Audio Distortion

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rehogg57
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 2:00 pm

Post by rehogg57 » Thu Jun 03, 2010 3:05 am

I really wanted to learn DAW software (never used before) so I could record the music I've written over the years. I'm beginning somewhat simple until I get my legs, then want to build a home studio to actually record our bands music. Purchased Sonar 8 pro (running 64) a year ago (Updated to 8.3.1) understanding that it would probably take some time to learn but yet have enough DAW to expand with. I'm doing well except for recording simple audio. I am using a VIA HD internal audio card, driver mode WDM/KS; dithering pwr 3; Playback and Record buffer size 560 each; I do not have Read or Write cache enabled; I have Multipleprocessing Engine checked; as well as MMCSS checked, Full Chase Lock enabled; I have the computer and sonar bit drive set at 24 with sampling rate 48000khz. I'm using a Sennheiser e835 mic > behringer xenyx 802 preamp/8 channel mixer>Line in to internal card. Just using VIA line out to a headset to monitor. A little history, couldn't get guitar rig to recognize my internal audio driver, so native instrument tech suggested I download asio4all driver. This solved my problems there; sort of, at least now I can run guitar rig, but doesn't sound real good (don't know if this is user error or sound problem yet as I play keyboard). However, prior to downloading the asio driver I couldn't get clean audio recordings, always distorted. The monitoring sounds good, it just records distorted. I've tried changing the buffers and latencies to both extremes but couldn't get rid of distortion completly using WMD driver. So I tried using the ASIO. Like magic the disortion went away for a couple recordings. Turned computer off, came back... no changes... Sonar wouldn't recognize the ASIO driver, so I changed back to the WDM driver and it seem to record okay for a couple takes. Again, turned off computer, came back and the WDM driver sounded distorted again. I tried swapping drivers back and forth, even mme (mme is terrible)sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. My thought is that Windows is possibly getting confused as to which driver to use, but I have little to zero knowledge in this regard. Maybe something is running on the computer to cause conflict, but I've disabled everything (based on forum suggestions) but my wireless. (at some point I will get a dedicated unit, but can't right now) I've searched the forums and tried multiple solutions like clearing the audio.ini etc. But I don't know enough to mess with index files. My question is this... what if I just bought an external audio card with drivers that work well with Sonar to solve this problem rather than continually fighting it. If that's the answer what external audio card is recommended for just a single audio in for now, then later expand to multi input audio card? If there is a simple answer to my problem I'm in for that too, but willing to spend a little to stabilize the system. Please, treat me like an child... I haven't learned all the acronyms yet.


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