Sound card tips for sonar
First, when you enter sonar for the first time, it will unchangingly work the wave profiler. This aid analyzes the sound cards in your pc and determines DMA (Direct Memory Access) settings for communicating with Sonar. All the same it does not know what the best settings are for you and your pc! What it defaults to 99.9% of the time isn’t going to be the best settings for you. Note, you should be using the latest drivers for your sound card. You check by going to your sound card’s web site.
Having the real sound card settings and having the latest drivers installed in your pc is very important! These settings determine how Sonar performs and communicates with your sound card. So having the optimal settings is one of the most important things. There is no one setting fits all sides. You need to see what works best for you, your project and your sound card drivers. This is what we will be going over right now.
The Playback Timing and Recording Timing Master – These determine what sound cards control the timing for the song. I by all means theorize, you use one sound card and one sound card only when using Sonar because every sound cards clock is slightly different and will cause synchronizing problems.
The settings for the Playback Timing Master should be set to your sound cards main outs 1-2 or its first output.
The setting for the Recording Timing Master should be set to your soundcard’s First input. Like analog 1-2.
Audio Driver Bit Depth (playback) – This setting set your playback bit depth in Sonar. I soundly encourage using 24bit over 16bit. For one, you don’t need to record as hot and therefore your more unlikely to need and use a hardware compressor/limiter in your recording signal group.
You set the Recording bit Depth in Options / Global / Audio Data. There’s an arrow down box that you can select and change bit depths. You set the playback bit depth in Options / Audio / General.
64 bit Double Precision Engine – Checking this box enables the 64bit double precision engine in the entire signal chain in sonar when mixing. Leave this box checked. If for some reason your pc doesn’t behave good with this optionality enabled. Uncheck it and when you export or bounce to tracks, just check the box for the 64bit double precision engine and you’ll get all the benefits you would if you had it enabled all the time.
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