I don't know if anyone else has come across this, but it looks to me as if the most recent driver that RME has issued (3.069) does  not work very well with SONAR.

The symptom is very slow loading of a project, followed by very, very sluggish performance. Clicking on anything results in the spinning wheel for at least 30 seconds or so. Then, once I finally get playback to start, there's no sound.

Once this happens, the FF800 doesn't work properly with any other application: Sound Forge, Windows Media Player, or anything using audio. All of these seem to work fine until SONAR is started, or after rebooting.

The infuriating thing is that it doesn't happen each and every time. I can work for hours without problems, then everything stops.

I went through everything, though probably not in the optimum order. Reinstalling SONAR, deleting AUD.INI, whatever. Once it occurred to me to roll back the Fireface driver, everything was OK.

I hope this helps someone.

What Windows Firewire driver do you use? To which version did you revert Fireface driver? 3.062 like mentioned in your signature?
I have the similar behavior in my setup: SONAR may work for hours but suddenly audio is gone and I need to power off/on Fireface to get it back online. Same thing happens with FF800 and UFX, SONAR X1d and X2. I have tried almost everything to solve the problem (I even bought Fireface UFX and have tested six different Firewire interfaces). Windows Media Player works perfectly all the time and so does Melodyne, Sound Forge and Vegas Movie Studio. Winamp and SONAR share the problem.
I use driver version 3.068.
Win7 Home Premium 64 bit, SONAR X1/X2 64 bit, Firewire interface with TI chipset.

panup


What Windows Firewire driver do you use? To which version did you revert Fireface driver? 3.062 like mentioned in your signature?
I have the similar behavior in my setup: SONAR may work for hours but suddenly audio is gone and I need to power off/on Fireface to get it back online. Same thing happens with FF800 and UFX, SONAR X1d and X2. I have tried almost everything to solve the problem (I even bought Fireface UFX and have tested six different Firewire interfaces). Windows Media Player works perfectly all the time and so does Melodyne, Sound Forge and Vegas Movie Studio. Winamp and SONAR share the problem.
I use driver version 3.068.
Win7 Home Premium 64 bit, SONAR X1/X2 64 bit, Firewire interface with TI chipset.

I'm using the Legacy firewire driver (which is another story!).


I went back to 3.067. I need to update my signature!


We might have different issues, as power cycling the FF800 didn't help me at all. Also, WMP and everything else I tried would not work properly when the problem arose. Strangely enough, it always started in SONAR, but that may be because it's more demanding of the hardware.

I started having issues a few weeks before X2 released. It turned out something about my onboard Firewire card decided to go totally crazy. The Fireface would work on my Mac and on my PC laptop, but not on my studio machine.

I installed a SIIG Firewire card (TI based, of course!) and set it to the Legacy Firewire driver and it works fine now. (FYI the Unibrain driver for the SIIG sucks and doesn't work. Best to go back to the Legacy Microsoft driver from 2006.)

Hopefully you can find a workaround or fix too. 

Peace,

Tunes

Just in case anybody's following this, I found out that it's not the RME driver.

A few months ago I switched my IEEE 1394 driver to the "Legacy" one on the advice of RME, because I was getting all kinds of stuttering and motorboating with sky-high latency.

Just because I was fed up with the problems described above, I switched to the TI driver. I don't even know if the Firewire in my motherboard has a TI chipset (I've ordered a card to be sure). But the bottom line was that the problem went away.

This only happened with SONAR, although I had problems with other applications after it would show up in SONAR.