Music Software troubles

[All Systems Go]

I recently installed some music software on my laptop. When I tried to record it worked fine. When I tried to record a second track to go with the first one I noticed on playbeack that it goes out of sync. I have tried to manually fix the problem but it coninues to lose time.

this is the first problem. If Anyone can solve this problem I would be greatful. Yet there is a second problem.

I installed it on my PC to see if it worked on there and I got an error message saying that there are no compatible midi devices. this in turn means I can neither record or play. I recorded some sounds in Sound Recoder and pasted it in but it wouldn't play. I can record using Sound Recorder and I can get my guitar to come through the PC speakers but the software doesn't seem to be able to do anything.

Any help of either of these problems would be appreciated.

Edit: It is Cakewalk SONAR 5 Producer Edition.

[mbushell]

If you're playing through whatever sound your laptop can produce you're getting latency problems with the software drivers. Sound cards for playback aren't designed for low latency and aren't any good for recording.

[All Systems Go]

So is there any way to get around the problem?

[mbushell]

Originally Posted by All Systems Go

So is there any way to get around the problem?

Buy an audio card made for recording, a decent cheap option for your pc is a pci card: M-AUDIO - Audiophile 2496. I route the stereo output ports back into my speakers aux-in; quality isn't great by doing so but neither is my playing (and I can leave my speakers connected to my sound card for playing backing tracks to solo over). For laptop you can get something similar which connects by USB.

edit: I'm not so hot on the techincals but I think I'm using ASIO drivers:

ASIO (Audio Stream Input Output) is a protocol for low-latency digital audio specified by Steinberg.

ASIO provides an interface between an application and the sound card. Whereas Microsoft's DirectSound is typically for stereo input and output for consumers, ASIO provides for the needs of musicians and sound engineers. ASIO offers a relatively simple way of accessing multiple audio inputs and outputs independently. It also provides for the synchronization of input with output in a way that is not possible with DirectSound, allowing recording studios to process their audio via software on the computer instead of using thousands of dollars worth of separate equipment. Its main strength relies in its method of bypassing the inherently high latency of Operating system audio mixing Kernels, allowing direct, high speed communication with audio hardware.

It works with Cubase, not tried with Cakewalk SONAR 5 Producer Edition.