Sonar latency - newbie user

[theinnertemple]

Hi I've been using ProAudio9 for the past five years and just upgraded to Sonar 4. I'm getting a ridiculous amount of lag between playing a note on my guitar and hearing it/it being registered in Sonar. my sound card is set to 256 samples. If I try to reduce the slider in Sonar the lag gets shorter but then the guitar distorts horribly.
I'm using a P4 with 1 Gb ram. My sound card is a M-Audio 66 Delta and I'm putting the guitar through the 1/4 inch jack inputs and taking the signal out through the 1/4 in outputs.

Any help/advice greatly appreciated as I've been battling with this for two days now!
theinnertemple

 

[acidrock]

Well you should be able to run at low latency with your specs.
What latency can you safely run at?
Is everything besides Sonar shut off in the background?
How many tracks/plugs are you running?
What sample rate /bit depth?

I've got Sonar3 a P4/2.4, a gig of RAM and a Delta 66 and run flawlessly at 2.9 ms.I'm at 44.1/24 and set my buffers at 64.

Also the drivers for your soundcard could be a problem.With M-audio the latest drivers aren't always the best.

Lastly,I plug my guitar into a preamp then into my Delta 66.Have you had previous success plugging directly into the soundcard?

 

[theinnertemple]

Hi Thanks for the info. Anything above 30 ms is OK but then the lag between playing the guitar and and hearing anything is too long to do anything.
I'm also using 44.1 kHz and I usually take a line staright out of my effects processor (whch has a built in pre amp). I've never tried going straight into the card.
I am worried by your comment about the drivers for M-Audio as I updated them last week- though the reason I did update them was because I had the problem I described with the drivers that came with my card.
Other weird thing is that if I try to go back to pro audio 9 I can't hear any sound going through, but the software is picking up the signal.
cheers
tom

 

[acidrock]

I am worried by your comment about the drivers for M-Audio as I updated them last week- though the reason I did update them was because I had the problem I described with the drivers that came with my card.

I made a big mistake,the buffers on my card are at 64!!!That should make a big difference.

I gave you the specs off of my online computer,not my DAW.


On my DAW the drivers I'm using are version 5.10.00.0029.

Other weird thing is that if I try to go back to pro audio 9 I can't hear any sound going through, but the software is picking up the signal.
cheers
tom

PA9 does not support input monitoring,that is you can't hear effects as you play them.