A newbie's Sonar questions

[Grotius]

I am pretty new to computer recording, but I am slowly getting the hang of Sonar 2.0, which I bought a few days ago. I have some questions, however. I have an Athlon 900, 512M RAM, 120G 7200 rpm HD, WinXP, SB Live Value:

1. I've just started using the demo version of Live Synth Pro, which seems like a MUCH easier way to use SoundFonts than the alternative -- attaching SoundFonts. I'll probably buy the full version of LSP. My question is this: is it preferable to route all the MIDI tracks to 1 or 2 audio Live Synth Pro tracks, or instead to assign a separate audio track for each MIDI track? (I'm working on a piano concerto, which requires at least a dozen MIDI tracks, plus my live audio piano performance.) Is the idea to group tracks together if you expect to give them similar effects or panning?

2. How do I tell precisely how much latency I am getting? Is it the info by the slider in Options | Audio | General? That latency slider allows me to adjust latency, but does it also report latency? When I first had my soundcard profiled, Sonar set this slider to 100 ms, which obviously makes for rather slow DXi performance. Does that mean I "have" 100ms latency? I've changed the slider myself, but I start getting dropouts when I go below 20ms. Does that mean I "have" 20ms latency?

3. Like many others, I am finding that Sonar treats my SB Live as a mono device. I'm using the Nov 2001 drivers, which apparently suck. I tried installing a driver off my XP disk, but it seems to have installed the exact same driver. Any suggestions?

4. One possibility, of course, is to buy a better audio card. Are there cards that work particularly well (or badly) with Sonar?

5. I also have a question about the demo of Fruity Loops, which seems like an extremely cool program. Does FL generate only audio loops, or also MIDI? Also, I could only make a 1-measure long loop; I assume one can change that somehow? (On this
question only, I plead guilty to not having RTFM.)

Thanks!

 

[dachay2tnr]

I'll take a couple:

2. Your latency is reported underneath the slider bar, next to the words "Effective latency at 44k." As you have found out, there is a trade-off between latency and performance. Low latency = lousy performance, and vice-versa. The trick for you will be to find a happy medium between the two.

Alternately, you can archive tracks and remove effects when you need low latency, then later raise the latency and add the tracks back in when you can tolerate higher latency settings.

3. I think you need to check an option like "display a list of all known drivers" when you are doing the driver update. Then pick the one supplied by Microsoft, rather than Creative. If you just do a straight driver update, it will continue to choose the Creative driver (probably because it has a later date stamp).

4. I have a Delta 1010 that works great with Sonar. I have heard others report good results with other Delta cards as well. But note, these will not give you midi capabilities (other than play through). Most of the better cards are audio only.

 

[Grotius]

Thanks for your reply, Dachay. I had one more question that I forgot to ask: when I use Live Synth Pro, my metronome turns into a cello or something. I tried using the PC speaker, but I can't hear it. Anyone know how to fix this?

Also, I remain uncertain as to how many audio tracks to use with Live Synth Pro. One audio track per synth? Or one audio track per MIDI track?