Problems migrating project from Sonar 8.5 Producer

[sean72]

I recently moved my production to more powerful hardware (in theory at least) and am not getting the expected behavior, I'm not sure what the problem is.

I had created a project in Sonar 8.5 Producer 32 bit. I also used Bandlab Cakewalk x64 to record vocals on a laptop and imported the vocal tracks back into Sonar 8.5 for mixing.

In Sonar 8.5 all plugins used were 32 bit. I installed it years ago on an Intel i7 4790K in Windows 7. This is back when 64 bit plugins weren't as prevalent as they are today and I didn't want to mess with Bit Bridge. Anyway, I recently installed Cakewalk on a new desktop machine running Windows 10 x64 with an AMD 5950x, twice the RAM (64 GB and faster speed) of the old Intel machine, and with NVME PCIE x4 drives that run circles around the old Samsung SSD drives used on the old Intel machine.

My audio interface was also upgraded (again, in theory) from a Focusrite Firewire 400 model to a Presonus Quantum 2626 Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt is correctly implemented on the AMD system using Titan Ridge 2.0 with the header hooked up to motherboard (Aorus X570 Xtreme revision 1.1) with both power cables also plugged it, etc. Thunderbolt is working fine, I copied a 90GB sample library from the primary NVME internal drive to a Thunderbolt 3 NVME external in less than a minute, and those were thousands of small files which tend to make transfer speeds slower. I spent a few days dialing in the latency for the system, running Latency Mon to test and everything stayed well into the light green. At first everything seemed fine in Cakewalk, Superior Drummer 3 samples loaded in a fraction of the time as expected and I was getting low latency without any pops or delays. 

So back to the point of my question.. I imported my project from Sonar 8.5 into Cakewalk. It even loaded in the plugins correctly. I have upgraded to all 64 bit versions of the plug ins that were used in the original project on the Intel 32 bit system. The problem is when I go to play back the track there is a delay of about 1 - 2 seconds before the audio starts, and there is also some popping going on. I looked at the CPU monitor in Cakewalk, all 32 cores showing up and usage is pretty low overall, maybe around 30% (although I still don't know how to read those numbers for sure). So I went in and pushed the buffer size from 128 samples up to 512 samples. That eliminated the delayed start but did not eliminate the popping sound every time I hit play. CPU usage was even lower this time likely due to the larger buffer size.

Are there any known issues with importing old 32 bit projects with 32 bit plugins into newer 64bit versions? It just doesn't make sense to me, as by every measurable metric this new system is multiple times more powerful than the old one and is noticeably faster in every other way. I don't see why this project would cause a problem, unless the plugins were having trouble or unless the Cakewalk x64 itself just isn't as efficient as Sonar 8.5 32 bit ?

The project is of a large size, about 6GB in the audio folder and track count is over 200, but I had it up over 350 on the Intel machine when I was editing vocals down from multiple takes and it still ran fine. I don't know why I am getting worse performance on this project from the new machine?

If anyone can help I'd sure appreciate it, Thank You!

-Sean

Edited January 6, 2023 by sean72

[Lord Tim]

32 bit plugins can be fine but if there's going to be any point of instability, that's one of the first places to look. This doesn't sound like there's instability, though, just latency.

Latency wise, you generally don't get more from 32 bit plugins vs 64 bit, though.

What plugins are you using? Some require look-ahead buffers, like limiters or linear phase EQs, and some require sample buffers, like convolution reverbs. Both of those will definitely introduce latency into your projects. 

[sean72]

Lots of general effects, EQ mostly and several instances of compression, some pitch shifting, reverbs, plenty of them. The problem is I wasn't getting this kind of startup lag on my older machine with the much slower Firewire vs Thunderbolt 3. If I don't get latency issues on the old platform I shouldn't be getting them on the new one. I will try deleting all effects and mixing up from scratch to see if that helps. Other than that I don't know what else to try.

Not sure if you have any idea bout this next question but how is Cakewalk efficiency-wise compared to older versions of Sonar? The only other thing I can think of is a difference in the audio engine being the culprit... but it doesn't show that I'm even stressing the audio engine. Typically when I had dropouts on my older systems the audio engine would be stressed to the max, or the disk bandwidth would be saturated to the max but neither is the case here. I've never had problems like this in any older versions of Sonar. Before Sonar 8.5 I was using Sonar 5 on an old AMD dual opteron and that one never crashed or dropped out under heavy loads either. 

I hope I can get this sorted out, thanks very much for your suggestions.

[Byron Dickens]

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/windows-music-dev/unofficial-windows-10-audio-workstation-build-and-tweak-guide-part-1/

[msmcleod]

Take a look at some of the suggestions in this thread:
 

 

[sean72]

Thank you, I will read through the info provided.