drop out problems

[farewellending]

I'm getting some drop out on 15 tracks. I have sonar 3 and I'm using a decent amount of the Waves Plug-ins. I'm running at 7200 rpms, 2.2 gHz, 1 GB ram. What will help this?

 

[Drewdt3]

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I have discovered today that if I lift the i/o buffer to 512 (options-audio-advanced)it stops the dropouts altogether. Hope this helps

 

[dachay2tnr]

Increasing the buffer size increases the latency. Generally an increase in latency will help with dropouts, however it may have other negative consequences if you are using input mointoring or trying to record midi in realtime.

If you can live with the higher latency, then go for it. You can also move the latency slider to right, instead of increasing the buffer size.

Another approach might be to reduce the number of plugins being used by putting them on a Bus rather than on individual tracks. This may not always be an option, and depends on the tracks that makeup the song, and the type of plugin being used. It is particularly helpful with reverb.

Lastly, you want to be sure your computer has been optimized for audio. Make sure nothing is running in the background other than the bare essentials. For ex., turn off any virus checking software and other non-essential stuff that loads on boot. There's several decent articles on the web for doing this. Here is one from sound on sound: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Mar02/articles/pcmusician0302.asp

Finally (although this one costs money) a second hard drive specific for your audio files might help as well. What does your disk usage look like when you experience the dropouts?

 

[Drewdt3]

I was talking about raising the file system buffer not the buffer in the asio panel, it worked for me and now everything is fine. Might be worth a try you can always put it back to where it was.

 

[dachay2tnr]

I was talking about raising the file system buffer not the buffer in the asio panel, it worked for me and now everything is fine. Might be worth a try you can always put it back to where it was.

I believe this only has an effect if you have disk caching turned on. Cakewalk recommends leaving this off, unless you have an older system with drives that do not use DMA transfer.

File System
Enable Read Caching and Enable Write Caching--Choosing either of these options lets SONAR use the Windows disk cache while reading or writing audio data. SONAR will usually perform best with all caching disabled, which is the default setting. If your computer has an older IDE disk controller, or a disk controller that does not use DMA transfers, enabling caching may improve SONAR's audio performance. Note: Changes to these settings only take effect when you restart SONAR.
I/O Buffer Size--This value determines the buffer characteristics for transfers to and from the disk. Changing this value does not affect audio latency, but will affect the disk throughput for audio tracks. The default setting is 128. If you have audio problems, try 64 and then 32. If audio problems persist, try 16, 256, 512, or reset to 128 and try a different remedy.

As always, YMMV.

 

[Drewdt3]

DACHAY2TNR

You've perhaps got more experience than I have with this software, but I can catagorically assure you that when I moved the buffer to 512, the percentage load went down to about 20 from 35-100 dropout before I moved it. To make sure that it wasn't coincidence I moved it back again and it started dropping out again. Try it, you'll be amazed.

 

[pepsifx357]

Are you recording in a high sample rate? because if you got a computer like that you shouldn't have any problems, unless your trying to record like 96K or something. You'll get to keep that tight low latency.

 

[dgatwood]

DACHAY2TNR

You've perhaps got more experience than I have with this software, but I can catagorically assure you that when I moved the buffer to 512, the percentage load went down to about 20 from 35-100 dropout before I moved it. To make sure that it wasn't coincidence I moved it back again and it started dropping out again. Try it, you'll be amazed.

Did this cut your CPU load that much? Are you sure DMA is enabled for that drive?

 

[farewellending]

when it drops out its not my disk usage, that stays at a lower percent, its my CPU% that causes the drop out. I am recording at 96K at a sample rate of 16bits. I mainly use this for audio recording, full bands, drums, guitars, bass, vocals. I never use MIDI at all. So you say I should change the latency? but will that make my audio playback off, or my quality worse? I am fairly new with this stuff.