Optimizing Your DAW

From Sonar

Revision as of 08:30, 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.

Autoruns is an extremely powerful program -- so powerful that it can hose your system with one click if you don't know what you're doing. So be very careful, and read through its forum first!

Use your hardware profile to disable services

Use the DAW-only hardware profile you will make in the Optimizing Your Computer section to disable unnecessary services. Most Windows services are not necessary for Sonar's purposes, and they take up RAM and CPU cycles, and can also do the most annoying things at times, some of which will disrupt or corrupt up your recording.

Copy your current DAW-only hardware profile and give it a new name (e.g. "DAW01", "DAW02", etc.). Then go into Administrative Tools and then Services and disable exactly one service under that particular profile. Then reboot into your new hardware profile and make sure everything is okay. Then rinse, lather and repeat, using a new hardware profile each time (that's the reason for the sequential numbering in the profile name examples).

This level of caution is necessary because you can literally lock yourself out of your current install of Windows if you disable the wrong service. So be very careful! If you do get into such a situation, just reboot and choose the previous hardware profile.

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.

Miscellaneous

Killing pesky services and apps that refuse to die

For whatever reason, XP doesn't always respect the configuration changes you make to stop services, and will start some of them regardless of your choice to disable them (some apps launch services). Also, your attempts to keep programs from running automatically on Windows' start up may also fail (some services launch processes).

To take care of this, use SysInternals' free PsTools Application Suite in conjunction with a batch file. Note that your antivirus or antispyware apps may tell you that one of the apps (PsKill) is a rootkit and needs to be eliminated. Well, it is a rootkit in large part, but don't eliminate it -- it's a benevolent one that couldn't do what it does without being one.

Unzip and drop the PsTools executables somewhere in your path (C:\\Windows\\System32\\ will do nicely). Create a text file on your desktop (or elsewhere if you prefer) and put something like the following in the text file:

psservice stop SERVICENAME1

psservice stop SERVICENAME2

psservice stop SERVICENAME2

pskill -t PROCESSNAME01

pskill -t PROCESSNAME02

pskill -t PROCESSNAME03

Then save it, change the extention of the file from .txt to .bat, and double click on it to execute it. Or put it in your Programs | Startup folder. This will exterminate just about any service or program you want, including ones that will cause an immediate blue screen if stopped.

You can find process (application) names in Task Manager. But when it comes to services' names, you need the real (non-friendly) ones and not the friendly ones Windows shows you. To find processes' real names, open a command line (hit WIN+R and then type cmd and ENTER), type psservice, and hit enter.

This will produce the single largest spewing forth of information you've probably ever seen in a CLI. And you'll lose 90% of it because it will have gone in and out of the buffer. So before you do this, hit the icon on the top left of the "DOS" box, select "Defaults", go to the Layout tab, and put something on the order of 3000 in the Screen Buffer height box. Then type psservice, and --if you're not a masochist, at least-- copy it all, paste it in your favorite text editor, and search for "RUNNING". A couple lines above each instance of that you'll find the internal name for each service.