Had to buy a new computer, got Win7, no 1394 so sold old mAudio interface.  Bought an Alesis IO|2.  Lots of issues.  Decided I better join the 21st century and upgrade SONAR from Producer 6 which predated Win7.  Bought X1 Producer.
 
Still had lots of issues with IO|2.  Bought a TASCAM 122mkII.  Tried all three driver modes.  Still having dropouts.  I've got maximum "safe" settings which adds bunch of delay to monitoring but that doesn't seem to affect the dropouts.
 
The project is 12 tracks, pure audio, one effects bus with SONAR reverb.  CPU usage stays in single digits.
 
Watching PerfMon I see disk usage spike exactly when the drop out occurs.  If it was really a disk bandwidth thing (unlikely with a modern disk I expect), then I would expect those safety buffers to take some time to drain out.  But as soon as the disk use spikes the audio quits saying "dropout."  I de-fragged this morning.  No effect.  No page faults so not burning disk swapping.  Network idle of course.
 
SONAR Producer ran great on the old cheapo generic computer and buying a computer 6 years later I figured I'd have power to spare.
 
Unsure what to try next.  Ideas?
 
Thanks,
 
CAF

Have you checked your DPC Latency?

I'm lucky to have a "monster PC" but my Nvidia was spiking this DPC Latency thingy up to 2000micro seconds every couple of seconds or so and it felt like I had bought myself a dinosaur for my DAW.

So check that. Find what driver is causing your dropouts and take it from there.


EDIT: Once I changed from Nvidia to ATI, this DPC Lat went down to a mere 87us. Now everything works perfectly well.

USB 2 or 3?
Hub or single port?
Checked USB Sleep settings?
Both the Alesis and the Tascam are USB powered - if it was me I would look to see if it was a limitation in the power to my USB port. If one of the devices happened to come with a wall wart, I would try that to see if the situation improved.
Also +1 on the suggestion to check DPC latency

Thanks.  I'm just using the stock graphics, likely an Intel chip set, dunno.  But i'll investigate when I get home tonight.

How do I observe DPC latency on Win7?  I swore I had a way of getting a detailed graphic of a bunch of system counters but either I don't remember how to get to it or it's not in Win7.

CAF

http://www.thesycon.de/dpclat/dpclat.exe

Tried all three driver modes.

Use ASIO. Set the buffers to 256 or 128 whichever works better. 


Did you install to the C: Drive? Are you using a USB drive for anything? 

It's USB 2.0.  There are 9 USB ports on the machine.  Device manager shows a couple of hubs so maybe there are internal "hubs", dunno, I don't know what a hub is specifically.

I've set ASIO drivers to max, 100ms is what I see.  I've installed all on the main c: drive which is a Western Digital WD15EARS-22MVWB0.  I went to try popping in a 2nd drive but it's a compact case computer and there's no 2nd drive bay.  Lack of page faults suggests I'm not thrashing trying to keep SONAR loaded though.

Latest symptons using the TASCAM using ASIO, largest buffers, is that SONAR keeps playing but sound drops out every once in a while for maybe 250ms.  Time shifts and I can't play with the sudden timewarp and the track being recorded gets some funny high pitched bleeps.

I used the DPC monitor suggested and DPCs all seem to be consistently in the sub-500us zone, max is 400 something,  normally around 150us I'd say.

I found you can launch the more detailed perf mon that I remember by typing at the Start menu:

  perfmon.msc

This allows you to add tons of granular detail about system behavior.  Whee!  And I thought I was just gonna finish a couple tunes real quick...

CAF

OK, I'm cautiously optimistic.  With Brando asking about hubs I moved the interface to a front USB port and just completed a whole pass recording with no dropouts.

Tell me there's some science behind this...

CAF

I concur with CAF that there is something about the front USB hub that always work, when the rear ones fail, slow down, not recognizing, etc...

dan le