Hi,
 
I apologize if this is the wrong forum.  I have Sonar X3 and a friend from another state is recording bass lines for me, which in the past has always worked just fine.  Now however, I'm noticing his bass lines are slightly off, maybe by half a second.  However, I've tried moving it around and that's not it.  He says our latency and buffer settings are likely not together (I use Windows and he uses Apple).
 
What is the main setting we should be the same on?  For instance, Latency?  Buffer?  Or would it be something altogether different?  If anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd really appreciate it.  Thank you.

Have you compared your latency/buffer settings? Is there a big difference? When you compare the waveforms, which way are the differences? If you zoom in very much and compare the transients of your recording and the bass recording nudged to an exact starting point, does it stay in time or drift apart?
Basically, AFAIK, if you both have a latency low enough for accurate recording, then the resulting audio tracks should be accurate enough to be combined.  
 
 
Anyway, no matter what the latency is, if the bass is played to the same drum track or click that you have used, and is a little off, then it should be equally much off all the way, and nudging the bass clip one way or another a few milliseconds should do the job. If it's half a second off, as you say, it's really, really much.
If the off-time drifts along the way, then I don't know what to say. 
 
Note, that if you have a bass clip on the track starting at 0 time, you can not move it left without cutting a slice
off the beginning.

Are you sending tracks back and forth somehow or are you exchanging SONAR bundles or using Gobbler or...?
 
This is the only way I can think of in which differing latency settings could be a problem:
 
SONAR applies latency correction non-destructively; a recorded .WAV file has latency in it that's compensated by a hidden compensation factor saved with the project for each file. If you were to send someone a track by just grabbing the file out of the audio folder, that correction would not be applied when they bring it into their DAW. You have to bounce/export the compensated track from within SONAR to create a new .WAV file with the correction built in.
 
That said, a half a second would be a huge amount of latency (22050 samples at 44.1kHz), so if it's really that far off, something else is going on. If you're exchanging project files with audio by some method (.cwb/.zip/Gobbler), none of this should be an issue.

Hey thank you very much for the both the replies.  We just weren't sure, but I will read through everything and when I find the problem I had, will post for others.  Thank you again!  

You said your friend uses Apple, so if he's running SONAR he's using Boot Camp?
I have no idea, if Boot Camp somehow could be a factor.
In case you're just exchanging wav- or mp3-files, latency settings don't matter.
 
In order to answer more, it would be essential to know how you are exchanging the files, as Brundlefly points out.