my recording sounds choppy, or ticky ticky ticky ticky over and over.  i'm connecting a mackie board through usb and i'm guessing it's using the onboard sound card.  but i/0 is through the board .  don't know what to do? please help

Is it a Dell?

Sorry, but you're going to need some sort of Sound Card... the onboard sound card won't cut it. Your Mackie is just a mixer, not a sound card. At the very least, if this is an off-the-shelf desktop, disconnect it from the Internet, disable any real time virus checkers and automatic updaters you may have running, and try again.
 
Best,
Rob

It sounds like an I/O latency issue. Ensure you're using ASIO or WDM/KS mode in the audio device preferences dialog.

Does the Mackie say it can be used as an audio interface/sound card? If yes, then read more below. If no, then you need to get one. 
Did you install the mackie drivers from the mackie website?
Have you set up the mackie as your sound card in sonar?
Have you tried WDM and ASIO driver modes at different asio buffer settings and wdm slider settings to see what works the best for you?
 
CJ
 

info@edwardmusicservice.com
my recording sounds choppy, or ticky ticky ticky ticky over and over.  i'm connecting a mackie board through usb and i'm guessing it's using the onboard sound card.  but i/0 is through the board .  don't know what to do? please help

which mackie board do you have?

Crackles etc. come during the converter drivers, ususally.  Since you state that the mackie is sending audio via USB I guess that is the case.  Some mixers use standard usb drivers for printers, etc. rather than writing their own drivers optimised for audio.  Somewhere in the mackie you should have software that controls the drivers, ie. type (WDM, ASIO), bit depth as well as the rate, and best of all lantency.  Move the latency to a larger time and the crackles should disappear.  And use the Mackie to do zero latency recording through the mixer section.
 
@ 

Computer specs? 
 
In order to get good results using a professional recording and sequencing program like Sonar, you need a separate high quality audio interface. Otherwise, you've wasted $400 on Sonar. 

you can try using asio4all with your control surface till you get a soundcard,i don't call that wasting 400.00..lol

daveny5
Computer specs? 
 
In order to get good results using a professional recording and sequencing program like Sonar, you need a separate high quality audio interface. Otherwise, you've wasted $400 on Sonar. 

Rather than computer specs, could have done with knowing which Mackie mixer it is ;)

As it sounds like you are using one of the usb series of mackie mixers, then it most likely has an inbuilt soundcard, so there is no need, or should be no need for another. A change of drivers or update may be required along with adjusting your settings in Sonar, latency/buffer settings....to reduce the crackle and get it playing sweet.
Anything below 10ms should be fine.