Sonar 3 dropouts on laptop

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maestro040255

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I,m somewhat befuddled here! I had been running Sonar 2XL on my laptop and desktop without any trouble. Since upgrading to Sonar 3, the desktop (with a 1.2Ghz Celeron, Delta 1010) had no trouble with 24 tracks of audio and 8 of midi, but the laptop (2.4Ghz P4, USB M-Audio Ozone) now won't run 8 tracks of audio and four of midi. I tried tweaking the buffers, etc, but same ol same ol. Anyone else with similar setup have insight? Could the fact that my work was created originally in Sonar 2XL have any bearing? Any help, greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Moe
 
more info please:
when you say 8 audio tracks are all of the audio tracks going out to the same stereo channel? Are you using 24bit/48khz? How many plugins do you have running on the tracks?

I'm using firewire now, but when I had the tascam us-428 I had no problem running 8 audio tracks with plugins in 24/48.

Are you sure you didn't upgrade anything other than sonar3? if not, maybe you should uninstall both sonar2 a sonar3, and then reinstall sonar3.
 
Plugins and softsynths

Hi Crosstudio!

Thanks for the input. Yes I'm running two instances of Livesynth Pro (which constitutes 2 of the audio channels) and 6 DSP plugin effects (1 reverb, 2 chorus, 1 Dynamics, 1 Compressor and 1 EQ). I do have about 8 more audio tracks in the piece, but they are muted (does that load the CPU?).

As for installing only Ver 3 goes, I bought both Ver 2 and Ver 3 as upgrades and only Ver 1 will install on it's own. Then you have to upgrade to ver 2 then to ver 3. Kinda ridiculous, huh?

Anyway, I have the same stuff running on the desktop PC (with the slow Celeron) and it doesn't drop out. I ALWAYS close any other programs I don't need, on either machine, disconnect from LAN, etc. to give as much time to the CPU's as possible, but still get these dropouts. I also disable the resident soundcard in the laptop (SIS 650 chipset, Realtek AC'97).

I am running 756MB DDRAM, 20 GB HDD (about 5GB unused), uh, I dono what else to give you for info...

Thanks,

Maurice
 
ok, we may have found your culprit. how fast is your HD, and when was the last time you defragmented it? although with per-project folders defragging the HD might be less necessary. also what operating system are you using? i had problems with XP and usb until i installed the XP service pack. theres a known usb-bug in XP (pre service pack).

oh but wait, you said it works fine in sonar2, but not sonar3.
 
is your dma enabled on the laptop ?
is the hard drive dma able ?
 
Crosstudio,

I keep my hardrive de-fragged, based on whether the defrag utility says I should defrag or not. I do have SP2 installed, but made no difference when I did install it?!

My hard drive is only a 5200 RPM, but I don't know the access time for it...? It's a Sager D610SU. I didn't answer acouple of your questions yesterday though.

I use 16 bit, 44.1 KHz (mainly cause my old ears can't hear the frikkin difference) and I am running all the audio out one stereo sub-mix (A). I wish I hadn't "converted" the files when I worked with them in Sonar 2, cause now I can't use them in any version but 3!

Do you think the slow hard drive is the problem?

Thanx again, Maurice
 
Manning1

What do you mean? I'm not sure about how to enable a DMA...? (Direct Memory Access?). A little more computer illiterate than I thought here.

Thanx, Maurice
 
maestro. your laptop processor p4 is plenty fast.
i hope you have 512 ram ? how much ram ?
are you running win xp on the laptop ?
the drive is slow. check with your laptop manufacturer if you can put an internal 7200 rpm drive into it.
what sort of problems IN DETAIL ARE YOU GETTING ?
if you get a chance - download diskbench from prorec.com
and post results. it'll give me some idea about your laptop for audio work.
search under my name for getting dma info. ive posted it a hundred times. should be a sticky.
dma is real basic stuff.
 
Manning1 is dead on with the DMA issue that can be a performance killer, so make sure you take care of that first.

Your hard drive is both slow and at 75% capacity, but if you've defragged... oh wait, what is your virtual memory set to? if your HD is almost full and virtual memory is swapping out during program execution, then maybe you should try to remove some unnecessary stuff from the HD. Also make sure that your virutal memory is set such that the MIN value is 1.5x the size of your RAM.

I have an external drive that I keep my music on (I also make CD-RW backups), so that I only have a few songs on the laptop's HD at any given time.

At 44.1khz/16bit playing back a single stereo output through your USB that should not be the cause of your problem. so I think we can eliminate the USB from the equation especially since you've got the service pack.

How many buffers do you have in the playback queue, and what is the audio latency slider set too?

the thing that has me worried is your statement that you'd run the same cakewalk project in sonar2 successfully on the laptop, and only started having problems with sonar3. i can't help you with any conversion issues because i'm still using sonar2, but if nothing at all changed except upgrading your software, then that has got to be the problem.
 
Crosstudio,

Setting Virtual Memory, it also asks for max. pagefile size...? Latency is set at 330.7mS, way to the right. I am not too worried about latency. I listen to the "live" (can't remember what you call it) monitor mix of what I'm recording to do my dubbing/sound with sound. Buffers = 4, Buffer size is 64 Kb, read and write caching both disabled. I dono what else to tell you.

Maurice
 
Manning1,

I get droppouts playing back 8 audio, 4 midi tracks simultaneous. Ram is 756MB. I can play the same cwp or (cwb) on my 1.2Ghz Celeron desktop and a delta 1010 no problem, and record another stereo track! I wonder why my laptop, with a P4 running 2.4GHz, 756MB memory with an M-Audio Ozone (2 x 2) is droping out just playing the same cwp. Confusing.

Maurice
 
Away for a week

Hey guys,

I hate to ask a bunch of questions, then run out, but I'm going to Japan for a week. If you can think of anything else, please reply, but I can't reply from there as I'll be in a little fishing village with pretty much no internet access. Thanks for the help so far, and I'll try the dma thing next time I do a session. Take care and Happy Thanksgiving.
 
maurice. you have a powerfull laptop with plenty memory.
you should be able to do way way more tracks at 16 bit 44.1.
prolly 30 or more with the right setup of your laptop.
PLEASE run diskbench like i asked you so i can find out stats on your hard drive. otherwise its difficult for me to diagnose.
the only two things i can think of is your getting disk drive contention on the hard drive, or the drive is set to an old slow transfer setting . also because of everything being on one slow hard drive, or ozone is being interrupted by another device making calls on the usb bus.
this is VERY IMPORTANT. DO YOU HAVE ANY OTHER DEVICES USING THE USB BUS while ozone is in use ??????
peace.
 
another thing to look at is the driver you are using on the laptop.

what do you have set under Audio Options --> advanced

I've got Sonar2 set for ASIO drivers, but I never had a problem with WDM drivers either. Just make sure you don't have it set to MME. I'm using a dell inspiron 2.8 ghz with 512mb sdram.

I use to set my MAX pagefile size to the same as the MIN, but not anymore. Because of the space left on your HD you might just want to do that. The point is to make your MIN size large enough that your system hardly ever has to go looking for more.

oh, and i've got my buffers all the way to the left using ASIO drivers with 6ms latency and 256kb i/o buffers.
 
maestro040255 said:
I do have about 8 more audio tracks in the piece, but they are muted (does that load the CPU?).
Click to expand...

As far as I know: YES this has influence on the performance of the whole system. I understood that 'archiving' the tracks that are not used, then the tracks won't be used in the processing at all. It worked for me. Also the question is how many tracks are layered in the same track, I've had problems while recording guitar solo's in the same track over and over again.. Since I used 3 mics to record the JCM2000 + 4x12 I was adding 3 tracks to the whole each time.. After 6 or 7 records the computer dropped out and I had to archive that track to continue on another 3 tracks.

I'm new at this stuff.. just thinking out loud.
 
External HD as audio drive

I always use an external HD for the audio files, when I'm on my laptop. It increases the performance a lot. To give you an idea, I can run 20 tracks at 24/44.1 in Sonar 4 with plenty of plugins on my 2Ghz Pentium4 notebook with 512Mb RAM. I use a firewire HD with 7200rpm.
 
pronoise: do you also record via firewire or USB2.0 or do you have a pcmcia card?
 
Hi, back from Japan. Tried to run diskbench, said I needed .net framework, too. Installed that, installed and tried to run diskbench, get messages like "access denied" to destination folder. No help screens whatsoever. I dunno...?
 
Hi, back from Japan. Checked driver, its WDM/KS, Apply Dither, Trigger & Freewheel clock. Also doesn't seem to matter whether or not I am running another USB device (I use a Edirol SD-20 Sound Module for various accompaniment), and have external 200G hard drive for mass storage. I figured I'm probably better off with internal drive for "live" storage during sessions though to keep USB workload to minimum...?
 
Ahhh! Correct you are. Quote from Sonar help screen, below. I guess I should have known this...duh.

"When a track is muted, SONAR processes the track while playback is in progress so that you can unmute the track without stopping playback. If you have lots of muted tracks, this can place a heavy load on your computer. Archived tracks, on the other hand, don't place any load on your computer. Therefore, if there are tracks you want to keep but don't need to play, you should archive them instead."
 
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