Very strange things starting to happen in sonar 3

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Guest

Post by Guest » Sun Dec 21, 2003 6:05 pm

I'm having some strange problems in sonar 3. After sorting out dropouts and the buffers and deleting the aud.ini file, it seemed to work like a dream.
Firstly, Sometimes,when i record audio, halfway through the recording i have a dropout and the warning box says there is not enough disk space.
This can't be possible as I have a partitioned 80gb hd which I defrag regulary and the audio partition has 83% free space.
I have a p4 2.2ghz machine with 512mb memory and I'm using a terratec ews 24/96 soundcard. The buffers are set at 128kb and my latency is set at 20ms. I have optimised my system for audio and have a minimum of services running.
The second problem i have been having is sometimes the effects I put in to tracks seem to disappear from the effects bus but if I scroll madly up and down they eventually reappear. The same thing happens in the master bus. The effects are actually there and working but the little box showing the effect disappears. It gets quite annoying sometimes as I think I don't have an effect on a track and I add another!

Is anyone else experiencing these problems or does anyone possibly have a solution. I've got a feeling something may be set up wrong somewhere but for the life of me i can't think what it is!

I remember setting the cluster size of the audio partition to 64kb after some advice on a forum. Could this be the problem?

Your help will be very much appreciated!


Guest

Post by Guest » Sun Dec 21, 2003 6:06 pm

as a further to the above. I'm using the WDM terratec drivers.

GretscGuy
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Post by GretscGuy » Mon Dec 22, 2003 11:02 pm

You mention you have your drive poartitioned and are uing a single 80GB drive.

I ask the follwing questions:

Do you have multiple hard drives or is the 80GB drive used as both an audio drive and a system drive? If so, what is the percentage of System to audio?

Many people hear that they should have a seperate audio drive and so they partition a large drive like yours. This will cause your drive to wear out fasetr and can actually 'lower' audio performance.

The reasoning for this is simple - the system is seeing the drive as seperate drives, yet the physical drive is being worked twice as hard. This could casue dropouts.

Try repartitioning your single drive as one big one or buying a second drive.

As far as the plugs dissapearing, it sounds like you may have some pirated Sonar or Plugins running.

Good Luck!

kentothink
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Post by kentothink » Mon Dec 29, 2003 2:55 pm

I have that weird dropout problem occasionally. sometimes, if i just change my latency setting, it takes care of it. other times, i have to delete the track that is causing it to drop out constantly (usually the one im recording to) and insert a brand new track. if youre worried about losing your audio by deleting the track, then just copy it to the clipboard and then paste it into the new track. Sonar is just weird like that sometimes. it just cant make a certain track work...and then it tells you the wrong error message.

i dont get your plugin thing.

GretscGuy
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Post by GretscGuy » Mon Dec 29, 2003 11:13 pm

note that fat32 drives have been known to cause playback delays. Are your drives ntfs?

multarnc
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Post by multarnc » Wed Apr 21, 2004 5:40 pm

Many people hear that they should have a seperate audio drive and so they partition a large drive like yours. This will cause your drive to wear out fasetr and can actually 'lower' audio performance.

The reasoning for this is simple - the system is seeing the drive as seperate drives, yet the physical drive is being worked twice as hard. This could casue dropouts.
This is untrue. The data is on the same physical drive whether on the same partition or not. It is actually better for the data to have it's own partition, b/c when you defrag that partition, the data is grouped together, decreasing seek time. The drive cannot be "worked twice as hard." It spins up to the same speed and has the same seek speed whether it's accessing that same data on one partition or another.

andychap
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Post by andychap » Wed Apr 21, 2004 6:08 pm

If you still have room to decrease your latency whilst the buffers are at 128 then I would increase the buffer to 256 and still set the latency at 20ms.

If you can't get those figures then there must be something wrong with your soundcard drivers. Even cheap cards can achieve 20ms with buffers of 512. Check you have the lates drivers.

Thes 'pirate' plugins might just be a didgy free one you are using. Some free VST ones are not fully tested on all sequencers. See if it happens when you patch a certain effect. It might be a graphics problem, try reducing graphics acceleration by one click.

HDB
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Post by HDB » Wed Apr 21, 2004 10:54 pm

This is untrue. The data is on the same physical drive whether on the same partition or not. It is actually better for the data to have it's own partition, b/c when you defrag that partition, the data is grouped together, decreasing seek time. The drive cannot be "worked twice as hard." It spins up to the same speed and has the same seek speed whether it's accessing that same data on one partition or another.
Multarnc,

I believe you may have misinterpreted Gretscguy's explanation, which is pretty much correct, as is part of your explanation. A person can partition one physical hard drive to try to achieve the equivalant of two hard drives. And they can put all their system and programs on one, while trying to use the other as an audio drive. It's true that audio should reside on it's own drive. The problem is that if it's on the same one physical hard drive, when the audio is being written to the latter partition, if the system or program that is doing the writing needs the hard drive, then the heads must jump from the second partition to the first, complete it's task, then jump back again. That's an interruption in the writing process. That also wears out the drive faster, simply because it's doing more.
If you use two separate physical drives, with audio only being written to the second one, and the system and programs on the first one, as long as the program is streaming audio to the second drive smoothly, there will be no interruption to the audio drive. It's only doing one task.




HDB

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