Cakewalk Sonar X 1 Problems with ASIO Drivers

Cakewalk Sonar is one of the leading softwares in the music world, a great team working behind the scenes  to meet the industry standards in all of its different aspects. Almost no bugs software yet I still hear complaints from people ascribing bugs to upgrade issues or audio drivers compatibility. In fact most of these complaints are a result of lack of understanding the background that the software is built on; one of these common complaints regarding the latest version of Sonar's software "X1" and ASIO audio drivers.This repeated complaint that I heard in real life and read about online is addressing compatibility issues and bugs with the software and ASIO drivers, or glitches and noises while playing a project.

The majority of these problematic issues are taking place with ASIO4ALL driver, and to sort that out let's have a look at the audio drivers supported by Cakewalk Sonar.

Sonar supports these three drivers:

• WDM "Windows Driver Model" that uses Windows Direct X system that can be used as an intermediary signal path for windows based application.

• ASIO "Audio Stream Input/Output" is a computer sound card driver protocol for digital audio specified by Steinberg, providing a low-latency and high fidelity interface between a software application and a computer's sound card.

• MME 32 "Multimedia Extensions-32bit" was introduced as part of Windows 3.0. This is an old technology available only on Windows 3.x, Me and 9x. Although recent versions of MME drivers can compete with DirectX in terms of latency, MME drivers should only be used where DirectX drivers are not available. Usually, MME drivers provide about 300-1000ms latency.

• ASIO4ALL an independent universal ASIO driver for Windows that brings ASIO support to users of virtually all consumer-grade sound cards and integrated audio chipsets. It also supports semi-pro and pro digital audio systems.

So ASIO4ALL is not a driver, it is a virtual emulation of the real ASIO driver for sound gurus who don't have a sound card that support ASIO. It does provide low latency yet depending on the memory CPU , operating system and the used software, the performance varies. So if you are looking for professional quality production get a professional sound card that supports ASIO drivers or use WDM drivers. It works fine with most of the"Windows" operating systems with low latency as well.

Now we know that the glitches,noises, and bugs are really problems with your PC or it's virtual consumer grade ASIO4ALL drivers.The only one issue that a Sonar X 1 user might face with ASIO drivers is glitches when stopping the playback while input monitoring is off, this issues is not a bug it can be fixed by doing the follwing:

1. While Sonar is on Click "P" or go to menu-edit-preferences
2. Under Audio select Playback and Recording
3. Tick Play Effects tails after stopping
4. Hit Apply-OK
5. You are done