thedude400
New member
Sorry for the long winded post but I can't get this situation figured out. I decided to post in the Cakewalk section rather than the computer recording since these issues seem to be happening with Sonar particularly. I've had a pretty significant problem trying to avoid audio dropping out in Sonar. I spent more than half of yesterday troubleshooting and don't feel like I've made all that much progress. Are there known issues with firepods and Sonar? I've done some forum searching all over the net and found very little relating to my problem. I've been using the latest FP10 drivers and my specs are:
Athlon X2 3.0ghz CPU
4 GB DDr2-800 RAM
320 GB Sata 7200 RPM HDD
Windows XP SP2
8800GTS 640MB evga GPU
My machine is plenty fast enough for Sonar theres no question there. The previous problem I had was a few months ago when I was using Cubase with the same setup. Everything worked fine for months then the firepod stopped working. The light turned red and out it went. So I ordered a new firewire card and tried it again. Funny thing is hat one ended up not working so I tested the old card again just for the heck of it and for some strange reason it ended up running fine.
A few months later I decided to switch to Sonar and had Sonar 6 running for many days. Then all of the sudden the dropouts started, and the driver recognition issues. At first I thought it might be itunes. I had just gotten the new iphone and had been using itunes quite a bit plugging in and taking out the phone frequently. So of course I troubleshot by making sure to not plug in the phone and erasing all itunes programs from the task manager, along with any other program that might be trying to access the firepods drivers. No luck, still had dropouts and driver problems. So I uninstalled and reinstalled the firepod drivers many times, sometimes without updating the firmware and sometimes with. No luck. So I decided to plug in an extra soundcard for all other windows sounds to default to, that way I could be sure no other programs were trying to use the firepod while Sonar was running. Nothing, still no luck. Actually at this point there was no sound at all, from either windows or Sonar. Also I've tried different cables, in different pci slots, in different firewire jacks all in many different combinations to no avail. I've been through Sonar's 'help' section and troubleshot for over an hour following their directions quite closely on audio dropouts. Still no luck.
So at this point I'm kind of at a loss. I'm no stranger to sound card driver problems as I once had an Aardvark Q10
If I had 1 good guess at what the problem was I would say theres a chance it could be the firewire card. I've been picking up the $15-20 ones online. The specs and the transfer rates on the cards both seemed more than adequate but the more that I read, I'm finding out that there are lots of companies particularly foreign, selling firewire cards that are worth no more than a doorstop. Even though I'm a little hesitant to think it's the firewire PCI card, I'm willing to try anything. So I will be picking up a firewire certified card that I KNOW is quality and will try that.
Another thing I wonder is if my firepod is fried or something. A guy on a different post mentioned that a firmware update fried his firepod (not sure if I buy that though). Or maybe it's XP2 issues. I'm also going to update To the latest Sonar 6 drivers. I've only got the first update installed right now, I think it's 6.0.1.
One other guess I have is maybe my disk drive is causing the problem. I used to have 2 320GB SATA drives running in raid and you can imagine how well that worked for audio recording. Then I ended up taking one drive out and now have just one left. My hard drive has been filling up quite quickly lately and had only 20 GB or so left a few days but I went ahead and erased it so now it has over 60 gb available. Also I should mention that the program is running on a partitioned portion of my drive with a total of 160 gb, 60 of it free. The other 160 partition is for storage of other unrelated files. Should I consider running Sonar on one partition switching my saved files to the other partition that has over 100 gb of free space?
Anyways I'm completely at a loss and I'm considering going back to Cubase, not because I want to but because I think theres a better chance it will work corrctly. Does anyone have any knowledge on a similar problem? I wanna get recording soon while I have lots of free time, not to mention I have a friend coming from out of state to record in a couple weeks. I'd like to be up and running by then. Any help is appreciated.
Athlon X2 3.0ghz CPU
4 GB DDr2-800 RAM
320 GB Sata 7200 RPM HDD
Windows XP SP2
8800GTS 640MB evga GPU
My machine is plenty fast enough for Sonar theres no question there. The previous problem I had was a few months ago when I was using Cubase with the same setup. Everything worked fine for months then the firepod stopped working. The light turned red and out it went. So I ordered a new firewire card and tried it again. Funny thing is hat one ended up not working so I tested the old card again just for the heck of it and for some strange reason it ended up running fine.
A few months later I decided to switch to Sonar and had Sonar 6 running for many days. Then all of the sudden the dropouts started, and the driver recognition issues. At first I thought it might be itunes. I had just gotten the new iphone and had been using itunes quite a bit plugging in and taking out the phone frequently. So of course I troubleshot by making sure to not plug in the phone and erasing all itunes programs from the task manager, along with any other program that might be trying to access the firepods drivers. No luck, still had dropouts and driver problems. So I uninstalled and reinstalled the firepod drivers many times, sometimes without updating the firmware and sometimes with. No luck. So I decided to plug in an extra soundcard for all other windows sounds to default to, that way I could be sure no other programs were trying to use the firepod while Sonar was running. Nothing, still no luck. Actually at this point there was no sound at all, from either windows or Sonar. Also I've tried different cables, in different pci slots, in different firewire jacks all in many different combinations to no avail. I've been through Sonar's 'help' section and troubleshot for over an hour following their directions quite closely on audio dropouts. Still no luck.
So at this point I'm kind of at a loss. I'm no stranger to sound card driver problems as I once had an Aardvark Q10
If I had 1 good guess at what the problem was I would say theres a chance it could be the firewire card. I've been picking up the $15-20 ones online. The specs and the transfer rates on the cards both seemed more than adequate but the more that I read, I'm finding out that there are lots of companies particularly foreign, selling firewire cards that are worth no more than a doorstop. Even though I'm a little hesitant to think it's the firewire PCI card, I'm willing to try anything. So I will be picking up a firewire certified card that I KNOW is quality and will try that. Another thing I wonder is if my firepod is fried or something. A guy on a different post mentioned that a firmware update fried his firepod (not sure if I buy that though). Or maybe it's XP2 issues. I'm also going to update To the latest Sonar 6 drivers. I've only got the first update installed right now, I think it's 6.0.1.
One other guess I have is maybe my disk drive is causing the problem. I used to have 2 320GB SATA drives running in raid and you can imagine how well that worked for audio recording. Then I ended up taking one drive out and now have just one left. My hard drive has been filling up quite quickly lately and had only 20 GB or so left a few days but I went ahead and erased it so now it has over 60 gb available. Also I should mention that the program is running on a partitioned portion of my drive with a total of 160 gb, 60 of it free. The other 160 partition is for storage of other unrelated files. Should I consider running Sonar on one partition switching my saved files to the other partition that has over 100 gb of free space?
Anyways I'm completely at a loss and I'm considering going back to Cubase, not because I want to but because I think theres a better chance it will work corrctly. Does anyone have any knowledge on a similar problem? I wanna get recording soon while I have lots of free time, not to mention I have a friend coming from out of state to record in a couple weeks. I'd like to be up and running by then. Any help is appreciated.