The Wave Profiler

The Wave Profiler is a utility that analyzes the sound cards in your computer and determines the best DMA (Direct Memory Access) settings for communicating with Sonar. These DMA settings are displayed in samples, at the sample rates and bit depths your sound card supports. The Wave Profiler also sets a value in milliseconds for the Buffer Slider, which controls mixing latency. The Wave Profiler is unnecessary if you are using an ASIO driver.

The DMA settings are used to ensure that a project that contains both MIDI and digital audio plays back in tight synchronization. If Sonar is not configured properly with your audio device’s DMA settings, MIDI and digital audio material may not play back correctly.

Note to users of previous Cakewalk products: The DMA settings in versions of Cakewalk prior to Sonar 1.0 were displayed in bytes rather than samples. Using your previous DMA settings in Sonar will not work. Try the settings that wave profiler displays, and if you are not satisfied, only then attempt to optimize your settings.

The Wave Profiler utility runs automatically the first time you run Sonar. The wave profiler determines the best DMA settings for the supported bit depths and sample rates of your sound card.

Note: It is possible to load a 48 kHz project when you are using a sound card that does not support 48 kHz. Sonar does not warn you when you do this. Your project may crash, or it may appear to record audio when your project is not actually recording.

All of your audio settings are listed in the Preferences dialog box, which you open with the Edit > Preferences command. The following list summarizes all the settings that the Wave Profiler sets. You can override all of them except what audio drivers are listed in the Drivers tab:

Input and output drivers

DMA buffer sizes (in samples)

Mixing latency

If you experience MIDI and audio synchronization problems during playback, before contacting technical support, run the Wave Profiler and try the default settings.

To manually run the Wave Profiler

1.	Go to Edit > Preferences > Audio - Driver Settings.

2.	Click Wave Profiler.

The Wave Profiler examines each of your sound cards in turn, makes default settings in the Preferences dialog box, and displays the name of each sound card and the sample rates that each card supports.

Note: The Wave Profiler is not available when using ASIO drivers.