Audio Drop outs

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revsound

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Anyone out there having problems with a song just stopping for no reason. The CPU and DISK meters are barely moving, and I don't have many plugins going and about 20 - 30 tracks.

thanks in advance for your help
 
whats ur system spec? what program are u using? what sound card are u using? whats your latency?
 
Sorry, I'm new at this. I'm using Sonar 2.2XL , and AMD 2.1 with 512 meg of DDR ram , with 2 80 gig hard drives (both 7200 rpm). I am using the RME HDSP 9652 sound card and the Tascam DM-24. I'm not sure about the latency, but I will check when I get home from work, but I think the slider is set to half way. Hope that gives you some of the right info. Thanks again for your reply, it's great to find a place like this to help with some of those pesky little troubles we all incounter.
 
If the slider position is relative to what card you're using, we need the actual figure. ;)

You might also want to try to set the buffers in your soundcards Control Panel a little higher. Just remember to reprofile your card.
 
Thanks for the help so far guys ! Hopefully we're almost there. The Hammerfall soundcard buffer setting is 128. The Sonar Audio mixing latency slider is set to half way=124.8 msec, and the i/o buffer size is 128. I'm not very good with computers so please bear with me. Should I have the read/write cache enabled ?
I have also had all the above settings higher.
 
Your system should do better than that! Have you optimized your system? Check out: www.musicxp.net

You might want to try to set the cards buffers a little higher than 128. If you don't need ultra-low latency, set the latency in Sonar to max too... ;)
 
Thanks very much for the link moskus. I will try that when I get home tonight. What type of system and sttings are you guys running ? I think my main problem is that the whole system is new and I really just have to work through all the bugs, but it sure is nice to know that there are people like you guys here to help out.
 
No problem

That's why we're here, to help eachother! :)

And eventually get mad at eachother, but whatever.... :D
 
revsound go to options, audio, advanced, and select ASIO...looks like your might be using mme cuz rme didn't make WDM drivers...
 
But I thought RMEs MME-drivers where so good that latency is down to a absolute minimum. At least that's what the salesman told me when I was shopping for soundcards...
 
moskus said:
But I thought RMEs MME-drivers where so good that latency is down to a absolute minimum. At least that's what the salesman told me when I was shopping for soundcards...

i read that as well...but doubt its true...how can u achieve the same latency going thru more s/w layers? sounds like he just wanted a sale and those RME are expensive as heck...
 
Quote from the link I posted above
RME has made some special MME drivers that can compete with WDM drivers (or ASIO for the Cubase and Logic Audio users) when used in SONAR.

:)
 
don't enable the read/write caching. that's for computers with old hard drives. BTW you didn't mention the rotational speed of your hard drive. 7200rpm or faster for the audio drive is preferred.

make sure you dont have any other apps running.

via Sonar, clean up the audio for the project, and then defrag your hard drive.

I use the frontier design wavecenter with a 1.2ghz AMD athlon with 512mb pc100 ram and my settings are:
audio driver bit depth: 24bit
default rate and bit depth: 48khz/24bit
8 buffers in playback queue
slider to the left using WDM drivers 10.7msec
I/O buffer size 1024 (big chunks)

I can push what you are pushing with half the CPU, so something is certainly askew.

p.s. Are the plugins in the aux buss? how many in not many?
 
As far as not many plug-ins, I am using 2 aux 1=waves rverb and 2=cakewalk delay. I insert about 3- 5 comps, and 3-5 eqs , and whenever posible I do a "process audio" to free up cpu. I defrag every week and I have also optimized my computer from musicxp.net ( thanks moskus ) All to no avail though. RE. "VIA SONAR CLEAN UP THE AUDIO FOR THE PROJECT", do you mean to just clean the audio folder. For some reason that freaks me out?? I save on a per project folder basis if that helps. I also did waht Sonar said just this weekend and went to the notepad and changed the "stop if starved" from 1 to 0. Didn't help.
 
Does it stop when in track view and the postion marker is at the far right edge of the screen about to redraw the waves?

I have a new system: Sonar 2.2xl, 2.53 P4, gig 1.5 GB ram, 80 gig system drive, 120 gig serial drive for audio, MOTU 2408 mkIII on an audio only system. Mine will drop out when redrawing the screen or if I use the scroll bar at the bottom of the console view. (I also have a DM24 but this has nothing to do with drop out).

I have 16 tracks with eq and comp on most. I think it's a video issue with redrawing the screen myself. I have an ATI 9000 pro or something. It's dual head. I only have one monitor at the moment though. I haven't really gotten into solving this one because it's sort of rare and I have too much to learn about other things.
 
My drop outs are getting more frequent. They are happening completely randomly. I thing I have the same video card, but I am running 2 21" monitors. I am probably going to try and reinstall my drivers for the RME HDSP 9652, and get a few good friends over who are great with computers to help me reorganize both of my hard drives. With systems this size you would think you could run more than 24 tracks with EQ and some comps. I am going to try deleting the AUD.INI file from the Sonar file ( unless anyone highly objects to this ) this week. My problem is I have so much work to get done that I can't schedule time for regular maintence. Thanks rcktdg. Hopefully figure this out.
 
revsound said:
I am going to try deleting the AUD.INI file from the Sonar file ( unless anyone highly objects to this ) this week.
There's no problem in doing this. Sonar will regenerate it next time you start Sonar. However, you will lose any personal tweaking you've done to Sonar.



rcktdg - have you tried increasing your waveform cache? Open aud.ini and change the line that says PicCacheMB=20. Raise the 20 to something higher, say maybe 200 mb.

You can also try lowering your Video Hardware Acceleration.

Don't know if either of these will help, but it's worth a try. If you see no changes, set them back to their original settings (although you might want to keep the large waveform cache anyway).
 
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