Quick tips for Sonar MOTU users

There’s a few things in Sonar’s Options/Audio window that may be good to pass along to our users who inquire about the performance and functionality of MOTU audio gear with Sonar:

* The mixing latency is good thing to adjust if a user wants to record through Sonar’s Input Monitoring mode. The best way to adjust this is to:
1) Go to the Drivers Profile tab and set the “Stream > 16-bit data as:” to “32 bit PCM, left justified.” With the newer updates of of Sonar and Sonar 2, they have made some improvements to this. The wave profiler correctly sets the options for streaming, so most people should not even think about it. Also it no longer allows streaming in mono for our drivers.

2) Go back to the General tab and adjust the the mixing latency slider. The slider moves in smaller increments, allowing for fine tuning the buffer size.

* I’ve found that setting the “I/O buffer Size (KB)” between 256-1024 on a 500Mhz or faster computer results in better audio audio performance.

* In Options/Audio/Drivers Profile tab, make sure that the “Access Driver in Mono” is NOT checked. This seems to put Sonar in a state where it prompts an error message that notes that it cannot use the WDM drivers.

* Make sure that “Number or Virtual Mains” is set to the number of outputs sources enabled in the PCI-324 console. If the number is set to, let’s say 2, only 2 outputs will be available when configuring an output for a Sonar audio track.

Knowledge Base