intermorphic.com Blog

I was having problems recording the output of my sequencer to a file. I could hear it fine through the headphones, but could just not get Sonar to record it. It was likely another one of those problems related to using the Sigmatel sound chip in the laptop. Paul Weir of Earcom came to rescue and suggested a neat little VST “Recorder” plugin from Voxengo. It is free, and it works a treat – thanks Paul!

Last week I came across an excellent piece of software – Asio4All. I was beginning to completely despair of ever finding anything that would give me low latency operation on my laptops, without having to resort to an external input box (MIDI or audio).

Then, in a last ditch websearch I somehow stumbled across asio4all. It seemed to good to be true, an asio driver that would work with my sigmatel chip, when sigmatel itself had not deigned to provide one (goodness knows why), nor did there appear to be one in site.

Well, it is a biggup for the developer behind asio4all (Michael Tippach) – qudos and respect! It works great…

I had a bit of a struggle getting it going with Sonar, but I got it working in the end – and I still don’t know what got it going in the end (but i think it was something to do with disabling the Windows Wavetable Synth – which is detailed in the FAQ notes somewhere). It works fine on both my Dell/WinXP and Macbook running bootcamp/XP.

Sonar is a bit quirky when it comes to WDM or MME or ASIO driver changes. Certainly, when I was using the MME drivers (the only other ones that would work on the Sigmatel before asio4all came to the rescue), getting MIDI into Sonar (played on an external keyboard) was so sluggish as to be completely unusable. Now, with asio4all it works like a dream and latency is fab. I have found, though, that when it comes to exporting audio from Sonar, I seem to need to revert back to the old MME drivers, but at least I have (thankfully) found a low latency solution now.

My next problem is finding a way to record the output of Sonar to an audio file – and I can hear it on headphones, but just not record it. This is not a normal problem, it is something to do with driving virtual instruments without triggering them with a MIDI track (noatikl generates MIDI on the fly). When I find a solution I will follow up this note with that.