Hi there,
(first post!)
we are fortunate to have a fun rehearsal space for our band and are gearing it up to become a semi-pro studio environment that is shared by a few bands. Hardware wise we are doing fine i think - a new workstation xeon 3.2ghz 8GB Ram intel SSD's win 7 x64 firewire asio drivers into a makie onyx 1620i mixing board sonar x2.  Nice setup now i have to learn how to use it. 

typically we are recording rehearsals - 9 tracks of live audio, no midi, few effects, each track comes from a mic/instrument though the mixing board to the daw. it really doesn't need to be high quality the main goal is to hear what we are playing, do quick mixes dump them to mp3 learn and improve. 

Question 1. What settings are best for longer takes? Ideally we might want to just let the tape roll for a half hour or more, and then chop down to the takes we want to mix down. The file sizes i am seeing are pretty huge though 200megs x 9 tracks. It seems to record these tracks just fine. The audio it there but.....

Problem 1. After recording (when reopening a project later) it seems to fail at rendering the associated wave images for the tracks - all the tracks say "busy" I can select all the tracks, right click and re-render the associated images. It does so in a few seconds and i can proceed. Then Problem 2.

Problem 2. Slow playback or no playback through the mixing board. After recording all the tracks I find i have to reboot - even though the sound from the board to the daw is working fine,  playback from the daw to the board just isn't happening. sonar says it is outputting the master channels to the board, windows seems to think everything is fine but . . . not a sound. I reboot. I hear the windows chime come though the mixing board. Back into sonar, open the project, hit play and dangit! it now is playing back, but at half speed, like a 45 rpm single played at 33. Maybe i can manipulate the .wav files to speed them up again but this is silly. 

I note this playback problem doesn't seem to happen if we stick to short takes, less than fifteen minutes. I also note that the other band is using reason on the same machine with no complaints - granted the other "sound engineer" it more skilled than I am.  I suppose it is possible that the asio drivers that reason likes are ones that sonar doesn't - there was some trouble with the drivers/firewire card at the outset but now that seems to be resolved and crashes aren't a problem for either software.

Any thoughts / advice welcome. My knowlege of sonar / digital audio is pretty thin but with a little help from google i get by and can record, edit and mix stuff so long as it "just works". except it aint. 

MLP 

 

  

Problem 2 sounds like the audio card has been set to a different sample rate on playback. E.g. set to 44.1K playback after recording at 48K. Another issue seems to be the inability of Sonar & Windows sound to share the card, and maybe it is Windows sound that changed the record or playback sample rate. Sonar should have been able to control the sample rate. Now it's hard to guess whether the sample rate was set wrong during recording or during playback. If you are using the on-board sound device, you might be best off eliminating Windows sounds through that device. If you have a separate firewire card (which one?) it would be best to send Windows sounds to the onboard device to cut down on nasty surprises.

Make sure you're using ASIO driver mode. You should be using 24bit depth and 44.1KHz as the sampling rate. In Preferences-Audio make sure only your audio interface (the Mackie?) is selected and not the built-in soundchip on the computer. 

This sounds like a PC problem and/or a sound card problem.with a decent PC and a recommended sound card ,you should be able to play back 200+ tracks with no problems.


CJ

Problem 1 - Try emptying Sonar's picture cache.

I can't see how any kind of 'problem' could cause proper playback but at a slower speed.

Something must be telling something else to slow down, like a tempo change or time change processing.

I doubt bitrate conversion could be responsible, or any excessive processing.
That would cause distortion, dropouts, etc.

I want to try to help with the case that you get dropouts after stopping recording nine tracks for a half an hour. it's possible that when you hit stop you are scanning the new files for viruses. that would cause g the effect of slow rendering of the graphical wave forms. it would be contention on The drive

for item number two, hit the bypass all effects. goofy sounds are probably somewhere in you signal chain.

thanks . . . this gives me a number of things to try.

are settings specific to projects? maybe i can import just the audio into a fresh project and see what happens. 

Well, Virus Scanning is built in to Win 7 and 8. I can't remember Vista. If you hit the start button and type Windows Defender. Hit F1 for help and set your folders for recording files to not be scanned.

Hit F1 in Sonar to find out how to bypass all FX. The default for a new project in Sonar is to have FX not bypassed.