Polyphony issues

[JWink]

I have been runnging Gigastudio 160 alongside Sonar for a while with no problems. Well, not \"NO\" problems, but I was happy with the way things were working. Now, all of a sudden I am getting voice stealing at about 40 notes of polyphony (on a sequence I made a week ago that played back fine). The only thing that has changed was that I installed the 1.3 patch for Sonar yesterday... I will go back to a previous version to see if that helps, but that doesn\'t make me happy either. I also did all the tweaks reccommended on the Tascam site, with no success.

My system:
AMD Athlon 900MHz
Abit KT7 RAID
512 MB RAM
Giga drive: 40 GB Maxtor (I don\'t remember the model, but it is plenty fast enough)

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Jake

[This message has been edited by JWink (edited 10-12-2001).]

[LHong]

Wow, where did you get the Sonar 1.3(1.03). We have known the latest path is V1.02?

[JWink]

Nope, not 1.03. 1.3!

Go to the cakewalk website, to the support section for Sonar. The download is there for registered owners. You essentially need to register again, even if you have previously registered.

[LHong]

Thanks, I\'m going to try this new path and let you know the progress in shortly.

[JWink]

Just re-posting with another plea for help. Anyone have any thoughts on this? As a side note, what happens to other people when they make polyphony demands that their system can\'t handle?

I had this thought the other day: If I exceeded the polyphony setting of Gigastudio, then I would expect voice stealing. However, as I am not even coming close to maxing out the software limitations, it seems like I am coming up against a hardware limitation. If so, shouldn\'t I hear something OTHER than voice stealing? Something like pops and snaps?

This problem is a real drag. I can work around it, but I would much rather fix it.

[Joris Vincken]

Normally if you run into the limit of the system you\'ll hear the difference. Maybe try some different settings (polyphone/note stealing). Also look on the Tascam page, there is an article about optimising your PC for audio.

[JWink]

I have already done both with no success. Anyone else? Hopefully this will all get cleared up when WinXP comes out and all my hard/software plays nice, but I have a deadline before then...

[NAZARU]

You know,
Something just came to me. Before installing Sonar 1.3 I was able to run Eight Magneto instances or better at one time in a complicated mix with no problem. After installing 1.3 I can\'t even run one. I remember that there was a post at the Cakewalk site stating that Sonar is being optimized for the Pentium 4. This mysterious post disappeared as quickly as it showed up and never returned again. Could it be possible that Cakewalk has optimized Sonar for the P4 at the expense of Athlon user? Hmmm.

Controller PC:
Tbird 1.33 Mhz
DFI AK76SN AMD 761 Chipset motherboard (optimized settings)
512 meg DDR Ram 2100 Micron
WD 10000 RPM U2W SCSI 9 Gig sytem drive
WD 10000 RPM U2W SCSI 18 Gig Audio drive
Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller
Delta 1010
Sonar XL
Sound Forge 5.0
Misc Plugins

Giga PC:
PIII 600E Coppermine
Asus CV4 Motherboard
768 Meg Sdram PC133 Micron
WD 7200 RPM 18 Gig (system drive)
Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 20 Gig 7200 (Giga)
Audiophile 24/96
Gigasampler 64 ver 1.62

Peace

[JWink]

After talking to a tech at Tascam, I did a few things that solved my problem. First, I ditched ME (I know I should have done that a long time ago, but switching OSs is always a pain) for 98SE, just to tide me over for a few weeks. When I reinstalled my programs, I put them all on the same partition (C:\\). I had them spread out before, to make defragmenting easier (I could do a little bit at a time). This seems to have done the trick. Thanks to all who chimed in.