I too have used ASIO4ALL with no issues - but switched to an external interface as soon as I could, to lighten the load.

The demands placed on ASIO4ALL, and on the CPU determine what the sound quality is.  For playing MP3 imported audio in Sonar, you would have no trouble.  For loading 20 synths and some audio and expecting that to cruise through might produce problems with audio quality.

So, I do not understand your comment about the solution you have working - is that solution that you are using Ableton Live instead?   Or did you mean that once you installed that the Sonar issues cleared up and now Sonar is working properly with regard to sound output?  Please clarify.

The fact that a simple MP3 playback of 1 imported track is still causing issues would indicate either a major problem with the drivers, and/or a major problem with the install.  Perhaps there is a sample rate mismatch between the ASIO driver and Sonar's setting in Preferences?

Bob Bone

This little notebook handles most things just fine. Just wrapped up a project that was 30 audio tracks with lots of FX and a few synths. Worked great except for the occasional crash opening plugins.

I'm only using Ableton Live for a specific project. Sonar is my primary tool and I've been a Cakewalk user since the 1980's (yep, since the DOS version). Ever since I installed Ableton Sonar plays back perfectly even if I'm launching it for the first time. Odd since Ableton plays back directly through WDM without the need for ASIO4ALL. And I've made no manual changes to anything. Not really a tinkerer here... if it works, why fix it?

For now, everything works great with no complaints.

Interesting.  I have the same issue, but my workaround is different.  Whenever I first open SONAR: no audio, start button sticks down for a bit, same as above.  I'm also using ASIO4all. My workaround is to click on the ASIO4all icon in the Windows taskbar notification area to bring up the ASIO4all control panel.  I then close that, SONAR tells me the audio interface has been reset do I want to troubleshoot it? I cancel that dialog, and now audio works fine.  This happens with the onboard soundcard on my laptop and on my desktop.  I'll try it with the Alesis USB interface I have and see what happens.
 
I saw it with X1 and now X2, x64 and x32 as I recall.  I guess I've just gotten used to it.  I don't think I'm going to buy Live to 'fix' it though!

Hey winds350, I used to do that too and it worked exactly the same way. I wonder if this is a hangup in ASIO4ALL?

Likely a SONAR-ASIO4all interaction of some sort. None of my other apps that use ASIO seem to have the problem (Reaper, Cantabile, Savihost, Geist standalone, z3ta+ standalone, etc.) And sadly, my laptop does have Live Lite installed, and still has the problem. I suspect that SONAR is doing more to negotiate start up settings with ASIO4all than most hosts, and something get's confused.

Just a thought. Do you have the MS wavetable selected on your system? That will upset ASIO4ALL.

As already stated ASIO4ALL actually uses WDM drivers so a direct comparison to ASIO drivers is not entirely accurate.

No, MS wavetable isn't selected (in MIDI devices output, I assume?)

However, I just played with things a bit, and as long as I leave the sampling rate at 44.1k in the drivers settings of preferences, when I start SONAR up again, things play right away.  I can change it to anything once the program starts, and things are fine, but if I don't put it back to 44.1k before shutting SONAR down, no sound starting up.  And it looks like the minimum to get sound back is to go to Preferences -> Driver Settings and select any frequency, even the one the same one, and that corrects the issue.

All of my hosts were set to 48k, and only SONAR has a problem with it.  I wonder if SONAR isn't initializing that in ASIO4all properly?