This sucks! I’ve been working on a particular tune for a while, and in the process of recording I would get an occasional dropout but was never sure exactly why. I kept trudging forward and had been recording for about an hour when all of the sudden I can get a second of playback or recoding time without it completely dropping out….I mean, the audio engine just stops literally within a second.
 
My USB interface is a Roland Quadcapture, and I’m running Windows 7 on a new HP PC. I’ve troubleshot this to death and still can’t come to any solution.
 
Chris

Christopher D


This sucks! I’ve been working on a particular tune for a while, and in the process of recording I would get an occasional dropout but was never sure exactly why. I kept trudging forward and had been recording for about an hour when all of the sudden I can get a second of playback or recoding time without it completely dropping out….I mean, the audio engine just stops literally within a second.
 
My USB interface is a Roland Quadcapture, and I’m running Windows 7 on a new HP PC. I’ve troubleshot this to death and still can’t come to any solution.
 
Chris

Hi Chris!
 
You are not alone..It is something going on if I'm not are mistaken Noel said something that this will be address in next update along with more tighter midi.
 
Chris, do this.
 
Make a "Metronome bus" that you route the "Metronome-CLICK".
Activate "Metronome" on PLAYBACK and RECORD in the Control Bar! A and B on the picture
 

 
 
Never cancel CLICK ever!
If you don't want to hear it lower the Metronome bus fader to zero.
This will and can improve dropout and sync stability. Also it improve "LOOP" between locators in the project without any kind of dropouts!
 

The first thing you do Chris, is ... ignore Freddie. LOL That little 'Metronome' trick of his has only worked on his system. If you try it and prove me wrong, I'll eat crow and apologize.

Try this:

Load X2, hit 'P' to bring up Preferences, go to 'Configuration File' under 'Audio' and change 'DropoutMsec' to something higher than it is. Write down the original setting in case changing it makes things worse.

Save it and reboot Sonar and see if that helps.

Drop-outs and pops/clicks seem to have gotten worse with the A patch. If you do a search you'll see a few folks have run in to problems like you are describing since they installed the A patch.

Good luck!

Bub




Load X2, hit 'P' to bring up Preferences, go to 'Configuration File' under 'Audio' and change 'DropoutMsec' to something higher than it is. Write down the original setting in case changing it makes things worse.

Save it and reboot Sonar and see if that helps.

Drop-outs and pops/clicks seem to have gotten worse with the A patch. If you do a search you'll see a few folks have run in to problems like you are describing since they installed the A patch.

Good luck!

Bub, thanks alot for this trick.
I set it to 500 ms. It seem to improve a lot.
My trick still improve the sync on my setup but with your makes it even better.
 
Best Regards
Freddie

Bub


The first thing you do Chris, is ... ignore Freddie. LOL That little 'Metronome' trick of his has only worked on his system. If you try it and prove me wrong, I'll eat crow and apologize.

Hi guys….thanks so much for the help and replies….It is appreciated.
 
Okay, now I feel dumb, but here’s what honestly happened—and maybe this will help someone else in the future. It turns out the reason the audio engine was stopping on both playback and recording was there was a loop point set towards the end of the song. How that loop point was placed there is a complete mystery because I had been comping multiple tracks at the beginning of the song for a while when everything went haywire. I just happened to find the loop points at the end of the song. Again, I have no idea how they got there because they weren’t consciously placed there. Obviously in the process of hitting “undo recording” and whatnot I did something that caused those loop points to be there, but I’m still scratching my head on that one.
 
That said, I’m still getting periodic dropouts, which I’ve experienced consistently from day one. So, I’m going to try Bub’s suggestions tonight.
 
Thanks again for chiming in everyone. At least for now everything is copasetic.  

Other causes of dropouts are the input and output buffer sizes found in Preferences--->Audio--->Sync & Caching. Try increasing those in steps of 128 and seeing if that stops the dropouts. In my experience these buffer settings are as important for stopping dropouts as ASIO buffer size, possibly more so.

Basically if Sonar can't get the data fast enough or has to wait for the buffer to fill it will dropout. It may take a little trial and error as it will depend on audio buffer size as well. It's a one time thing though, once set up you shouldn't need to do it again. It'll be 10 minutes well spent.

There are no right or wrong figures either, every set up is different but I promise you they will make a difference.

Hi guys! I have the same problem with the same interface! Roland Quadcapture! Does it come from the driver of the soundcard wich I don't find so good (latency isn't as low as pretended) or from X2 Pro itself?
Thanks!

I know this sounds crazy but I have an APOLLO with TB interface and I was getting really bad dropouts... so, during my "FIX IT" period, I tried to set the max threads to something less than the 8 cores on my CPU..... figuring that this would free up a couple of threads for the OS to do its thing...  sure enough, this fixed my dropout problem... I think I wound up having the max threads set to 5 of the 8...
 
This variable is in the .ini file and I am not sure of the exact name but the name does describe what it does...  if you set it right, you will see less bars in the CPU monitor in SONAR.
 
Jim

I have an Octa-Capture and a relatively fast PC with an i7 3770 CPU.  The DPC Latency Checker shows a consistant below 100usec.  I can't go below "3" for the buffer setting in the Octa-Capture Control Panel or I get dropouts.  The recording PC can also go on line and I also make sure the NIC is disabled and I close Antivirus, etc when I record.
 
X2, 64 bit, Playback buffer is set to 512 and Record to 256.  I haven't tried different settings lately as these work OK for me.