Guys,
 
I completed a first-pass rebuild of an older DAW setup (XP w/ Sonar PE5) and seem to have things working except for one major issue with MIDI tracks.  The project I'm testing with is imported from my prior working DAW and other wise seems to be working - DFHS drums, audio tracks, etc.  The problem area is where I'm using LiveSynthPro to load a Soundfont bank but when the MIDI tracks go to trigger the sounds things falls apart.  It's not the usual silence gap that adjusting the MIDI buffers can fix.  The tracks start to play - but only for a split second on the trigger edge of the MIDI note, then immediately stops an has huge gap of silence.  When I stop Sonar the broken up sound will continue out of the speakers & stammer for up to 15 seconds or so.  Very weird.

Any ideas what might be wrong before end up crawling through every possible setting in my old DAW to attempt to figure out what is different?   I don't tend to change things, usually keep things default so I can't think of what this problem may be.....

      Sonic

*** UPDATE ***
 
Ok, I found the problem, sort of.  But it makes no sense.  I have to turn on the "Input Echo" button on ANY LiveSynth Audio track to get the soundfont tones to render correctly on this one problematic track.   Did not have to do that on the original DAW from which this project was derived.  So why on this new DAW do I have turn an Input Echo button, and only for this one track??    I suspect something isn't set right somewhere or something in the system is having a strange conflict.  I vaguely recall solving this problem many years ago but I can't recall for certain....
 
??  Anyone ???
 
Sonic

A few more key pieces of data:
 
The problem does not happen when only ONE pair of MIDI/Audio LiveSynth Pro tracks are involved.  Once a 2nd pair is added, that is when problems occur.
 
 
The problem does NOT happen in S2, it appears specific to S5.  And only on the new DAW rebuild, the prior machine works fine.
 
Hopefully enough info here for somebody to have some thoughts....I'm stumped....
 
Sonic
 
 

IIRC, LiveSynth Pro never worked well on multi-core CPUs. It may work better with "Enable Multiprocessing Engine" turned off. This may help locate the setting http://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Knowledge-Base/2004227/HyperTheading-Multiprocessor-Optimization
 

OMG, that was the problem!   Thank you!    I would have NEVER EVER figured that out on my own.  You guys on this forum rock.
 
What am I supposed to do now though, LiveSynth Pro was my go-to synth for soundfonts.  And even moreso now that I was going to depend on it in place of the SBLive card's synth engine for hearing soundfonts when real-time MIDI recording.     Ugh.....I hate technology.  

There is a lot of history in the forum. You can read about the death of LSP by searching Google with the string
site:forum.cakewalk.com LiveSynth Pro
 
It was around that time I stopped using soundfonts and have no recent experience with them. I believe SONAR 5 included sfz,a soundfont player. TX16Wx claims to read soundfonts. sforzando converts them to sfz format (not to be confused with the sfz plug-in bundled with SONAR). My experience in the past with conversion is that it is not 100% although I have not tested sforzando. Forget sforzando, it is not supported on XP.

I prefer something "light weight" just for Soundfonts, that's what made LSP so cool.  You could actually load the Soundfont from the SBLive card and have a software-only version of it, so to speak.
 
I think SFZ is indeed in S5, will have to check into that.. 
 
*UPDATE*  I looked into SFZ. Apparently it has one monstrous drawback in that it cannot remember (nor even reflect) what Soundfonts were loaded if, for any reason, it cannot find the Soundfont file.  Obviously this could create a major trainwreck down the road were you to open a project and suddenly SFZ cannot recollect what Soundfont/settings were used.   In searching around I found some commentary of a potential fix (free download from Cakewalk?) but I cannot locate it, maybe the link was removed. 
 
       Sonic

All this got me wondering.....what else is there native to earlier Sonar versions that might cause problems in multi-processor machines?  Please let me know if there are any other Sonar plug-ins that I should be avoiding.....
 
Thanks,
 
    Sonic

I would explore the newer possibilities involving the use of modern virtual instruments.  The sound quality in general is far superior to anything you could ever have with sound fonts.  But as scook has previously mentioned, unfortunately some plugins are not compatible with XP.
 
TX16Wx does work on XP SP3 or higher.  It is a full featured sampler for free!