Sonar 2.2 Dropouts

[qwincy]

Hi all,

I've been dabbling with this for a while, but finally got enough $ saved to get going for real. My question : I have a song with six audio tracks, no midi tracks, no automation, and about 11 plug-ins (Waves and Cakewalk FX) called up and I can't play the song. The audio engine drops out immediately. My PC is a Dell Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz with 768 MB RAM. Is this just a case of running too many effects at once, or does it sound more like I need to look at the whole checklist (defragging the drive, etc.)

Any thoughts appreciated. Thanks

[tubedude]

I opened up over 30 tracks and like 10 plugs and 10 reverbs on mine and it kept chugging, and its a 1.53 with 700 something ram in it...
Either you are running an uncooperative plug, the wrong drivers (WDM?), or your latency is set too low for that many plugs.... check your latency slider and if its under like 5ms, move it up til it quits dropping out.
Otherwise, I dunno.

[dachay2tnr]

A lot depends on the plugins you are using as well. For ex., if you have multiple instances of Waves RVerb, that will bring a system to it's knees. Remove one plugin at a time to see if you can pinpoint the culprit.

[moskus]

And tune your machine. www.musicxp.net

[Teacher]

what kind of sound card do you have? its prolly cuz you are using the cheapy onboard card or a sound blaster or some crap...you gotta have the latency on those things wayyyy up

[qwincy]

Thanks for all the replys. Teacher, it's a Delta 66 and the latency is set all the way to the "safe" side. Plus, I tried closing all the plugs and it still wouldn't play...so it's some other weird problem.

Anyway, I was planning to rebuild the box and keep sonar and the working audio directories on a separate drive, small and fast for easy and frequent defrags. Will also be guided by the advice on musicxp.net -- thanks moskus. Hopefully whatever is choking it will get dealt with in the rebuild.

[moskus]

Ahh, the Delta66!

What have you set your DMA Buffers to in the Delta Control Panel?

[qwincy]

It is set to 384 samples

(Sorry for the lag in responding. Every now and then my boss gets this crazy idea that I actually have to do stuff in exchange for my paycheck. Must get him straight on that one day... heh heh heh )

[Wurlitzer]

Try the aud.ini tweak. It completely cured my system of dropouts.

Go into the Cakewalk program folder (can't remember off hand exactly where) and find a file called "aud.ini".

Open the file with Notepad. Scroll down until you find a line that says "Stop if starved = 1".

Change the "1" to "0" and save the file. That's it - no more dropouts.

I'm not really sure what is behind this. Some people have said that if you do this you'll get clicks and pops in your audio when its recorded, even if you don't hear them during recording. I can only say that I have not found this to be the case at all - my recordings are completely clean.