Desparately need help with soft synth setup in SONAR HS 7 XL

T

TeeMoon

New member
This is my first post. Not sure how I managed to NOT find this awesome place for so long!

I have been using versions of Cakewalk for about 20 years but always strictly midi and using external devices for sound (Roland Sound Canvas, and various sound producing keyboards over the years). Recently I finally built my dream "monster" desktop PC and installed SONAR Home Studio 7-XL, which I am already familiar with. With the new machine I am finally comfortable with my processing power, space, and memory to dive into VST's and soft synths for the first time. I downloaded two freebie soft synths that looked interesting and inserted one into a new project but I cant get any sound to make it's way to the speakers from any soft synth, not even from TSS-1 that comes setup in the default "NORMAL" template, even though I can see that the soft synth tracks do receive midi coming from my keyboard/controller. I have reinstalled SONAR several times as recommended somewhere. After reading everything I could find and watching several you tubes on soft synths I haven't found anything that explains all the different audio related settings that come into play. I am probably one or two mouse clicks from fixing the problem but after two days of messing with it I feel just as ignorant as when I started.

HELP PLEASE.
 
1) the input for a MIDI track is set to your keyboard
2) the output of the MIDI track points to a soft synth
3) a patch/program is loaded in the soft synth
4) the soft synth output is pointed to your output device
5) SHS has access to your output device (some other program has not taken exclusive control of your sound card)
6) Sound comes out of the speaker.

Where are you in the above list in chasing down the problem?

Glen
 
Glen,
YES< YES< YES!!

You are awesome!

First... Your simple 6 step process describes very clearly what I was looking for but kept getting caught up in various branches of "too much information" OR instructions that were perhaps too specific to a product. I was able to quickly verify that even after lots of fiddling with settings I did have the Sonar flow right.

Second.... The problem was with the output device getting snatched up at startup by a rude application. So every time I would reboot (in an attempt avoid this very problem) I would immediately hear sound from the speakers coming from the startup "rude" application and assume all was well on that end. I would close it and move on to Sonar not knowing that the output device was left under exclusive control of the closed app. Following your list lead me to the problem yet I still came close to skipping that step because like before I "knew" it was fine one minute before.

Cant thank you enough. Now if I can only remember that song idea I sat down to capture three days ago. I'm certain it was destined to be the best song ever written in the history of all music, and now its lost forever so the worlds problems will not go away, there will be no rejoicing after all, no masses dancing in the streets, no annual pilgrimages to my humble doorstep, humanity cheated all because of one bad behaving application : )
 
Windows has a setting from the control panel under sound that will let you set a device to allow applications to take exclusive control or not to. If you have an audio interface (ai) that you use only for music production it works best to allow exclusive control. If you are sharing your AI (for example using the internal sound card) this will probably not be a good idea.

There is also a setting in SHS7 to direct if Sonar should take exclusive control of the sound device. The same guidance applies to what the right choice here is. If you use the device exclusively for music in Sonar, set it to exclusive use. If shared this is not a good idea.

ASIO drivers expect exclusive control (one of the weaknesses of ASIO).

Glen
 
Thanks Glen,

Good info. I plan to get a little smarter about the demands that all the soft stuff puts on the soundcard, what to look for in a sound card, etc and possibly upgrade if it makes sense but so far I am very happy with the internal sound device that came with my motherboard.
 
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