NOTION Music Forum

I am having very poor results with rewire 64 bit and Notion with Sonar X2. Suddely I have crackling audio all over the place. I have a i7 processor with 16GB memory, and a Presonus FP10 firewire, so machine performance it is not. It worked fine in 32 bit. My only assumption is that the rewire drivers just does not work as advertised. I have no other 64 bit rewire programs, so it is not possible to narrow it down further. I tried playing with latency, but no improvement.

sepheritoh wrote:I am having very poor results with rewire 64 bit and Notion with Sonar X2. Suddely I have crackling audio all over the place. I have a i7 processor with 16GB memory, and a Presonus FP10 firewire, so machine performance it is not. It worked fine in 32 bit. My only assumption is that the rewire drivers just does not work as advertised. I have no other 64 bit rewire programs, so it is not possible to narrow it down further. I tried playing with latency, but no improvement.

Try adjusting the buffer sizes, which for NOTION 4 will be on the "Audio" tab of "Preferences", where the default is "256 Samples", and for your external digital audio interface will be somewhere, probably in a hardware configuration dialog, but there should be a way in Sonar X2 to configure the external digital audio interface hardware . . .

And of course, as you know, you need to set the resolution for Sonar X2 to 44.1-kHz at 16-bits, which as best as I can determine at present is the resolution that NOTION 4 uses, since it is the resolution that NOTION 3 uses and I have not found anything to the contrary . . .

[NOTE: On the Mac when everything was 32-bits, the NOTION 3 default buffer size worked best here in the sound isolation studio, but with NOTION 4 everything is faster, so slightly smaller buffer sizes work, and this might be the case for Windows machines . . . ]

Lots of FUN!

P. S. The ReWire 2 infrastructure comes from Propellerhead Software, but the application specific part of is done using components provided by Propellerhead Software but implemented by the third-party software engineers, which in the scenario you described will be Cakewalk and Notion Music, and if ReWIre 2 works with any host controller and slave in Windows, then it is not a problem with the Propellerhead Software infrastructure and components, where this also is the case on the Mac . . .

My focus is on the Mac, but pcartwright can provide more information on what to do in Windows, since he reported that NOTION 4 is doing ReWire 2 "beautifully" with Reaper in Windows, which works for me with respect the "if it works in any scenario" aspect, where in this context "any" maps to "one", which is fabulous . . .

[NOTE: This is the Notion Music FORUM topic where pcartwright reports his stellar success, and it is particularly relevant to your problem, because pcartwright provides a key clue to the solution for configuring the Presonus FP10 . . . ]

Rewire (Notion Music FORUM)

Fabulous!

Surfwhammy wrote:
Try adjusting the buffer sizes, which for NOTION 4 will be on the "Audio" tab of "Preferences", where the default is "256 Samples", and for your external digital audio interface will be somewhere, probably in a hardware configuration dialog, but there should be a way in Sonar X2 to configure the external digital audio interface hardware . . .

I'm using ASIO. buffers are set on the hardware drivers as you suggest. As I mentioned, that was my first place to look at. Latency of even 60 ms did not solve the problem. The crackles went away, but there are constant drop outs and glitches. With Sonar X2 I run on 2ms. At worse, 6ms should do the trick. With rewire sadly not.

Surfwhammy wrote:
And of course, as you know, you need to set the resolution for Sonar X2 to 44.1-kHz at 16-bits, which as best as I can determine at present is the resolution that NOTION 4 uses, since it is the resolution that NOTION 3 uses and I have not found anything to the contrary . . .

The Notion documentation confirm that, and yes, I made sure that was in sync.

I tried to run on MME drivers on the onboard soundcard and the problem was less, but still there.

Surfwhammy wrote:
Lots of FUN!

I/m having lots, but also lots of stops. I already reported 3 bugs to Notion friendly department. 1) Wav file playback 2) Non working backspace shortcut and offcourse rewire.

Other than that Notion is working GREAT. No show stoppers here yet.

Surfwhammy wrote:
P. S. The ReWire 2 infrastructure comes from Propellerhead Software, but the application specific part of is done using components provided by Propellerhead Software but implemented by the third-party software engineers, which in the scenario you described will be Cakewalk and Notion Music, and if ReWIre 2 works with any host controller and slave in Windows, then it is not a problem with the Propellerhead Software infrastructure and components, where this also is the case on the Mac . . .

I suspect driver issues. Presonus is know for the worst driver updates in the industry - no I am lying - Terratec was even worse.

sepheritoh wrote:

Surfwhammy wrote:
P. S. The ReWire 2 infrastructure comes from Propellerhead Software, but the application specific part of is done using components provided by Propellerhead Software but implemented by the third-party software engineers, which in the scenario you described will be Cakewalk and Notion Music, and if ReWIre 2 works with any host controller and slave in Windows, then it is not a problem with the Propellerhead Software infrastructure and components, where this also is the case on the Mac . . .

I suspect driver issues. Presonus is know for the worst driver updates in the industry - no I am lying - Terratec was even worse.

This is a possibility, and another possibility is that Sonar X2 (Cakewalk) does not implement ReWire 2 correctly . . .

[NOTE: I am not suggesting that Sonar X2 does not implement ReWire 2 correctly, but it is a possibility. And my experience with ReWire on the Mac suggests that everything needs to be configured correctly, because ReWire is very sensitive to everything that affects timing . . . ]

ReWire is a multidimensional technology, and while it is defined and created by Propellerhead Software, some of the work is done by the specific applications, where Propellerhead Software provides the operating system specific infrastructure and the various application specific components, but it is the responsibility of each application to implement its part of the ReWire functionality correctly . . .

[NOTE: I am not suggesting that Sonar X2 does not implement ReWire 2 correctly, but it is a possibility. And my experience with ReWire on the Mac suggests that everything needs to be configured correctly, because ReWire is very sensitive to everything that affects timing . . . ]

My advice is to see if you can get some specific help from pcartwright on the various Windows based aspects, which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous!

P. S. Doing more experiments might be productive, and if you can download Reason 6.5 (Propellerhead Software), it is an excellent test application for the playback part of ReWire 2, but it is a rather large download (approximately 3.3GB) . . .

Reason 6.5 DEMO Info and Download Webpage (Propellerhead Software)