SONAR 4 - Drop outs during mixdown

[Phyl]

I'm using SONAR 4 with a MOTU HD192 for I/O. The computer is a AMD 64 bit machine with a UAD card installed for effects.

Problem #1 - When I try to mix down "in the box" by using Bounce to Track the result has lots of clicks and pops. I couldn't figure out why so I started sending all the tracks to a master bus, routed that to the MOTU AES/EBU output, connected the AES/EBU output to the AES/EBU input, back to a track set to record. It's cludgey but it works. Any body know what to do about the clicks and pops? I've tried adjusting all sorts of things - no joy.

Problem #2 - During mix down, if the song is longer than about 5 1/2 minutes, I start to get dropouts in mix down track. SONARs CPU and disk meters aren't burping, the UAD meter doesn't seem to register any problems either, so I'm not sure where to start. I've been trying to play with the SONAR and MOTU I/O buffer sizes, more experiments are necessary to see if that really fixed it.

 

[dachay2tnr]

I started sending all the tracks to a master bus, routed that to the MOTU AES/EBU output, connected the AES/EBU output to the AES/EBU input, back to a track set to record.

Sounds like a couple too many A/D - D/A conversions for my taste.

Are you able to export from Sonar without problems. I'm not fully sure why you would want to mixdown within Sonar. If you want to master within Sonar, export to a wave file and re-import it into a new Sonar project.

Gererally pops, clicks, dropouts, are a sign of pushing your system resources. It can generally be fixed by increasing latency. Assuming, of course, you've already tuned your system for audio - nothing running in background, etc.