I agree with FBB and the others that say this not normal.

I suggest you give us a breakdown of your system and more detail on just what is happening. 

If you are recording MIDI from a MIDI controller it should be near instant. If you are playing back there should be no delay.  

A delay in recording that is a noticeable time delay for a note to sound this is known as latency and can be adjusted by changing your audio buffers for your driver. However some audio cards such as the Sound Blaster will not give you low latency. A card with low latency drivers will take of this.

It could be a system issue.  Where Sonar is installed wrong. Or how you have your project setup and what plugins you are using.

Without knowing what your card is its hard to go much further in this. 

deved.com


Replying soon. :)

LOL Good Morning Dev,


Glad to see your actually watching, alot of times people will post and never return while people are trying to help them. 

I'm up!

So my computer is an HP T6400 notebook with 3gb of RAM. I'm not using an interface and this notebook has the IDT HD sound chipset. The drivers are horrid so I'm using ASIO driver instead - which works like a charm.

Bob Bone: If I launch Sonar, and create a new project with the Normal template and drop in an MP3, and click play, Sonar does nothing. The play button activates but gets stuck in the down position for a few seconds but playback does not begin. If I then open another audio project and click play, it plays fine. When I switch back to the NEW project it will now play just fine. This happens with any combination of audio track steps. The only thing that is common is that I must open a second file, play it, then go back to the first file.

Mike Leghorn: Which properties window?

I'm thinking the same thing you guys are. I'm not convinced this is Sonar. It's so flawless, right? :) And certainly there are no roadblocks with what I'm doing: once I open and play a second file, it all works fine after that. It's just...uh... quirky...

I like the plugins thought from John. I'll check the two files to see if there's a weird plugin issue.

First thing I'd try would be ASIO4ALL. I have great results with that and onboard sound despite the myth that you can't run Sonar with  a laptop sound card. Of course an interface would be better but onboard works for me while I'm away from the studio.

Sonar's not flawless but neither should you be seeing some of the problems you are.

You seem to be using the on board sound chip. It is fine for playing back media player songs but is useless for work with Sonar. You really need to get a sound card meant for DAW use. Until then you will have nothing but problems. 

As far as you using ASIO with this sound chip. That is an illusion. What ASIO for All does is wrap the windows driver to appear as an ASIO driver. It isn't. You are most likely actually using a wdm  or mme driver that Asio for all uses to access that sound chip. Remember this, that chip cost maybe $.50. It is not meant to run at low latency or provide quality sound input.

Its a waste of your time to trouble shoot this until you opt for something better.


Edit to add. it seems FBB has a totally different take on this. I still stand by the above post.

Oh, yes, what I meant to say is that I am using the ASIO4ALL driver.

deved.com


Oh, yes, what I meant to say is that I am using the ASIO4ALL driver.

If you read my post I figured that out already. On board sound chips don't provide an ASIO driver.

I agree with you both, FBB and John. I am using the ASIO4ALL and I usually do have an external interface (and I do in my other studio: an Edirol FA-101 - but my notebook does not have firewire).

This solution that I have does work and - ironically - something has changed in just the last few hours...

I just installed Albeton Live last night. Since I've run it, I no longer experience the symptom I originally posted with Sonar. So, uh, problem solved?

Gotcha, John. I was replying to FBB and our messages must have leap-frogged. :)

I'm not saying that onboard sound is a 'great' solution and certainly not something that I'd base a studio on.

However neither is it the 'demon' of all things audio. Onboard sound in my experience is perfectly adequate for travel/mixing purposes. I can run the onboard card with ASIO4ALL at latency as low as I can with my Roland Sonic Cell and it's 'proper' drivers.

Plugged in to the same set of monitors I certainly can't tell the difference. I most definitely wouldn't want to record with the onboard card, but mixing is fine for me.

As John has pointed out not everyone will agree with that view.