles)

Luke, if you don't want to use an external sound card that supports ASIO then you will never get the full performance of the software. If you want to use the Realtek sound chip you should use the WDM driver option. I could run 8.5 on a laptop with REaltek and WDM but I don't know if the X series will work that way. Best of luck.

 Just so you know, I do not use or need any outboard midi interface

 
Maybe not, but you definitely need a decent Audio interface as that where all of your problems are coming from.

OK.

First, it should be possible to get a Realtek on-motherboard sound chip working with Sonar. On-board sound chips can generally handle playback, but will be far from ideal, especially if you meed to record audio or play a software synthesiser in Sonar using a MIDI controller, but you say you don't need to do that.

ASIO drivers provide, amongst other things, a very low level of delay between playing a note on a controller and it emerging from a software synthesiser, amongst other things. Again, you say you don't need to do that so don't worry about it at the moment, let's just get sound working. In any case, there are no ASIO drivers for Realtek that I'm aware of, amd the freeware ASIO4ALL driver which can sometimes be persuaded to work with Realtek is very hit and miss, difficult to configure and can itself cause all kinds of problems if present on the system.

So. First, go into Windows control panel/device manager and locate the AMD HDMI audio device. Right click on it and disable it (do not uninstall it, just disable it or Windows will spot it and re-install it automatically) Having graphics-card relayed HDMI drivers (which are mostly intended for playing hi-def video/audio on a home theatre system) active can confuse things.

Now make sure that there is nothing running that might use the sound card so that Sonar can have sole access to it. It's also a good idea to go into the control panel/sounds settings and tell Windows not to use any system sounds at all. That will (hopefully) prevent Windows from grabbing the sound card and denying access to Sonar or making unwanted noises at the wrong time.

Open Sonar go into Sonar's preferences and set the pull-down for audio driver to WDM or MME -

You should then see the realtek listed under audio devices. Select it as output and input device.

Now open a new project, call it 'test' or something similar. To check you've got audio working try dragging a wave (not mp3) file into the project and playing it back. If all is well and correctly routed you should now get sound.

To get MIDI playback in Sonar you need two things. One is a MIDI track containing the MIDI data and the other is an audio track with a software synthesiser (such as TT100) in the fx bin. The output of the MIDI track should be set to point to the software synth and the output of the audio track should point to the master bus which in turn should be routed to the realtek.

Sonar is very powerful but has a bit of a steep initial learning curve. I strongly suggest you work through the help tutorials to do with the basics of getting things working, MIDI and software synths as these will take you through things a step at a time.

   Thanks for the suggestions.  None of them worked. I went to EDIT>PREFERENCES>PLAYBACK AND RECORDING AND SELECTED WDM/KS to the right of DRIVER MODE:  I clicked "Apply" and a window came up - SILENT BUSES DETECTED, a paragraph under it yada yada, and a box under that that is blank except for the letter A in the upper left corner.  You have my utmost awe and respect if this means anything whatsoever to you.  Anyway, nothing changed.  Still no sound.

One other thing is you're attempting to solve several issues simultaneously. This will eat your time and cause frustration. I'd recommend narrowing down what's going on. Start with sound first - create a new project and insert an audio track and drag some audio clips to it and hit play. If you get sound from that then you know the interface is working and you can proceed accordingly.

ampfixer
Luke, if you don't want to use an external sound card that supports ASIO then you will never get the full performance of the software. If you want to use the Realtek sound chip you should use the WDM driver option. I could run 8.5 on a laptop with REaltek and WDM but I don't know if the X series will work that way. Best of luck.

It's not always a given that Realtek chips will work with WDM/KS. On an older computer it would only do MME. Don't know about what they can do with Windows 8.1 computers.
 
 

He also should cut off any other apps on his pc that would run in the background that can cause interference while using Sonar... such as turn off your internet and perhaps your virus software. And in his case his best bet would be to get ASIO4ALL since he refuses to spring for an audio interface.

Asio4all wreaks havoc with all the new realtek chipsets since their drivers are built around the wasapi specs and not the old wdm. Wdm mode in windows 8 is an just emulator of the original wdm mode that talks to wasapi so what you wind up with is asio4all wrapping itself around a wdm wrapper to get to wasapi.  Seriously bad bad idea
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I personally have Sonar Professional, Music Creator 6 Touch, Reaper 4.7, Akai MPC Essentials, Guitar Rig 5 and Waves Soundgrid Studio as DAWs on my HP Pavilion Touchsmart 14 Sleekbook, which is a laptop with Windows 8.1... which uses the IDT High Audio Codec. I use ASIO4ALL when I am not using a USB audio interface as the audio drivers.
I was having similar problems as this person, with no sound coming from Sonar, but was getting sound from my other DAWs.I even had asked for help within the forum as well ( and thank you Anderton for the help ) .. But when I configured my ASIO4ALL to consider all on the WDM Device List but unchecked HP Out? I have no problems with ASIO4ALL or any audio dropouts of any type. Just saying...

 

@Lucian
 
As others have said get rid of / don't use ASIO4All - it is just a wrapper.

Sorry mate you probably won't have much satisfaction with RealTek device.
You need to invest in something like a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 or Solo.

Your real issue is that you don't have a decent audio interface. Sonar is the least of your problems (your scenario is hardly surprising given your hardware). Even if you get it fully working probably won't be of much use.

^^ Freemake Audio converter usually works for anything i need however i do have the MP3 converter from sonar so i usually export whatever file type straight from source (sonar), but i find freemake Audio and Video converter has came in handy.. and its free.

Lucian Williams
   Thanks for the suggestions.  None of them worked. I went to EDIT>PREFERENCES>PLAYBACK AND RECORDING AND SELECTED WDM/KS to the right of DRIVER MODE:  I clicked "Apply" and a window came up - SILENT BUSES DETECTED, a paragraph under it yada yada....

Right. As has been said, the "silent buses" window is probably just warning you that you have at least one bus in the current project (probably the master) that isn't pointing at an audio out. Which is not surprising if you've changed driver mode. Now have a look in preferences audio devices and you should see the realtek listed, with tick boxes next to the list entries. Tick those boxes, hit "apply" and close preferences. If not listed try switching the driver mode to MME or wasapi. On-board soundchips can take a bit of work to get them operating properly with DAW software, and they'll never match an interface with a good ASIO driver in all sorts of ways, but they can usually be persuaded to give playback.

Then point the project's master bus output at the realtek which with any luck should now be listed in the bus output pull-down menu. Finally, check the windows volume control isn't turned right down. Sonar should bypass it, but with onboard sound-chips you never can tell.

As for the other problems you're having, let's go one step at a time with one problem at a time and see if between us we can work out a solution.

Ps - the specific contents of an error or warning message - the "yada yada" - might be important, so it's usually a good idea to quote them in full. The yada-yada might not always be the same. :-)

+1, I am finally on a computer here, but seen this thread a few times. Bear in mind that this is a public forum, so anyone can grab your number. It is best to edit your original post (or perhaps a host could do it for you). As this is a peer-to-peer forum, anyone "calling you" would most likely be a spammer that snatched your number from here.