i posted this as a comment on another thread and thought some of you would like to know how to do this without opening task manager every time sonar runs...

setting affinity in windows is a two-step process.  the first is in sonar:  in preferences/config file you need to set "enablesetthreadidealprocessor" to false  step two is creating a bat file that will look something like this:  start "sonar 7cpu" /affinity 0xFE "C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\SONAR X2 Producer\SONARPDR.exe"  the affinity option is a hex representation of the processors you want to use converted from a binary number made up of all your cpus.  i have 8 cores on my system so it would be an 8 bit binary mask ie. 11111111 where each digit represents a core.  the cores are read from right to left, so it's laid out like this: core # 76543210   my start option wants to use cores 1 thru 7, so the binary is 11111110 which converts to hex of FE.   say you want to use cores 4567, then the binary would be 11110000 and the hex F0 and the resultant start command would be   start "<YOURSHORTNAMEHERE>" /affinity 0xF0 "C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\SONAR X2 Producer\SONARPDR.exe"  just thot i'd toss that out there if anyone's interested. 

Why would you want to do that?

some people want to use dedicated cpus for processing.  maybe you want a background process to run without causing cpu spikes in sonar, so set that process to its dedicated logical core and sonar to the others.  seems like there were a few people wondering from the other post, like sharke... 

one of the things that i'm doing right now is using math formulas based around crowd analysis and video analysis and real-time acoustical analysis.  so, something i can do is have reaktor and pure data running on cpus 1-2 doing the math and generating the 4-500 midi events per second that are being sent into sonar, which is running on procs 3-8.  i was having a bit of trouble keeping sonar in sync with pure data sending 75 midi messages every 250msec across 15 different midi channels into 15 instances of kontakt recording real-time in sonar.  playing with the processor options gives me a bit of flexability.  still working on stabalizing it but it works pretty well for several hours with maybe about 12 msec of drift in the timings here and there. 

Oh well, good luck to you
 
I think 99% of us are quite happy to just let the OS decide which cores to use for which threads - but I guess there's always an exception.

one of the things that i'm doing right now is using math formulas based around crowd analysis and video analysis and real-time acoustical analysis.  so, something i can do is have reaktor and pure data running on cpus 1-2 doing the math and generating the 4-500 midi events per second that are being sent into sonar, which is running on procs 3-8.  i was having a bit of trouble keeping sonar in sync with pure data sending 75 midi messages every 250msec across 15 different midi channels into 15 instances of kontakt recording real-time in sonar.  playing with the processor options gives me a bit of flexability.  still working on stabalizing it but it works pretty well for several hours with maybe about 12 msec of drift in the timings here and there. 

o_O

ouch... my brain.

See the use of Sonar for any purpose is endless. Here an anthropological investigation is being done via Sonar. Maybe the name has something to do with it. 

I had a weird dream last night that I had to do some crazy math calculations for something or other. All of a sudden I was looking at a huge bare motherboard that an extra big arsed processor aside from the CPU that said MATH on it. Then I watched little jolts of electricity sweep across it and at the end a bunch of digital style number came pouring out of it and the calculations saved the day.

My brain is a very strange place.

Thats why you were drawn to Sonar! All of us suffer the same disorder Beep. 

setting affinity in windows is a two-step process.  the first is in sonar:  in preferences/config file you need to set "enablesetthreadidealprocessor" to false  step two is creating a bat file that will look something like this:  start "sonar 7cpu" /affinity 0xFE "C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\SONAR X2 Producer\SONARPDR.exe"  the affinity option is a hex representation of the processors you want to use converted from a binary number made up of all your cpus.  i have 8 cores on my system so it would be an 8 bit binary mask ie. 11111111 where each digit represents a core.  the cores are read from right to left, so it's laid out like this: core # 76543210   my start option wants to use cores 1 thru 7, so the binary is 11111110 which converts to hex of FE.   say you want to use cores 4567, then the binary would be 11110000 and the hex F0 and the resultant start command would be   start "<YOURSHORTNAMEHERE>" /affinity 0xF0 "C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\SONAR X2 Producer\SONARPDR.exe"  just thot i'd toss that out there if anyone's interested. 

Yeah. I do that all the time.

lol. beep you made me spit my coffee! that was the best!