I was out of town over the weekend and didn't get a chance to download Sonar 2.2 until this afternoon. I installed the update, and after enabling ASIO, I restarted Sonar. Sonar said it couldn't find the ASIO drivers. I tried everything I could think of -- switching to ASIO2 modules and back again, but Sonar still couldn't find anything. At last I got a blue screen, and I had to reboot. When my computer came back up, everything worked fine! Go figure.
I first tried a couple of light projects at 1.5 ms, and it worked fine. Yes!!!!! No stupid "scope.sys" blue screens or sync problems. Then I loaded some more complex projects with lots of DXi synths, and they used too much CPU to play properly. So I bumped up the latency to 2.9 ms, and it worked better -- until it began crackling again. I soon found out that the CPU meter was jumping up to 70% unexpectedly when it shouldn't have, and it played fine as soon as I pressed stop and play again. 30-40% CPU normally. After a minute the CPU meter would jump up to 70% again and start crackling. But none of that happened in projects that did not contain any DXi synths. So there seems to be a bug (at least for me) where the CPU meter unexpectedly jumps up to 60-80% after a couple of minutes if I have DXi synths loaded. Now, it did the same thing at 11ms latency, but the buffers were big enough not to crackle. That's low enough latency to play DXi synths live, so I'll probably work with 11ms most of the time. I think it's a Sonar bug, and I'll report it to Cakewalk and hope they are nice enough to fix it.
So -- for the most part, I'm in business!! FAR better performance than the crappy CreamWare WDM drivers. No blue screens, no lag at playback, and no sync problems. I can easily work around the CPU bug, so I can at last do anything I want without worrying about blue screens all the time. Now I don't have to buy Cubase!
Shayne
