Hi Guys,
 
I've been around for a while but now I'm recording audio for the first time - it's actually recording the sermon in church for the website and I'm taking a line out from the sound desk into my UA-25EX and into my laptop using Sonar X2a (build 351).
 
All was going smoothly but a couple of times I glanced down and found the screen had gone blank and although the screen came back when I moved the cursor, there was a message from Sonar saying there'd been a dropout of the audio engine.  I restarted the recording but obviously I'd lost some material.  I checked power management (I was running from battery) and sure enough it had Turn Off The Display set to 5 minutes.  
 
Here's my question though - I would not have expected the display turning off to cause an audio dropout, I was expecting that once the display was enabled again I would find the recording still running; has anyone else come across this?
 
Hopefully I'm right about the display being the cause, it did seem to be a bit of a coincidence that both times the audio dropped out I looked down to find the display switched off.  Obviously I know I can change the power management settings and make sure the display doesn't turn off after 5 minutes in future; about 2 hours should do it for our vicar!!
 
Any comments gratefully received ...
 

When using a laptop for audio always go in and set all power saving off- Set hard drive, sleep mode and screen to Always on. 
Shut off wi fi and some times disable battery management 
Run the DPCLAT test to check nothing is hogging resources 
 http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
 
 I use a wave editor = Wave lab or  Waveosaur or Golden wave for simple 2 track recordings. Way better than Sonar because it's easier to edit and burn to a CD afterwards. And these programs are not a fussy about drivers and background issues. Rock solid. X2 was a buggy version of Sonar, think about the upgrade to x3. 

Yup - Sonar wakes up GRUMPY.  Don't let anything go to sleep, including any connected USB audio interfaces, hard drives, or your monitor.  
 
I use the High-Performance power plan, and further modified it to set CPU minimum processor state of 100%, and also turned off USB Selective Suspend.
 
And, as noted above, just before you are going to launch Sonar, temporarily disable or turn off your Wi-Fi adapter, then you can turn it back on after you finish your Sonar session.  These adapters can cause massive latency spikes if left on while using Sonar.
 
Bob Bone
 
 
 

Hi Cactus & Bob
 
Thanks for the input.  I think the best thing to do would be to create my own custom power management plan just for recording and use the settings you recommend - some of that is under advanced settings I believe?
 
I've never actually disabled the wifi before.  In the Device Manager I have an item there called "Atheros AR9485WB-EG Wireless Network Adapter" and I can see how to disable that.  Does that sound right to you?  (Device Manager makes me nervous!)

You are not going to uninstall it - just disable it in Device Manager.  You can then later enable it again without having to install it.
 
I used to do this all the time with a laptop I brought on live gigs and ran Sonar and other music software.  Never had a single issue doing the disable/enable approach.
 
I just altered the parameters I needed to in the High-Performance plan (under advanced).  Those are simple changes, and I wouldn't bother creating a custom plan.
 
Edited - that does sound like your Wi-Fi adapter, by the way.  :)
 
Bob Bone
 
 
 

Thanks Bob

I am having problems with audio dropout in Sonar X3. I have a Dell computer i5 6gigs of ram windows 7 64 and using a Tascam 1800 audio interface. I have recently upgraded to X3 and still have both X1 and X2 on it. What is the best things to do to run Sonar without all the Hiccups. I am ready to start recording on my old Yamaha AW16G again. I was having problems with latency also if I pull the slider to far to the right in the audio settings to stop the dropout.

@cannimagine - can you perhaps post this issue in its own new thread?  That way we can keep the 2 issues separate, so it doesn't get all mingled together.
 
Thanks, I'll try to help you get to the bottom of it.
 
Bob Bone
 

General-purpose machines (especially Laptops) are configured for general-purpose use.
ie:  That laptop is configured for maximum battery life (which is diametrically opposed to being setup for maximum performance).
 
What's causing the dropouts are DPC Latency spikes.
If you were running Office, surfing the Internet, or on Facebook... you'd never notice a couple millisecond hiccup in data flow.  However, when working with low latency audio, we need constant uninterrupted data flow.  That 2ms hiccup causes glitches or dropouts.
 
In general:
Disable all power-management
Disable anything running in the background that's not absolutely necessary
After tweaking the machine, use the DPC Latency Checker to verify that Laptop's DPC Latency.
If you see spikes well into the Yellow or Red, that's virtually guaranteed to cause glitches/dropouts.
 
Depending on the laptop (and the settings it presents in the BIOS), you may not be able to achieve low DPC latency (which is critical for running heavy audio loads at low latency).