Reference Guide

1182 Improving audio performance

System configuration

This section covers optimizing your system configuration to work with SONAR.

See:

“The Wave Profiler” on page 1182

“Enabling and disabling audio devices” on page 1183

“Sampling rates” on page 1184

“Bit depths and float resolution” on page 1184

The Wave Profiler

The Wave Profiler is a utility that analyzes the sound cards in your computer and determines the

best DMA (Direct Memory Access) settings for communicating with SONAR. These DMA settings

are displayed in samples, at the sample rates and bit depths your sound card supports. The Wave

Profiler also sets a value in milliseconds for the Buffer Slider, which controls mixing latency. The

Wave Profiler is unnecessary if you are using an ASIO driver.

The DMA settings are used to ensure that a project that contains both MIDI and digital audio plays

back in tight synchronization. If SONAR is not configured properly with your audio device’s DMA

settings, MIDI and digital audio material may not play back correctly.

Note to users of previous Cakewalk products: The DMA settings in versions of Cakewalk prior to

SONAR 1.0 were displayed in bytes rather than samples. Using your previous DMA settings in

SONAR will not work. Try the settings that wave profiler displays, and if you are not satisfied, only

then attempt to optimize your settings.

The Wave Profiler utility runs automatically the first time you run SONAR. The wave profiler

determines the best DMA settings for the supported bit depths and sample rates of your sound card.

All of your audio settings are listed in the Preferences dialog box, which you open with the Edit >

Preferences command. The following list summarizes all the settings that the Wave Profiler sets.

You can override all of them except what audio drivers are listed in the Drivers tab:

• Input and output drivers

• DMA buffer sizes (in samples)

• Mixing latency

If you experience MIDI and audio synchronization problems during playback, before contacting

technical support, run the Wave Profiler and try the default settings.

Note: It is possible to load a 48 kHz project when you are using a sound card that does not

support 48 kHz. SONAR does not warn you when you do this. Your project may crash, or it may

appear to record audio when your project is not actually recording.