Yes. LatencyMon is good for all Windows Machines and it works the same. It is also good on x64 based OS Installs. It only takes 10 or 20 minutes from Install to report. Look for your top few offenders. As I reported above, my greatest latency is 0.17 milliseconds. If you get any over 0.5 you should be concerned and note the names of the DLLs and post them so you can be advised. Some of the DLLs will be familiar to the community and we can tell you exactly what is doing you in.
 
I remember one laptop I had where if I disabled the monitor driver, the monitor would still work on a generic driver but my dropouts stopped. It's these little things that the LatencyMon will point you to. If you know the DLL you're halfway home.

Daylaa
I see all of mine (Record, Render and Import) are currently set to 64. So would you recommend I change mine to what yours are?

 
As others have said the ideal settings are the defaults Record=24, Render=32 and Import=original
Its pretty rare that you need render=64 and you never want to set record > 24 since no converters go higher than 24 except for a few drivers that support streaming float audio. If they have hardware input fx that would be the only time you might want that.
Going higher is taxing the Disk as well as the I/O thread and using excess CPU. If you have large projects with lots of tracks this could certainly add up and lead to spikes esp if your disk is slow.
 
 

How often does your PC do an anti-virus scan?
 
 
Edit: Also, next time you get it, the *first* time you get it, note the time. Then when you get an opportunity, check the System and Application event logs for just before that time and just afterwards.

Roo Stercogburn
How often does your PC do an anti-virus scan?

Hi Roo - My main machine doesn't have Anti-Virus on it as I brows using the virtual PC 'Rainzone'. So this can't be a problem. I'm told by RAIN that Rainzone cannot effect my main system.
 
OBHave - Although I feel your pain and frustration first hand, it sure is nice to know someone else has the same issue as me and I'm not completely alone with this. Please also let me know if you find a cure.
 
I seem to have found peace with my Pro Channel - but I'm not going to say it's 'fixed' just yet. My setting now are: 256 Samples (on soundcard interface and in 'sync and caching'). And then as Noel has recommended: Record=24, Render=32 and Import=original.
 
If I raise my sample rate higher, Pro Channel becomes glitchy again. This strikes me as strange still, as surely my PC should handle this kind of thing better? There are people on here with less powerful machines enjoying much looser reins with regards to sample rates.
 
I will continue to keep this thread posted - will play around with Pro Channel every day if I can.
 

I just took a look at that Audiophile interface. Is that your main interface? Did Rain computers install it/recommend it? Is it a legacy PCI interface (which it seems to be) or is it PCIe?
 
The reason I ask this is because if your PCI slot is "bridged" which is the case with many new motherboards this could be causing your problems. That is why I had to buy my Focusrite. Bridged screws with the datastream somehow. What you want, and what used to be the standard was "native" PCI support which I think means it has it's own chipset whereas bridged sends it off to be dealt with by the PCIe chipset or some such nonsense. I'm not a computer tech but I think that's the story.
 
Also I've seen quite a few people have issues with M-Audio interfaces, particularly the PCI ones.
 
As soon as I bought my Focusrite USB 18i6 interface Sonar started working a whole heck of a lot better. If at all possible I'd suggest you borrow or rent a different interface that does NOT use the PCI slot (USB 2.0 is fine for audio).
 
Other than that, and I'm sure it has already been mentioned but I haven't checked all the new posts here, I'd get a hold of M-Audio or check their site to see if you have the correct/most up to date drivers or google the interface to see if anyone else is having similar problems.
 
If you've already been through this my apologies but it's worth mentioning. I just hadn't checked out your interface until just now otherwise I would have said something sooner. Cheers.

I can't remember where I originally read it, but bridged PCI devices on PCIe bus, share the same [PCIe] interrupt priority (ala the bridge mechanism).  It's a decent design - but all PCI devices have to wait their turn to be exposed on the PCIe bus thru that single priority. It puts an extra level of intervention in place for things like memory access - not what you'd normally want for a high I/O-count device.
 
Better to go with PCIe today for direct bussed devices, or USB/Firewire as they are usually motherboard devices with direct memory access.
 
 

I used to use an old M-Audio internal interface on an XP Desktop a lifetime ago. It worked fairly well IIRC. I didn't use it much though.
 
And I can't speak to the bridging stuff that Beep refers to.
 
I would say that if the interface is working properly for other DAW software (which I think Daylaa has reported) then it should work similarly well within Sonar if he gets it dialed in correctly.
 
That isn't to say that and upgrade of interface wouldn't help. It certainly will. But that if you push up your buffers etc, you should be able to work with your current setup.
 
We all have ceilings of one sort or another that we deal with. Number of inputs... cables... mics... Unless you're Bapu, plugins. ;-)
 
So, I would focus on getting what you have to work sufficiently. Post your DPC Latencies reported by the program I listed, Daylaa. Don't get us writing all this stuff and fail to deliver on your side. Take 10 minutes and run the app and tell us what you find.

In PCIe motherboards, PCI slots are treated as legacy devices and the implementation of passing data is flaky and varies from board to board. In audio devices where I/O is paramount this kind of a kludge exposes your system to instabilities.

The lesson basically is that for recent MOBO's get PCIe cards for audio or use USB or even firewire

Gswitz - my apologies. I will get those results on for u asap. Really Appreciate everyone's help. I'm currently walking to work in rainy England so I will post them later soon as I can.

... also, I wonder if anyone can recreate this issue on their machines? By setting record and render to 64 and upping the samples on sound card? Does pro channel e q become glitchy?