I just bought a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, got it installed, everything sounded good... until I hit record and I get Audio Dropout. I'm using Windows 7, 64-bit. A brief scanning of related posts and it appears that I'm not going to have a plug-and-play experience. I don't even know where to start troubleshooting on Audio Dropout, so any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks!

Download the free version of LatencyMon and run it; there's a good chance it might reveal the problem if it's hardware related.

http://www.resplendence.com/downloads

You might also pull up the Task Manager and see how many processes are running in the background.  My quadcore has 35 processes running in the background, with no other software booted.

If there are a lot of processes running, make sure the start menu is turned off.

Based on recent posts, disabling the wireless adapter and bluetooth port using the device manager might help.

Thanks! I'll start with LatencyMon.

Just ran the LatencyMon and it looks like my system should be able to run without issue. I'll continue to adjust settings and see what happens. So much for a 3 day weekend of recording...

One thing I can't adjust is "Buffers in Playback Queue". It's set at 2. Any ideas how to get that to increase?

What is your latency set to? I imagine you have it as low as possible if you are monitoring your inputs from within Sonar. If you are doing this, you can try my favorite feature - PDC. For the track you are recording, route the output of the track directly to your Main soundcard outs - the same output as your master bus (probably should lower the master bus level a bit as well). Enable input echo on the track (which you probably already have) and finally, click on the PDC button in the Mix Module - this is the grouping in the toolbar that has Mute Solo, etc in it. See if that helps your issue... Beware that perfect Space does not play well with this set up, but otherwise things work well. Good Luck!

I was able to get it to record without locking up by changing the output to None. Then, I played it back and while it did record the direct guitar it sounded really choppy - cutting out/clipping... one small step.

Latency is set to 70.2 msec, sampling rate 44100.

ugh the recorded track is choppy? :( I haven't tried a USB device for recording... maybe try a different USB slot? Sorry if that's stupid...

oh wow, that's too high latency for what I was suggesting... Sorry I don't really know where to point you from here - latest drivers and all that? Hopefully somebody else will chime in and help...