How to make Sonar work with laptop?

tombuur

tombuur

New member
I don't want to do anything serious using Sonar on my laptop. Only I could get to know add-ons like vSampler better, doing tutorials etc. wherever I happen to be with my laptop. So I would like to make Sonar work with the built in soundcard (Sigmatel in my case).

The problem is Sonar tells me this soundcard is either used by another application or the format is wrong. And I can't fix this whatever I try. Also it won't run MS Midimapper as the chosen midi device.

Any advice?
 
Select MME (32-bit) for SigmaTel Audio

Options > Audio...
Choose the Advanced tab.
There should be a dropdown control called "Driver Mode:"
Select MME (32-bit)

You will have to restart Sonar.

This should fix your problem.

I'm stunned that little things like this are not posted on Cakewalk's support Web site. Nice software, but nightmarish support.
 
Using Sonar in MME mode is not a good solution. You would be better off using the ASIO4All drivers instead. I can get very good latency numbers with my laptop's SoundMAX chipset using the ASIO4All drivers.

This all assumes you are using at least Sonar 2.2. Previous versions did not have ASIO driver support.
 
Thanks!

The MME immediately made my laptop work with wav clips. Then I just need a midi solution, be it Edirol or VSampler with some basic GM sounds.

As to suggested other drivers. Is there any advantage if you don't want to record and monitor recording with realtime effects? I only intend to use the laptop for playback, doing some some first attempts at mixing, getting to know how plug-ins work etc. All while I am somewhere away from home on a train or on holiday.
 
I'm pretty happy with Sonar running on a Celeron 2.2 GHz, 512 MB RAM laptop, but I'm uisng a M-Audio MobilePRE soundcard with it... ;)
 
I have an Edirol sound module with audio i/o that will plug into the USB port. It works well. But the idea was to bring only laptop and a set of headphones.
 
tombuur,

i have a dell inspiron with the sigmatel card. i had to use 16bit playback rather than 24bit with the WDM drivers, because my sigmatel card is not 24bit.

incidentally, i use a tascam us-428 along with the laptop for 'field' recording. i'm going to give the ASIO4All driver a shot and see how that works.
 
I just installed the ASIO4All driver with the Sigma-Tel card on my laptop.

I was using WDM drivers and getting 10ms latency at 48khz with 24bit file depth and 16bit playback.

after installing the ASIO4All driver, I'm getting 2.7ms latency... but the sigma-tel card won't play if I try to enable the direct DMA buffer option.
 
I solved the problem with wav last week. However, I still can't get midi. It tells me to pick a midi device at start up. I do. Then it tells me no midi device has been chosen.

Tried with MS midi mapper. Today I got the VSampler standalone, so I thought I would try using its "virtual midi cable" so that I don't need to insert an instance of VSampler in every Sonar file. But Sonar won't accept this either.

What's wrong?
 
tombuur said:
I solved the problem with wav last week. However, I still can't get midi. It tells me to pick a midi device at start up. I do. Then it tells me no midi device has been chosen.
Click to expand...

Do you have a MIDI device?? Quite likely your sound card has no MIDI capabilities.

If you are planning on using DXi's or VSTi's, then just bypass the prompt. You don't need a midi device.

I'm not familiar with the virtual midi cable, so I can't help you on that one.
 
Got it to work somehow.

I can now open any downloaded midi file in Sonar and it will play directly through VSampler (stand alone version) loaded with a complete GM bank. Even the karaoke player works... Well, it crashes occasionally, but that happened with the external sound module too.

There are several advantages. First of all I don't need the sound module anymore. Moreover, I can set up my own GM bank with the instruments I think sound the best, rather than using the fixed bank 1 in the sound module. Then I can audition midi files anywhere I just got my laptop and a set earphones.

(I use downloaded midi files as a starting point for backing tracks, playing lead guitar and singing)
 
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