The case of the mysterious drop-out.

T

timothydog

New member
I will throw this story by you and see what y'all can make of it.

I'm running SonarXL on a P3-700, 384MB pc133 ram, sblive 5.1 platinum, IBM 60GXP 40gig 7200rpm with Win98SE. My band and I are working on our new album in my home studio. I go SBLIVE mostly because of it's soundfont capabilities. We don't have a drummer.

So I've worked on a few songs so far and things are working great. The CPU usually runs at a solid 60-70% because of the 5 active soundfont tracks with effects on their linked audio tracks. Plus I'm running 2 guitar tracks and bass with EQ and Ultramaximizer.

Something strange happened last night while I was editing some drum beats (soundfonts). I have some scratch guitar and bass tracks laid down just for reference purposes. I lengthened my drum beat a few bars past where the guitar/bass takes end so when you play it you only hear the drums. Every time I play this section where it is only drums, Sonar drops out like a punk. The cpu meter goes from a solid 65% right to 100%. I have nothing else going on.. just active plug-ins....

Oh, and get this. For the hell of it, I copied a guitar take and extended it so there was always guitars playing with the drums. After I did this, Sonar stopped dropping out.....
What?????????? This is insane. I've never had this problem before.

Anyone have any clue ?
Thanks
 
Don't even know if I'm in the ballpark, but...did you try increasing your latency? Buffer settings? There is a definite correlation between dropout and latency. This is documented on the Cakewalk site. My recent "Sonar-kicking-me-in-the-balls" episode happened when I was recording live drums syncing my Roland HD recorder w/Sonar/Soundblaster Live. Sonar/PC was the midi timecode slave in this scenario and would just not keep up (dropout, sync loss) until I upped the latency. I don't know how this will affect your soundfonts, but the 'blaster can only handle so much IMO.

My suggestion to troubleshoot your problem would be to record a stereo Audio track of all your soundfont tracks. Archive the originals and see what happens.
 
I understand where you're coming from Chuck,
I did adjust my latency when I first set it up.
I suppose I could crank it up some more and see where it leads.
I just thought it was weird because the CPU usage is usually solid at 60% but it jumps up to 100% out of nowhere.
 
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