I now am experiencing cracks and pops since I have upgraded to sonar x2a.  prior to this, experiences almost none, the only time was when I was processing lots and lots of things, usually while mixing, a bump in the buffers and all gone. while tracking, i could process a several channels, a couple guitar rig 5, vocal reverbs, bfd or session drummer, etc at low buffers (low latency) and no clicks or pops. now just with bfd or session drummer, i am getting cracks and pops. I have shut off every un needed windows process/service. My cpu utilization is less than 12% and my memory usage is leass that 20% while these cracks and pops are occuring. Any other folks experience this? Any suggestion where or what else I can check for the cracks and pops?  Again, I never got them prior to x2a.  I did restore to a windows restore point back to x2 and still get the cracks and pops.  I did not do a disk image, did not have available hd space.  Any ideas?

Sorry no idea how to solve your problems but I too have got small crackles and pops showing up in my audio having upgraded to from XP 8.53 to Win8 X2a.  The thing is I've also had to update several drivers and plugins and I may not have totally optimized Win 8 for audio so I can't say X2A is the problem.  But for what it's worth just running one instance of Korg M1 digital playing back 4 note chords with sustain pedal and minimal volume automation can cause minor audio problems on playback. However problems are more noticeable when mastering a track with 3 or 4 LP64 plugs and Breverb (no automation). I didn't have an audio problem with this small project on 8.53 xp using the same hardware.
I also note that others don't seem to be having this problem or there would be more posts.
Hope you get your problem resolved.

check the file size you are writing. Is it 32 bit? This will require processor to work harder to apply your fx. Try dropping the file size back to 24 bit for render etc. see preferences.

Tracey and maxsax, please detail your system specs and indicate what bit-depth you use for recording, as well as your ASIO Sample Rate and buffer size.

Maybe there is something in all of that to be tweaked that would help get rid of those for you - worth a shot.

Bob Bone

AMD FX-6100 six-core processor 3.3GHz
8 Gig RAM
SONAR X2 Producer
Tascam FW1884
BFD2

recording at 48K / 32bit (tracking)
SONAR X2 Producer 64 bit version
dedicated OS hard drive which runs Sonar & OS
dedicated data drive which is used exclusively for Sonar project data, audio tracks etc.
dedicated hard drive for BFD2 data streaming/misc storage
dedcated hard drive to back up project data drive & additional folders


could usually get by with 128k buffer size for tracking, low latency. I was able to load the machine up a bit and not have any issues at 128k, now I have been using 256k to get around the cracking and poping. sometimes notice latency. So then I end up freezing tracks. I mix /master in 512k cuz I use lots of plugins and it has always worked fine. I did go back thru all of the services on the machine and disabled un needed services (i did this also when I purchased the machine), there is no virus scan, security software. I rarely connect the machine to the internet. This is a dedicated recording machine.

Does this help?

Hi,
So nothing else changed except for the Sonar upgrade, correct? OS and Mackie Blackbird driver are the same as before?

You may want to check if you have any time / latency sensitive effects running while tracking.  Some effects (such as UAD and some of the included Sonar mastering effects) introduce alot of latency.  

If that doesn't yield anything, you may want to run DPC latency checker to identify if there's a driver loaded causing latency.

Hope that helps.
Russ 

thanks! I will try that.