chuckebaby
have you tried your buffers in queue ?
try lowering them from 256 to 128.
 
cheers man.

Chuck, that is way way way too high. Your Q buffer needs to be at 2. this is why the poster is probably getting a delay. 


As i said in my othe rpost above, the buffer in Q needs to be set at 2. Anything higher than 2 can and will cause a playback delay!!!!
 
CJ



 

I had already pointed this out, CJ..
 
I think Charlie is confusing number of buffers with buffer size, that's all.  I wouldn't have thought he would actually use 128 buffers.  I'm no expert, but would assume that it would increase latency hugely.

I think OP has abandoned us.
 
And my earlier point about the system was he mentioned that he was getting the delay, which I'm assuming was noticeable thus the thread, even on a single track and that he was not experiencing this problem on his old system which would likely be less powerful. With that info and the fact that aside from when my hard drive takes a snooze I have never noticed any significant delay between hitting the spacebar and actual playback even with some heavy duty plugs across multiple tracks. It's a new system so it does really make me think that there may be some HDD optimization that needs to be done. Maybe he's using those Green drives or something.
 
Without a followup though there is just no way to know. Not saying it isn't buffer stuff but it just doesn't make sense to me that he'd get a noticeable lag when in my experience Sonar just gets up and goes. Technically his Quad Capture should have much lower latency than my Focusrite box too.
 
Meh. Just sayin'.
 
Cheers.

I had the same problem with my system, an AMD Phenom X6 with 16GB of RAM running Windows 7 64-bit and four 1TB HDD 7200rpm each: 1 for the system disk, disk 2 for samples, disc 3 for audio files and disc 4 for video files, my sound card is a RME Hammerfall HDSP9652.
Produced no effect try different buffer sizes, latency ASIO sound driver or WDM, or the size of the disk buffer.
I solved it by changing the access mode from IDE to AHCI drives in the setup of my motherboard. For this it is advisable to completely reinstall the operating system or try editing the Windows registry (try googling "IDE to AHCI") but this is more dangerous for beginners, but not impossible.
I hope this can solve your problem, greetings.

CJaysMusic

chuckebaby
have you tried your buffers in queue ?
try lowering them from 256 to 128.
 
cheers man.

Chuck, that is way way way too high. Your Q buffer needs to be at 2. this is why the poster is probably getting a delay. 


As i said in my othe rpost above, the buffer in Q needs to be set at 2. Anything higher than 2 can and will cause a playback delay!!!!
 
CJ



 

you are correct I was referring to file I/O.
and even that I believe is 128 as the default (adding positive increments of 128 is usually recommended if im correct ?)
 
I give up :)

Yea, I thought you may have gotten that confused. If you go up in The I/O buffer, your playback may be delayed. The smaller the better for the I/O buffer and for the ASIo and WDM driver setting
 
Cj

jb101
Are you sure?  I would have thought setting Buffers in Queue to 128 would increase latency. My Buffers in Playback Queue is set to 2.
 
Buffer size varies from system to system.  Just try lowering them as far as they'll go when tracking to reduce latency.  You can always raise them when mixing, as latency is no longer an issue.
 
Has anything else changed since your old system?

This is great advice and it's something I always do on my system, and it's no slouch by any means

Beepster
I think OP has abandoned us.
 
And my earlier point about the system was he mentioned that he was getting the delay, which I'm assuming was noticeable thus the thread, even on a single track and that he was not experiencing this problem on his old system which would likely be less powerful. With that info and the fact that aside from when my hard drive takes a snooze I have never noticed any significant delay between hitting the spacebar and actual playback even with some heavy duty plugs across multiple tracks. It's a new system so it does really make me think that there may be some HDD optimization that needs to be done. Maybe he's using those Green drives or something.
 
Without a followup though there is just no way to know. Not saying it isn't buffer stuff but it just doesn't make sense to me that he'd get a noticeable lag when in my experience Sonar just gets up and goes. Technically his Quad Capture should have much lower latency than my Focusrite box too.
 
Meh. Just sayin'.
 
Cheers.

I'm the OP and I'm definitely monitoring this thread :)
 
Just to recap, my new setup is Sonar X2a (x64), Win 7 64bit built on an Intel i7 3.4 GHz CPU, 8GB Ram. My system drive is a WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA HD, and a WD Caviar Blue 1TB SATA HD for my data drive.
 
In Sonar Preferences, I am using WDM driver mode, sampling rate 44.1, Audio driver bit depth 24, buffers in playback queue is 2, WDM Buffer size set to 5.6 msec.
 
I opened the Mixing Tutorial Project that comes with Sonar and I experience the slight delay on playback. May I say that this very slight delay is no deal breaker for me...I just had instant playback in Sonar in my earlier Quad Core, Win 7 32bit system....so I was hoping to get the same "instant" response with this i7 system :) 

So, this is a stretch >> under preferences > files > are you writing 24 bit files or 32?

Gentlemen...
 
I just switched driver mode of my Quad Capture to ASIO, 256 samples (5.8 msec), and everything's back to the way it was before....instant playback with the spacebar!
 
Seems that Sonar X2a with the Quad Capture is optimized for ASIO and not WDM :)
(I just assumed that WDM would work just as well.....)
 
Thanks guys...I should have tried ASIO mode much sooner!