More on those hard drives... what speed are they? 7200rpm is recommended. If they are not at least swap out the C drive for something like 500GB caviar black. I have two (500GB for programs, 1TB for storage) and they work great.

Is all your computer systems hardware up to date? Sometimes outdated BIOS drivers and stuff can cause problems. 

Hi Kevo

No, no warnings

Thanks

Rgds Bruno

Also check out the Sweetwater Optimization guide in conjunction with the Cakewalk optimization threads/guides (there is one Sonar specific tweak in the Sweetwater guide that needs to be left out). Disable start up programs. I may have missed it but what AntiVirus do you use? If it is anything other than Microsoft Security Essentials you should either switch or disable the AV when working on audio stuff.

Oh sorry... the AV (none) is in your specs. 

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

Download and run the above utility.

Let us know what you find out.

Harddrives are all 7200 and has never been a problem before.
i have been running Windows app where it shows the performance on memory, harddrive transfers network and one more along with Sonar in playback mode and there are no peaks at all from the harddrives exept when its loading the buffer, lots of memory.
I have downloaded the DPC latency checker that reports the system is very well suited for audio....


Thanks

rgds Bruno

Kevo asks a very pertinent question on the previous page - does your FW interface have a TI chipset?

If not you need to get rid and install one that does.

The questions about your Hard Drive allocations is equally important - they MUST be 7200rpm models, with one dedicated to the OS & Programs, and another for Audio. And no "green" drives either.

And no, partitioning won't help a jot!

Hi Sitemaster, 

Before anything else, I would check with another (non-firewire) soundcard ... 

While A&H are decent boards, I'm not sure I would trust them with firewire audio, (on windows)

I would re-enable the onboard audio, and use ASIO4ALL to see if your system would perform better, 
(or maybe you have another PCI/PCIe soundcard around?)

Probably some other have said it in the thread, but I'm sure Sonar is not the source of your problem, 
if you want to try nailing it down to Sonar, try a demo version of another DAW (FL studio has lots of demo songs you can try to stress out your system a bit), use the ASIO driver from A&H, see how the DAW behaves ... 
But then, maybe that would prove that your downloaded files were corrupted, 

X2 has a few flaws, but for sure it works ... 

Hope that helps, 

V

Okay... starting to look like the firewire interface is the bad link here. Are you able to borrow a decent USB 2.0 interface to try out? I've never heard of your particular interface and firewire is a dying breed. Unfortunately that might be the last thing to look into from the info you have provided. 

I feel that the technical issues completely takes over and leave the music in the dust. 
Instead of programming yet another 'vintage compressor' or a fancy console emulation of whats not used anymore ( guess why ) Cakewalk should figure out a testprogram that evaluates all the relevant parameters and generate a to-do list if the test program is unable to adjust them itself.
That would be on top of my wishlist....  :)