moskus said:
What soundcard do you have?
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz ... if only I had joined this BBS
before I got my computer!!! *sigh* Oh well, "better soundcard" - just one of the many items on my long and growing list of new/upgraded toys to get.
Anyway, in a follow-up to this problem, I think that it is latency-related, at least in my case. I tweaked some settings and have seen a really significant improvement in this. Before the tweaks, I couldn't loop on a basic 4-bar MIDI drum riff output to the VSC DXi more than maybe 3 times without getting the dreaded DROPOUT, and the speed-up and pitch-creep were noticeable from the first time it looped. Now, besides a brief hiccup every so often at the start of the loop, it seems to be working ok. I sometimes hear a little pitch-creep right at the start too, but it works itself out much more quickly now.
Here's what I did:
(don't know if these settings changes will cause me problems somewhere else, but I'll deal with that when it comes up - probably need to strike a happy medium somewhere) In the Audio Options General tab under Mixing Latency, I used to have the Buffer Size set at 100msec (right in between Fast and Safe), which resulted in an effective latency 44kHz/stereo of 300msec. I set this all the way over to Fast (10msec buffer), which decreased my effective latency down to 30msec. Also, I had Buffers in Playback Queue set to 3, and I changed it to 4, just 'cuz I thought another one might help.
(Get the impression that I'm winging it, here? You're right. ) Also, I went into the Advanced tab and unchecked the Apply Dithering checkbox, which the Help said "may provide a slight improvement in real-time effects performance". Anyway, I did all these things at once, so I'm not sure what the individual effects were, but hey... it's working, so I'm happy.
I would guess that the Buffer Size is probably the most significant change.
Anyway, if you guys try some/all of these tweaks and it works for you too, I'd be curious to know.
-Jeff
I will definitely have to try having some audio in the background to see if that fixes it like Pedullist mentioned. That would be sweet, although if it would just work right in the first place, that would be the best. I'm getting more and more frustrated (and feeling forced into getting SONAR) as I run into and hear about all the problems existing in HomeStudio that are fixed in SONAR. 
