Syncronizing audio - MPC as master

What's your setup for laying down audio tracks from the MPC to your recording software?

Anyone else out there in MPC land using Cakewalk Sonar? I'm also using an Echo Audio Layla 20-bit 8 i/o sound card. I've been using midi to sync the two up and it's been okay, but not mind blowing

Most of the time when I hit 'record' in Sonar it starts the mpc, and I can lay down a track. But about 1/3rd of the time it all just stops after a second and I have to hit 'record' again. Kind of a pain.

How tight of syncing are you getting? I find that several tracks will be perfectly lined up, then one will be off. It's not real bad, but still I'd like it to be consistent. Starting mid-song I get even worse results.

Just curious what kind of experience you're all getting.

you should try using midi timecode if you want to start mid song.

i tried syncing to sonar for a long time. I never got it to work perfect. I even had a friend over who's an expert on Sonar, but he didn't manage to fix my problems either.
Your soundcard supports asio drivers, so it might be worthwile to update your software to the latest version to take advantage of asio support.

I ended up dropping sonar altogether, and i recently switched to Cubase sx. It's a bit easier to work with timecode in cubase, because you can actually see if timecode is being recieved on the main transport bar.

Cool. Thanks.

This weeked I switched to making Sonar the master and things got a lot better. I'm not sure if it's the mpc, or Sonar (probably NOT the mpc), but Sonar really doesn't behave well to being the timing slave. It's more convenient to have sonar as the slave, because it's quicker to switch it back and forth from slave to internal clock, but I was getting a lot of glitches. With the mpc you have to sometimes do a little more button pushing to switch it in and out of sync mode though.

I'm still fairly new to the mpc4000. There's not a way to program a button to always do the same thing regarless of what screen you're at, is there?

I don't know sonar at all, but in cubase you've got an helpfuff tool, the vst performance. it's an indicator which tell you when recording or reading how much the cpu and the disk are used by the software. When i record a track, i always check this, cause if the cpu goes too much in the red, the sync may be broken, and if it's the hard drive, it'll stop recording (you can actually hear it stop working). If this happen, check the buffer size and memory per track (if you can do it in sonar, i don't know).
hope it helps