Giga and Sonar....

[drg]

I have been using Gigastudio and Sonar together but have been getting very poor midi response(midi dropouts- no audio). I have all audio on 1 harddrive, and a comp w/ a pent4 1.8ghz processor and 512MB of RAM. Its true that I have alot of material but not so much as to cause polyphony problems w/ giga- giga polyphony should maxout before sonar stops or has choppy playback right? The dropouts are directly related to the amount of notes I have or how many fast/ sustained notes. I have called tech support 5/6 times and they dont know the first thing about how to is this. I have changed every audio setting in Sonar they asked me to and tryed some others too, have dedicated soundcard channels for both giga and sonar (no conflicts), Have checked the irq to make sure that my video card is on a seperate channel, done all standard comp. audio optimizations. One time recently (although not the last time) someone at Sonar said that GIGA\'s drivers had poor midi response w/ Sonar and they were seeing this alot. They told me to download midi yoke drivers and use them instead. I did but it only made things worse if there was any change at all. Does anyone have any ideas? Is it possible I was using the drivers incorrectly (seems straight forward as can be, and worked-but was no better)? Does anyone have a sucessful setup where they can stream whatever midi they want off of Sonar assuming GIGA\'s polyphony is ok? Thanks in advance, sorry for the long-winded post,
drg images/icons/confused.gif

[Munsie]

Based on past threads like this, I think it\'s fair to assume you have 2 paths to take to try to resolve this \"problem\".

a) You spend ALOT of time, picking at your machine, disabling things, upgrading the hard drive, drivers, tweaking Gigastudio, Sonar, etc, etc, etc, etc. until finally you have it working, good, most of the time, but not perfect all of the time.

b) You spend another $1000.00 (or less!) on another machine and dedicate GigaStudio to that computer and treat it like an external sound module. Problem solved instantly! Plus now you can add DXi instruments to Sonar now that you\'ve freed up a bunch of cpu time. images/icons/smile.gif

I chose \"b\"....

[drg]

Ahh, I see. So its not my fault. Most people run Giga and sequencer on seperate computers.... Considering the specs I gave earlier, does anyone see this setup as feasible on a single computer? (not that I dont believe you munsie, just want a second opinion in case someone has it working and knows something i don\'t....)

[sri_bubba]

I thought it was just me, and that my new 2Ghz XP machine with dedicated audio drive & 768 MB RAM needed optimizing. But even after donwloading v6.03 drivers for my echo Layla 24 card (I thought, \"maybe it\'s the beta MIDI drivers...)the problem remains--single-note melodies are low-latency but chords are ragged. Chord voicing is (very) perceptibly \"clumpy\".

And it\'s channel-specific. 18 channels playing polyphonic stuff is fine. Chordal SEQUENCING is fine. However!

Latency for \"live\" chordal stuff is almost unplayable and affects how I lay in new tracks.

Sequencer playback \"dropouts\" were solved by slightly increasing the latency setting at Options|Audio|Mixing Latency. I also followed TASCAM\'s guidelines for PC optimization (\"Optimizing Windows 2000 and Windows XP for Audio\", available at the Nemesys website), and still,...

ARGHHH! I don\'t want to have to quantize EVERYTHING to make up for this!!!


Originally posted by drg:
I have been using Gigastudio and Sonar together but have been getting very poor midi response(midi dropouts- no audio). I have all audio on 1 harddrive, and a comp w/ a pent4 1.8ghz processor and 512MB of RAM. Its true that I have alot of material but not so much as to cause polyphony problems w/ giga- giga polyphony should maxout before sonar stops or has choppy playback right? The dropouts are directly related to the amount of notes I have or how many fast/ sustained notes. I have called tech support 5/6 times and they dont know the first thing about how to is this. I have changed every audio setting in Sonar they asked me to and tryed some others too, have dedicated soundcard channels for both giga and sonar (no conflicts), Have checked the irq to make sure that my video card is on a seperate channel, done all standard comp. audio optimizations. One time recently (although not the last time) someone at Sonar said that GIGA\'s drivers had poor midi response w/ Sonar and they were seeing this alot. They told me to download midi yoke drivers and use them instead. I did but it only made things worse if there was any change at all. Does anyone have any ideas? Is it possible I was using the drivers incorrectly (seems straight forward as can be, and worked-but was no better)? Does anyone have a sucessful setup where they can stream whatever midi they want off of Sonar assuming GIGA\'s polyphony is ok? Thanks in advance, sorry for the long-winded post,
drg images/icons/confused.gif <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">

[Cody]

Same problem here. I have found out that I don\'t have the problem with dropouts if I use the .66 drivers for my echo card. But if I turn up the latency on the 6.03 driver the dropouts stop too. images/icons/rolleyes.gif

[Haydn]

What OS are you using? I\'m running Giga and Sonar on the same machine - P3 733 with 512 MB without any latency. I have 2 audio drives which may help. I\'m using Win XP Pro with the .66 Echo drivers for my Darla 24. It is possible to run both on one machine. BTW, I don\'t pops or clicks and get full polyphony.

[drg]

I am using win 2000 and have a mia sound card. I have just downloaded the .66 drivers.... Mabye
this will fix it. Thanks,
drg

[drg]

I think the .66 drivers really helped. thanks to everyone that posted,

drg

[DTrevino70]

DRG, I dont know how to solve your problem but i know is possible. I had a PII 450 Mhz, with only one HD (5200 rpm, 6.4G), and i was able to run Cakewalk PA 9 and GS 160 at the same time, i use a MONA card and didnt have any problems.
As someone mentioned before i had to go to the TASCAM site to optimize the OS. Now I have a new system and still runs perfect. So I cant tell you exactly how to do it, but it really is possible. (Unless the problem is SONAR)

Daniel

[dwdonehoo]

I use an internal GS with Sonar on a 1.5 ghz system (running at 1.33 ghz presently), and I have and external dedicated GS system. All my music has been made on this setup. I use the internal GS long before I ever turn on the external system, and I have no latency problems at all: actually no major problems at all. I did not use tricks or optimizations or anything, just a basic install. I am using an Echo Mia. I think the difference here is, and thanks for giving me yet another reason not to upgrade, is XP or 2000. I will not give up WinSE unless I absolutly have to. The installed systems will keep WinSE forever.

[MikeGraybill]

I tried and tried, and when I couldn\'t think of anything else to do, I went back and repeated everything 3 or 4 more times, to get Giga and ANY sequencer to work on one computer with acceptable stability/usability. I had latency problems, skipping, etc. As well as the blue screens, freezes, etc.

I could not bring myself to believe that there was just no way to get it to work on one system. After a good 6 months of trying, I decided to add another comp and \"just see.\"

Immediatly EVERY technical problem I\'d had simply disappeared. Fortunatley, you don\'t need a super fast machine to use as a sequencer, so its not really very expensive. My only requirement was that the sequencing machine be just fast enough to play rough quality digital video back to score to. (This is more the video card than anything else, and also not expensive.)

Right now, I\'m just using a PII450 for sequencing, a newer P4 1.5 acts as the sampler during the compositional process. When I\'m ready to do final mixing, I render dry tracks via Giga, and have a copy of my sequencer/mixing software (in this case Cubase) on the faster machine as well, so I can do all the cpu/ram heavy work on it.

Its not perfect, but it is a reletivley inexpensive way to achieve stability, and speed up your sampler\'s power by giving it nothing to do other than giga until the final mixing process. After going through it myself, my recomendation is not to suffer the downtime, not to stress about it and research cryptic details of driver options and soundcard resources that are getting eatin up... Save yourself the energy and just build a cheap, weak system to handle nothing but midi. I know others say to \"only use giga\" on its own machine, but I haven\'t had any probs at all running other software on it, just not concurrently.

Okay, sorry for the lengthy post, but I can sleep better now knowing that I\'ve at least done what I could to spare someone else even a part of that one-system nightmare. images/icons/tongue.gif Whatever you do, good luck!

[mschiff]

While I agree with those that suggest a separate machine for Giga, I do run Sonar 2.0 and Giga together on a single machine with no problem at all. My machine is an Athlon 950 with 768 megs ram, a Delta 1010 sound card, and 3 - 30 gig hard drives. One for programs, one for Giga samples, and the third for audio recording. I am able to use Sonar to play sequences of complex piano parts and play them without any problems on the Bardstown Bosendorfer piano. One of the keys is to have separate drives for samples and recording audio.

-- Martin