Latency with SONAR 4 - Audiofanzine

Cakewalk Sonar 4 Producer Edition

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General Sequencers

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Cakewalk

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Latency with SONAR 4
[ Cakewalk Sonar 4 Producer Edition ]

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zedashton

Forum Newbie

3 posts

1 Posted on 06/13/2007 at 09:24

Dear friend,

I am running SONAR 4 on a brand new super duper PC with a PCR1 Edirol kbd controller as MIDI input.

I'm experiencing about a 1/2 second delay between the time I hit a note on the PCR1 and the time I hear SONAR play it back.

This is SOOO frustrating especially since this has been going on for many weeks now and I'm spending all my time farting around with the PC instead of recording music.

Herer's my setup:
PC with Intel Conrad 2700 Dual Core
2 Gigs of RAM
300 G HD

Edirol USB PCR1 kbd as MIDI input

Phonic 302 Firewire Audio I/O

SONAR 4 Producer

Inorder to try and isolate the problem somewhat, I ran the same set up with Reason instead of SONAR and there is no audible delay. This tells me that the problem lies with SONAR: I tweaked all the latency parametrers in the ASIO config of SONAR and even with all the sliders to the extreme left, I still have the same delay.

Finally I ran my setup on the PC of a friend with SONAR 6 Producer and get the same delay.

I'm just about to through my setup throught the window but I live on the ground floor so the damage to the equipment is likely to be minimal.

Any ideas out there?

Thanks and regards,

Zed

ra7or

Forum Lurker

370 posts

2 Posted on 06/13/2007 at 20:35

MIDI devices do not have any- or only a very low latency (e.g. around 0,9 ms when playing a chord).

If you are experiencing noticeable delay between playing a note and until you hear it, you are most likely using a software-based Synthesizer and are outputting it through an audio card that is currently running slow.

This is dependent on what kind of driver is used for the audio card and if the software synthesizer is able to make use of a faster driver standard.

On windows, there are generally 3 common standards for audio drivers that will give you different results when it comes to latency:

1. MME drivers
2. WDM drivers
3. ASIO drivers

Generally, using an ASIO based system gives the best possible latency time (should be your case).

The latency that can be expected is related to the buffer sizes that are set for the audio card and the driver configuration within the software (smaller buffers=shorter latency). Check out these settings in Sonar.