soft synths midi playback out of sych with computer sounds

I am using Sonar X1 in a 64 bit environment.
Every time I combine a soft synth with the sounds already on the computer, the midi play back is out of sync with each other.  Any idea how to solve?

Is this a 32 bit vs 64 bit problem?
Thanks for your ideas!!
mididrummercpa

You don't give much information :-(

Firstly, I doubt it's anything to do with 32 or 64bits. Are you using Sonar 64 or 32 bit?

Are the sounds on the computer ones you have recorded or loops, or what?

What is your soundcard and MIDI interface?

One thing to try, and a good idea anyway if you've not already done it, is to increase the MIDI buffers in preferences.

Open Edit menu/preferences and click the "Advanced" switch at the bottom.

Go to MIDI/playback and recording and where it says "prepare using...buffers" set that to 500ms. This may not solve your problem, but can sort out a lot of MIDI timing issues and is usually a good idea.

Well, when i loaded Cakewalk, there were a bunch of general midi sounds ready to assign to midi tracks.  Bass, drums, piano, etc.
These play just fine for assigning existing midi tracks.
Then  I read about this neat function called insert soft synth that brings many other (better) sounds.  So I inserted a couple of them.
They have better sounds all right, but the soft synths do not play in "synch" with the original general midi sounds.
Thanks,
Midi drummer CPA

Actually there are 4 synths:
A) Microsoft GS Wavetable synth- This is the one that is NOT in the synth rack.  It  seems to be "native" to the computers sound card.
Synth Rack:
B) cakewalk Sound Center
C) SI Drum kit
D) SI Bass guitar

A plays well alone, but a few milliseconds  behind BCD
B, C, & D play well together, but not with A.
Thanks!

This sounds really close to the exact problem I am having with midi sync/timing as well. First I had to move the midi buffer up to 500 (default is 250). And it allowed me to record and replay a single track at the correct sync. As soon as I split the single track, even before moving it, something goes slightly whack with the sync at where the split is. From there if I copy and paste any of the snippets into more tracks each goes progressively farther and farther "out of sync"... So i went back deleted all the new pasted tracks and rejoined the original track leaving just the original and goes right back into sync as it should. So I split it again and once again as soon as it hits the split, again off sync it goes... it's drivnin' me nuts!

I'd second replacing the MS GS synth with TTS-1. As SuperG says, the MS synth is a kind of software fallback for consumer/gaming soundcards without built-in general MIDI chips.  It's intended for media player or web browser playback of general MIDI files and to provide sound in games that expect to find a "built in" synth in a PC and so use it.

High quality it isn't.

Using it in combination with soft-synths will cause problems as it will have a different latency and response time to the synths in Sonar, and Sonar can't compensate automatically for that.

It might be possible to get it to sync by experimenting to find the time difference between the MS synth and Sonar's synths then shifting the MS synth's MIDI notes that far backwards, but to be honest it's not worth it.

I use mostly hardware synths and run into a similar issue when recording the audio output of one or two as the synths have different response times, though in my case this is usually something like a 3-5ms spread so isn't really noticeable at all. If necessary (or I'm feeling very particular) I just shift the recorded audio the required number of milliseconds.

TTS-1 is not only better behaved in a DAW but it sounds better and offers far more controls as well. It's also straightforward to convert the TTS-1 track to audio, while the MS synth's output will, I suspect, have to be recorded as audio by looping the output of the soundcard back to the input one way or another.