I have been using a roland tricapture to successfully record my guitar playing and singing along to backing tracks with no problems until today.
I downloaded a backing track to record my guitar along with but unfortunately a second or 2 into recording it drops out .
With process of ilimination I have found the backing track is causing the problem.
It is just a simple mp3 backing track like ive used before. I really need to record along to to this particular backing track.
 
If anyone has some simple sugestions to things I can try to stop the dropout problems that would be great. 

I'm not an expert on the subject, but the metadata included in many MP3s has caused problems to many.

I've not experienced that, but in light of what Kalle mentioned, I would suggest bouncing the MP3 track to a new audio track. This will create a wav file, and you can delete the original MP3 track from your project. If the metadata is the problem, this would allow your project to run cleaner, and hopefully, eliminate the dropout problem.

ok set up my gear this morning to try again recording along to the same backing track and it worked fine with no dropout messages or anything. I was going to try out your idea Robert but I didn't have to.
Its very strange because everything is set up exactly the same as yesterday.
 Thanks anyway for your help

I hope it's OK to submit my Dropout problem to an existing thread.   I'm fairly inexperienced with Sonar, but technically relatively proficient in general, so I have used google and Cakewalk resources to my best ability.   I have previously owned and used Cakewalk/Sonar software (possibly even on this laptop, I cannot recall) and in general found it quite usable, although it is always tricky working with Windows audio.   Yesterday I installed the Sonar LE 8.5 that came with my UA-25EX (yes, first time installed) on my Lenovo i3 Laptop with 8Gb RAM and after considerable research got it working flawlessly with the ASIO drivers at 44.1 hz sample rate, single channel record.   I am not doing anything strenuous, simply recording an audio book using an XLR mike via the USB UA-25EX Roland/Cakewalk external audio card.    No dropouts, no problems.  Great sound!  
 
After recording two chapters last evening, I noticed that my laptop suddenly was complaining that No WiFi device found!!   I was not able to easily re-enable the WiFi but eventually managed to turn it back on (I never turned it off!).   I know WiFi can be a problem with sound capture, but I did not appreciate the disabling without notification.  I also experimented with trying to set the UA-25EX as my default audio card (the built in audio is Realtek and since I wasn't using it for Sonar, I wanted to use the same external USB UA-25EX sound card for both Sonar and Windows Media Player.   I got it to work but fairly quietly.
 
This morning, I rebooted, and attempted to resume recording and POOF!   Stopped recording and red DROPOUT in the lower notification line after less than 2 seconds.   Repeatedly.   No way to avoid.  I have searched Google and Cakewalk forums and done everything I can imagine, but no dice.   Continues to stop recording.   Here's what I've done so far:
 
1)  Disabled WiFi in the device manager
2) Disabled Network adapter & disconneded LAN cable for good measure
3) Disabled Antivirus
4) Disabled Firewire
5) Uninstalled Skype, Google chat, and anything else that looked remotely audio related
6) Disabled built in Realtek audio card
7) Unplugged external USB hub (only external mouse and keyboard plugged into built in USB)
8) Strangely, an ASIO4ALL driver was set, so uninstalled ASIO4ALL and set to UA-25EX
9) Verified ASIO settings still remained as before, but increased buffer as per online recommendations
10) Unplugged UA-25EX  Cakewalk/Roland USB sound card completely
11) Rebooted (several times) - each time left UA-25EX unplugged, at least until system rebooted
12) Installed DPC Latency check software  ( )
About every 30 seconds my system continues to have a huge red spike and the message that "Some device drivers on my machine behave bad (sic) and..."   with only general recommendations on what to do (try disabling WiFi etc....already done)
13) I went into Process Explorer and cannot find any 'badly behaving devices).
 
I assume that ASIO4All was NOT necessary for this installation (I had installed it for previous virtual pipe organ synthesizer installation (GrandOrgue) which I am not currently using and is not running.
My audio is being recorded to the C drive which is probably not the fasted (5400??) but I had no problems yesterday and I read that running it over USB while capturing audio via the UA-25EX via USB was not a good idea (I did set up my audio folder for the external USB folder but somehow in the save dialog I managed to accidentally do the 'right' thing and save audio together with the project files -- that is where the audio ended up at least.
 
I am doing a disk defrag (it is 0% fragmented but has only 29Gb of 221 Gb free).  I have just now turned off indexing -- just in case that might help.  Basically, I have tried everything I can think of but obviously I am missing something because none of the things I have tried has made a noticeable change in the dropout.  I wish there was a way to tell Windows:   Just stop everything!  Do what I want and nothing else!
 
Currently I have uninstalled my UA-25EX drivers AND Sonar and plan to reinstall from scratch (seemed to work yesterday).  Perhaps something in the automatic audio configuration will make it work again, but I'm a bit nervous about having WiFi permanently disabled and any re-enabling causing permanent disability to my Sonar config!  
 
Any and all ideas welcome - stupid ideas, good ideas,  most likely scenarious, unlikely scenarios...
 
Dell

I would work on 12 before anything else. DPC checker is good for what it does but LatencyMon
 should give you a better idea of what is causing the spikes.

Ok, thanks.  But for USD 119.95 and only recording voice (something that theoretically Windows Sound Recorder should be able to do) I think I'll start with just a clean reinstall of Sonar LE and not muck things up by reenabling WiFi etc...for now.

But long term, LatencyMon looks like exactly what I need - might be helpful in my Virtual Organ projects eventually.   Just seems a bit steep for a utility that ideally would come with an Operating System!  ;-) (I can dream!)
Thanks.

There is a free home edition http://www.resplendence.com/downloads near the bottom of the page in the System Monitoring Tools

Oh, cool.  I found the free home edition of LatencyMon

 
I hope I can figure out which device driver(s) is/are causing the problem, and even better, I hope the driver(s) are non-essential.

OK, the preliminary Latency Mon results are...drum roll:
 
First of all, I did a clean reinstall of Sonar LE, cleaned up my hard drive so there is plenty of space (70Gb) and rebooted between driver install and Sonar LE install.   Exact same Drop out problem (less than a second before screeching to a halt this time).  
 
So I rand Latency Mon and had huge hard page faults.  It pointed at:
 
ACPI.sys
 
This appears to be a fairly common problem.  See (my newbie link function is disabled):
(   social . technet . microsoft . c o m / Forums / windows / en-US / e5738608-59ab-41c1-9ebe-f653b76ccd81 / possible-audio-latency-issues-due-to-acpisys  (remove parens and spaces if you are really curious).  
 
Basically it looks like it is a power management driver issue.  I'm not sure how to resolve that on my laptop.  I currently have power management set to peak (full) performance, so other than finding a new driver or reinstalling with a fresh distro of Windows (I think I'd rather just go Linux if it comes to that) I'm out of luck.