Hi guys, Returning to production after a several-year break. I have Sonar X2 installed on Windows 7 (64), using an Echo Gina3G sound card, with 10GB of ram. QUESTION : Under Playback and Recording, the Driver Mode options are WDM/KS, WASAPI, ASIO and MME (32 bits). Default is WDM/KS. Should I leave it at default?

My own experience will tell you ASIO. WDM has never worked right for me since SONAR 2 waaaay back. It wouldn't hurt to try all of them and see which give you the best results. Speaking of which what ever happened to WaveRT??

I find Echo's ASIO driver to be very solid and reliable for SONAR. With WDM, I was getting similar latency settings but with a lot of tracks I'd start getting some crackles. Nothing majorly wrong in WDM. Welcome back to production. Feel free to experiment with both. Don't use MME though. I'm trying to recall a discussion on WASAPI where it leveraged a setting that WDM was reporting in Windows to set somethings....can't remember. I'm not so technical. For me and my Echo products I prefer ASIO to WDM only slightly. Both work well. [edit] we were typing at the same time it appears. Good advice above. And I confirm ASIO works well.

emwhy : What do you mean, what happened to WaveRT? All my Gina3G inputs and outputs are showing up as [WaveRT] in Sonar X2.

I agree that Echo ASIO is generally better than WDM. For my AudioFire, WDM latency settings can only go as low as 128 samples, while ASIO can go down to 64 samples. If I really need to crank up latency on a huge project, though, ASIO can only go up to 1024 samples, while WDM can go way up to 15360 samples. So if I ever need to turn latency way up to keep a massive project going while mixing, I temporarily switch to WDM. But ASIO is definitely the way to go for low latency input monitoring and softsynth playing.

When I switch to ASIO and restart Sonar X2, the software tells me (while loading) that my soundcard (Gina3G) cannot support the 24b bit rate. When I go to Driver Settings under Preferences, I see the bit rate as 16 and greyed out. I can't click it. ASIO control panel defaults me at 256 samples. Is all of this normal? My card can do 24 bit recording. I don't want it to do 16.

Is your recording bit depth set to 24 in Sonar Preferences|File|Audio Data? Also, you have to click on the ASIO Panel button in SONAR to change the latency using Echo ASIO configuration.

Yes, that was the first thing I set after installation. However, now for some reason it's back to 24 in Driver Settings. I guess it must have been a freak occurrence, or something else was using the device at the same time. So what would be an ideal number of samples to select in the ASIO panel for a Gina3G on an Intel i7 920 with 10GB ram?

I meant that sarcastically, not directed at Echo or Echo users. It was supposed to be the next big thing when Vista came out, but not many companies seemed to embrace it.

Just to reiterate from above, that's good you have advice from people with the same interface, because the choice of ASIO versus WDM depends on the quality of the drivers for the individual hardware. No blanket advice for everyone is possible. If you do select ASIO, though, you make the adjustments in the ASIO control panel for your device. Experiment.