So yesterday I was finishing my song up and added a last vocal track. I then listened to the whole track and realized there were some strange crackling sounds in some parts where there weren't before. I figured that it must be coming from the new track I added so I solo'd it, but it was fine on its own. I checked every other track and they were also fine. I decided to ignore this for the time being, so I began to tweak a few things and add a few more effects to finish the song, but gradually the crackling became more frequent and stronger to the point where it occurred throughout the entire project. A day later, I can no longer play the project back because it is almost constantly dropping out and I can barely make out the song. 
I assume it must be a processing problem as the more I add to the project, the worse it gets.  
My specs are:
Windows 7 64 Bit
Pentium Dual-Core Processor 3.20GHz
3GB RAM 

Any help will be appreciated.


- Jon

JonBoh


So yesterday I was finishing my song up and added a last vocal track. I then listened to the whole track and realized there were some strange crackling sounds in some parts where there weren't before. I figured that it must be coming from the new track I added so I solo'd it, but it was fine on its own. I checked every other track and they were also fine. I decided to ignore this for the time being, so I began to tweak a few things and add a few more effects to finish the song, but gradually the crackling became more frequent and stronger to the point where it occurred throughout the entire project. A day later, I can no longer play the project back because it is almost constantly dropping out and I can barely make out the song. 
I assume it must be a processing problem as the more I add to the project, the worse it gets.  
My specs are:
Windows 7 64 Bit
Pentium Dual-Core Processor 3.20GHz
3GB RAM 

Any help will be appreciated.


- Jon

You failed to list your audio interface.

Oh sorry, it is an E-MU 0204 USB

Sounds like your audio buffer needs to be raised.  Try freezing any soft synths.  Try exporting an audio mix.  It should be fine.  

The usual suspects are audio latency, buffers, and drivers. So if you are listening to playback with a lot of effects, you could be hearing drop outs because your PC can't keep up.  You could try increasing buffer size, freezing tracks or increasing latency during playback.
 
Brian
 
 

Also, 3Gb of RAM isn't huge by today's standards, I'd upgrade to 8 - maybe higher if your Motherboard can cope.

Is this a laptop or a desktop?

Also, how many hard drives? What capacity? 

What synths are you using?

All of the above can and will have a bearing on audio performance

When I increase the buffer size, it makes the project unresponsive and I sometimes I have to close and re-open sonar to fix the problem. Freezing tracks doesn't seem to be making a difference either....

It is a desktop and it has 2 hard drives, capacity of both being 222GB. I am using Session Drummer 3 and z3ta+ 1. 

EDIT: My computer just blue screened after trying to close Sonar, this isn't looking good...

You haven't by any chance set Processor Scheduling to give priority to "Background Services" have you? That's a debunked tweak that made my DAW run as you describe when I tried it once many moons ago. My machine could barely boot and launch SONAR, much less play a project.
What are your ASIO and Disk I/O buffers set to now?

Ok I checked the processor scheduling and it is set to programs, not background services. At the moment my ASIO buffer size is 80 I believe, but how do I check the disk buffer?