Sonar & M-Audio Audiophile

[MikeA]

I'm baaaaaaaaack! And I'm gettin pi$$ed!!
You guys offered several possible solutions to my previous issues and I have finally gotten a chance to go back and try them. Unfortunately, I'm still where I was before. Here's the specifics:
- M-Audio Audiophile USB installed on a Dell 1.8 GHz Celeron with 256 MB RAM. 80 GB HD. Running Windows XP w/ SP1.
- Sonar 1.0.2
- Latest drivers for XP downloaded from M-Audio and installed. I uninstalled the card prior to installing the new drivers.
- When I go into Sonar and I do NOT have the "Always use MME drivers..." option checked, I get the message that says, "The following drivers either do not support the current audio format or are in use by another program." I choose to use them anyway but they don't show up on the dropdown list of available input choices for the individual tracks. I figured that meant that it tried to use them and couldn't. However, the Audiophile USB Line is listed and I've chosen it as the input & output in Sonar's Options|Audio window.
- I disabled the onboard soundcard (by choosing to not use it's drivers in Control Panel. There was no entry for it in the BIOS.). I also turned off ALL Windows sounds.
- When I run the Wave Profiler from General tab at Options|Audio it says it is checking out the soundcard and it says "WDM Kernel Streaming" in the title bar of the message box. It comes back saying it successfully profiled my M-Audio Audiophile USB. Then I get that stupid "The following drivers..." message again.
- If I DO check the "Always use MME drivers..." then it sees my card and I can get it to work. The latency is up to 92.4 ms though and I know I need it better than that. According to the Help file though(yes, I even read that!), if it says WDM Kernel Streaming when it profiles your soundcard then it sees the WDM drivers.
- Oh yeah, I even tried resetting the DMA Buffer to 128 Samples for 16Bit Mono & Stereo. I got my latency lowered to 2.1 but the card still wasn't recognized. (This was done with the "Alway use..." option UNchecked.)
- The only thing I've found so far that I could think is conflicting with it might be RealPlayer but I uninstalled it and it still doesn't work.

I apologize for being long, but believe me, I've tried everything I can find from asking you guys questions, to scouring both the M-Audio and the Cakewalk sites. If ANYBODY has additional ideas I'd love to try them. I'm beginning to think this might be an incompatibilty issue between the Audiophile and that early version of Sonar. I'm not against upgrading, I just don't want to spend more money on something that SHOULD work, at least from everything I've read and seen so far.
Thanks again guys...

Mike

[moskus]

Are you on a laptop, as in do you have to use a USB-card? If not, exchange it with a PCI card.

[brzilian]

Originally posted by moskus
Are you on a laptop, as in do you have to use a USB-card? If not, exchange it with a PCI card.

I second that PLUS do yourself a favor and upgrade Sonar to at least 1.3 and throw in some more RAM. 256Mb is totally inadequate.

[MikeA]

I'm on a desktop.
I will try the upgrade and also add more RAM.
I'm afraid I can't return the Audiophile as it was a special order item. So I really need to try to get this working. Why would it simply NOT work?

[moskus]

Originally posted by MikeA
Why would it simply NOT work?

Basically USB devices suck compared to PCI cards. Sorry, that's just the way it is...

[brzilian]

...also because their bandwidth is a fraction of what PCI is and the USB communications protocol is terrible inefficient.