Optimizing Your DAW

From Sonar

Revision as of 07:52, 14 September 2006

Information about optimizing Sonar, your OS and your computer.

You can't expect optimal performance from Sonar (or any other DAW software) with your computer and OS configured as they were right out of the box. Digital audio has its own special needs. Here are a series of things you can do to optimize

Optimizing Sonar

Freeze or Archive Tracks

To increase the resources available to Sonar, use its Freeze option on tracks you're not currently working on, especially those with effects on them. This can take a huge load off your CPU, allowing you to do more with your current system and song, while letting you hear the frozen audio.

If you have spare takes, stuff you can do without for the moment, or other things you don't need to hear for your current purposes, use Sonar's Archive function. This will mute the audio in question, and will keep it from being loaded into memory.

Note that Sonar does load muted tracks to memory, so muting will give you no performance gain.

Optimizing Windows

Make a separate user account for audio recording

A separate user account lets you eliminate all the autostart programs and processes that you don't need while doing audio, but do need when doing unimporant things like e-mail, web browsing, work, etc. This also lets you get rid of eyecandy, system sounds, and so on that you may want when you're not using Sonar.

Under Windows XP, go to Settings, then Control Panel and then User Accounts. From there create a new account. Giving the account administrator privileges will almost certainly save you from future headaches when installing or using software.

Then reboot your computer and log into this special DAW account when you use Sonar.

Once there, you can choose to eliminate sounds, anti-aliasing, menu shadows, menu animation, cursor shadows and other resource-wasting effects.

You can also prevent many or most programs that run automatically at Windows startup from doing so. You can do this with any number of programs, including the freeware Autoruns and Quick Startup. As always, the trick is to eliminate everything possible, without eliminating anything vital.

Optimizing Your Computer

Fix your PCI latencies

Your PCI latencies are almost guaranteed to be configured in the worst possible way out of the box. Typically, video card makers assign the maximum value (meaning the most access) to their devices, leaving other equipment --like your sound card-- precious little PCI bandwidth to use.

A good freeware tool for this purpose is PCI Latency Tool. You can also use Entech's Power Strip, which is a US$29.95 shareware app that only incidentally allows you to adjust PCI latencies -- its main uses are video-card related.

There are no ideal PCI latency values for each device in your system -- this is something you will have to experiment with.

Put your audio on a non-SATA drive

Many people have had serious problems when they have Sonar's audio data stored on a SATA drive. Use IDE or external drives for this purpose. Note that having Windows or Sonar itself on a SATA drive does not seem to affect performance.

Set up a recording-only hardware profile

Set up a recording-only hardware profile and disable absolutely every device and service you can. And I mean everything -- network interfaces, modems, Firewire ports, DVD drives, USB ports, parallel and serial ports, floppy drives, game ports, PS/2 ports, and various virtual devices added by programs for DVD burning, drive emulation, etc. In short, disable everything you can without disabling your system or Sonar's functioning.

To do this in Windows XP hit WIN+PAUSE to bring up the System Properties control panel, select the Hardware tab, and click on the Hardware Profiles button at the bottom. Then select your current hardware profile, hit Copy, and rename the copy to something like "Sonar" or "DAW".

Then reboot, select this profile at boot time when given the choice, go into Device Manager and start eliminating devices one by one from your new hardware profile. Do this by right clicking on the device, choosing Properties, and selecting "Do not use this device in the current hardware profile (disable)" under Device Usage at the bottom of the General tab.