Delay after playing a note and hearing a sound?

[tlaskows]

So I was playing with Sonar X3 today to try to finally learn it.

It was okay for a couple hours. Everything worked fine. Then after some time, there was about 1 second delay between I pressed a note and I heard the sound play on a VST instrument.

Has this happened to anyone else, or may this be a Sonar bug? I think restarting Scope fixes the issue. But restarting Sonar without restarting Scope does not. Hmm...

BTW. Checked the instruments that it comes with and they are super not good They have stuff from like very early 2000. The Roland plugins sound worse than my Soundblaster AWE32 did back in 1996.

The only "okay" sounding plugins are the Session Drummer 3, the bass guitar and... I think that's about it

Any tips welcome!

-Tom

[garyb]

what driver?
asio, or did Sonar default to wave?

[tlaskows]

It's going thru ASIO. I would never use the WAV driver.

Thanks,

-Tom

[tlaskows]

I will double check what it's using in a few minutes. Haven't restarted Scope yet...

-Tom

[tlaskows]

Hi Gary,

Yes, it is still using ASIO. Restarting Scope didn't fix the issue. I think I had to reboot the last time this happened.

-Tom

[tlaskows]

Gary,

It DOES look like it's a Cakewalk problem.

I just ran standalone Korg M1 Le and there's no delay! What a joke

-Tom

[ronnie]

Tom,

This makes no sense to me. I can't think of any reason why this would happen. Could it be the synth VST you are using or EFX rack, (might have their own disk, MIDI, etc., buffer adjustments) of course MIDI input quantize is off (who ever thought of that should be shot)?

Try a new SONAR project with just one MIDI track and see what happens.

You might want to also set up a base SCOPE project for SONAR with just the basic IOs you're going to use for SONAR like MIDI, ASIO and Audio.

I doubt it would be the MIDI cable but you never know with these things.

This sounds weird but you might set Sonar to use Scope as other than ASIO and let the Sonar Audio Profiler run. After it does, set the driver back to ASIO and configure the MIDI and Audio ports. I haven't needed to do this in a very long time but sometimes this fixed strange ASIO issues in Sonar for me in the past.

[garyb]

ulli isn't set high?

i agree with ronnie, that sounds pretty strange. there are a lot of people using Sonar with no problems...

[tlaskows]

It's set at 4ms. should be plenty.

I was still experiencing this after a reboot, but when I created a new project and loaded a synth (without changing any driver settings) there was no delay. Hmm, and I checked for updates. The website said my Cakewalk is up to date.

-Tom

[ronnie]

Sonar project got borked!

[tlaskows]

I think so Ronnie

-Tom

[tlaskows]

I think I will try the Presonus demo of Studio One 3. They say on their website the crossgrade from Sonar is 299$. I might want to start saving up if I like it

The GAS is always strong but I need a bug free DAW.

-Tom

[garyb]

there is no bug-free software. not anywhere...

i'd be more interested in workflow and how the editing tools are laid out and how they are used. whatever fits you best is the one. you should be able to do your work with any of the sequencers on the market. of course, if you like buying things and/or playing with the computer, more than you like making music, then buy them all!

[tlaskows]

I know...

Maybe I will contact Cakewalk.

Scope is not bug free either It stops responding after a few weeks of running (computer always on).

-Tom

[garyb]

does it happen over and over? or just the one project?

there are a lot of things that can corrupt an individual project, and many of those things are not the fault of the software. some are m$'s and some can be caused by the user(accidents happen, like improper shutdown).

[tlaskows]

It has not happened in a while actually. I will bring it up when it starts happening. I know most of the problems in the world are caused by M$

-Tom

[ronnie]

This was the Sonar project file, not the Scope project, correct? In any case I agree with gary on the DAW software observations. As for Scope, she's like a Ferrari, you gotta give her some love now and then, you can't just leave her idling for weeks at a time, those valves need to breathe.

[tlaskows]

LOL, I don't have a problem with Sonar X3, but it's acting up on me! I will play with it a bit more... Maybe I loaded up some plugins that need buffering. I loaded a bunch of junk actually.

Oh Scope is fine, I have no complaints! Pretty solid in my book. It runs on valves (vacuum tubes)? I had no idea! That's probably why it sounds so good

Oh yeah, the Scope project is fine. I just have like my basic setup loaded and a Mini for some reason...

-Tom

[tlaskows]

Hmm,

Really weird. I unloaded the precision multiband (UAD) and reset my audio and MIDI on Sonar and no there's no delay.

The odd part is it did not have a delay initially, why would it show up later? I have no idea. Maybe the multiband does some extra buffering for looking ahead.

-Tom

[tlaskows]

Yep, looks like that's the plugin that was causing the issue. Loaded it again on an instrument to check and surely there was a delay.

Well, that was not so smart

-Tom