Subject:Rewire slow to catch up

Posted by: dorkus

Date:11/15/2004 11:52:30 AM

I'm using Acid 5 in Sonar 4, and when I hit play, it sometimes takes about 5 seconds for Acid to start playing. Is this normal? It's a large project - about 50 Sonar tracks and and about 40 Acid tracks. I've played with latency a little, but it doesn't seem to change. Is there something that I'm missing?
Thanks.

Subject:RE: Rewire slow to catch up

Reply by: pwppch

Date:11/15/2004 5:05:17 PM

You are saying there is a 5 second pause over all or that ACID doesn't kick in while SONAR is playing for 5 seconds?

After the delay, is ACID in sync with SONAR?

I have never seen this type of behavior, but I have never had a 50 track + 40 track project. (Yikes! 90 tracks!)

Performance issues like this are completely dependend on what is going on. You have a large number of tracks. You don't talk about FX or routing or hardware. You are basically running two full blown host applications at the same time, so how much you can get out of this is dependent on so many factors.

Are you using ASIO or WDM/KS in SONAR? What type of hardware buffer settings are you using?

What kind of tracks in ACID? Loops/Oneshots/Beatmapped/MIDI?

One thing to keep in mind with this whole ReWire thing. ACID is VERY different when used as a slave than when it is stand alone. While we let you do as much of ACID that you would normally, the work flow defined by ReWire is very different than that of ACID being used stand alone.

What I am saying is that there are things that you may be tempted to do in ACID when ReWired to SONAR that should be done in SONAR. Treat ACID like an "instrument" and do in ACID what SONAR just can't do and you will get far better mileage out of your CPU and other resources.

ReWire is a cool technology, but has some limitiations with how it permits dealing with non-tempo based media or processing. ReWire is NOT sample accurate, but "nearly" sample accurate as the Propellerheads describe it. However, I have never seen a 5 second delay as you describe it.

Peter

Subject:RE: Rewire slow to catch up

Reply by: jardeano

Date:11/16/2004 4:53:37 AM

In Sonar,, Go to options -audio -advanced and try increasing the I/O buffer size,,

Subject:RE: Rewire slow to catch up

Reply by: jardeano

Date:11/16/2004 5:13:26 AM

I wanted to say try increasing or decreasing the I/O buffers

Subject:RE: Rewire slow to catch up

Reply by: dorkus

Date:11/16/2004 4:16:40 PM

Thanks for the responses. I guess the first thing to try is playing with the buffers - I haven't done that yet.

Yes, I know that I'm pushing the envelope as far as project size. As far as this project, there's about 15 full length audio tracks and the rest are loops and one shots - for both apps. I'm using WDM in Sonar. Both apps use about 10 - 20 FX. When Acid does finally come in, it is in sync. Sometimes it takes as long as 10 seconds to catch up.

As far as hardware, this is on a laptop with an indigo IO. Specs are P4 3.4 ghz, 1 gb ram, 2 internal 7200 rpm drives.

If there's any other suggestions, I'm listening. This is my first experience with rewire, and I guess I'm finding out its limitations.

I'll post when I get a chance to play with the buffers.

Subject:RE: Rewire slow to catch up

Reply by: pwppch

Date:11/16/2004 4:42:11 PM

Try this:
Remove the long audio file based tracks from ACID. Does the problem go away?

It is recommened that long disk based audio tracks are used in the host application vs ACID when ACID is ReWired. Because of how ReWire deals with tempo changes, long files can play incorrectly or display incorrectly if there are tempo changes contained in the host's project.

This is inline with the problems that ReWire was intended to solve.

Peter