AXE FX III taking control over Sonarworks

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David P

New Member
Hi guys. I would appreciate any advice on how to solve an issue I am having with Sonarworks Systemwide Room correction software and my Axe FX III.

My interface is an RME Fireface UCX. The ouput signal goes from outputs 1 & 2 to a nano patch monitor controller and then to my Mackie Studio monitors. I have my AXE FX plugged in to inputs 1 & 2.

I have Sonarworks Sound ID Reference set as the default "VIRTUAL" audio output device on my PC so everything I listen to whether it be my DAW or You Tube is subject to the Mackie correction profile for my room.

As soon as I connect the USB cable from my AXE FX to my computer however, the fractal driver seems to assume dominance. The Sonarworks disconnects, becomes unavailable and the audio output switches to "Speakers 2 RME Fireface UCX".

To work around this I am having to connect my AXE FX to a separate laptop when using AXE EDIT etc. but this is a pain and not possible if I am recording DI tracks / re-amping within my DAW.

Does anyone have an explanation and / or a solution?

Many thanks. David P
 
I've had all kinds of issues with the Sonarworks Sound ID Reference app / plugin crashing / glitching out for the last couple of years. It's insane how expensive software like this can go unfixed for so long.

I generally quit Sound ID Reference, until everything is switched on and setup ready to go, then turning it on works (90% of the time for me).
Are you using a Mac or Windows machine?

The main issue I have now is that it randomly crashes for no reason (once a day at least).
The glitching in the plugin was fixed once I stopped using Rosetta mode in Logic Pro.
 
I had so many issues with Sonarworks Reference ID that I actually requested a refund for it. They said they have at least new Mac drivers coming soon but that doesn't help me as I use Windows as well.

Sonarworks for me tended to crash or reset simply by doing nothing more than bringing another sound device online. It could be my Axe-Fx 3 or my Focusrite, Sonarworks would just stop working.

Unfortunately it's just shoddy software and the issue is not something Fractal can fix. Contact Sonarworks support.

I've moved to using Peace+EqualizerAPO on Windows for headphones correction using EQ curves. It's not quite as good but good enough. For MacOS I would recommend SoundSource.
 
I removed Sonarworks from my system as it seemed to play havoc with my audio devices - if I wan't headphone correction I use the Github repository now.
 
If you want speaker correction and want to use the GitHub repo for headphones....

Go download room eq wizard or REW. Use an Omni directional microphone that you can download a calibration file for from the internet. I use the Behringer one and I have a calibration file for it that I load into any software that takes room measurements.

https://www.roomeqwizard.com/

Measure your room with the software and have it spit out the eq curve for you. Now load up an eq on a listen bus or the master bus in your daw and take your favorite eq (I use fabfilter proQ3 for this) and create the curve that REQ measured your speakers, to the exact detail. When you have the same curve, highlight all the points in the eq and right-click and have it invert the eq points. Now save that as a preset in your eq. So do this for each speaker set you have. Now, this won't fix timing from bad speaker placement or listening position, or phase issues. It will correct the eq for your room and take that out of the equation.
 
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Also if you are using your Axe-Fx 3 as an audio device, you can take the corrections from Sonarworks and make IRs out of them.
  1. Generate a sweep. My understanding is Logic can do this on its own, otherwise you can use Voxengo deconvolver.
  2. Add the sweep to a track.
  3. Run that through the Sonarworks plugin with corrections enabled and then the saved track into e.g Voxengo deconvolver or Logic's own tools.
  4. Do this separately for left and right channel.
  5. Export IRs and import them into Axe-Fx 3.
  6. Load IRs in the IR Player block, pan them L/R and adjust output volume if needed.
  7. Route your USB audio into the grid, through the IR player block into your preferred outputs.
Now you have Axe-Fx as room or headphones correction. You might want to save this setup to the library for the IR Player block and save a preset just for music listening.

It's a shame that IR Player does not support global blocks as it would be perfect for this use.
 
Same problem here. my fix was to open every audio device one at a time and go into sonarworks to setup as a new device with, name the device and chose a default eq setting. once you setup every device it should automatically switch presets when you open the new device. reference 4 did this perfectly. ID reference has issues when switching between Reaper DAW and google chrome, must relaunch ID.
 
Welcome to the forum @David P !

@jamesmarshall nailed it. There's another thread here if you search for "AutoEQ" that should have what you're looking for.

As for getting SoundWorks to correct the audio from your Axe-Fx, I've chased that trick for a while and haven't been able to pull it off. The best I could manage was to put a GEQ block at the end of my presets with a channel dedicated to each listening system I want corrected(A: Sony 7506's, B: Sennheiser HD650's, C: Nearfield monitors in the room, etc). Hope this helps and good luck!
 
laxu said:
Also if you are using your Axe-Fx 3 as an audio device, you can take the corrections from Sonarworks and make IRs out of them.
  1. Generate a sweep. My understanding is Logic can do this on its own, otherwise you can use Voxengo deconvolver.
  2. Add the sweep to a track.
  3. Run that through the Sonarworks plugin with corrections enabled and then the saved track into e.g Voxengo deconvolver or Logic's own tools.
  4. Do this separately for left and right channel.
  5. Export IRs and import them into Axe-Fx 3.
  6. Load IRs in the IR Player block, pan them L/R and adjust output volume if needed.
  7. Route your USB audio into the grid, through the IR player block into your preferred outputs.
Now you have Axe-Fx as room or headphones correction. You might want to save this setup to the library for the IR Player block and save a preset just for music listening.

It's a shame that IR Player does not support global blocks as it would be perfect for this use.
Click to expand...

As I'm sure you've learned, it's a pain to have to customize every preset you might ever use so grid and playback audio is corrected for your room. On Windows it's pain just trying to get that audio into the grid, let alone corrected in a convenient manner. Switching to listening on headphones is another awkward complication.

It would be nice if there was a global FIR that worked on both grid output and playback output and had selectable presets for different listening conditions, but good luck with that wish. An alternative worth considering would be to use monitors with room correction built in, like the IK MTM. Genelec makes something too.

For anyone looking for room correction of system audio on the Mac, one alternative to Sonarworks is: get a corrective IR for your room using REW, then use Soundsource to apply that IR to system audio using any IR plugin.
 
GlennO said:
As I'm sure you've learned, it's a pain to have to customize every preset you might ever use so grid and playback audio is corrected for your room. On Windows it's pain just trying to get that audio into the grid, let alone corrected in a convenient manner. Switching to listening on headphones is another awkward complication.

It would be nice if there was a global FIR that worked on both grid output and playback output and had selectable presets for different listening conditions, but good luck with that wish. An alternative worth considering would be to use monitors with room correction built in, like the IK MTM. Genelec makes something too.
Click to expand...
I simply made a preset where I can use scenes to change which output device is used, all it does is changes output routing (e.g Out1 for headphones, Out2 for studio monitors) and then in the IR Player block I use channels to load different corrective IRs, e.g channel A is IRs for my Sennheiser HD6XX headphones, channel B is room correction for my Genelecs.

Yes I agree it would be much nicer if you could use IRs for output correction or global IR Player blocks at least so you'd just use that block in every preset and if you change it in one it's changed in every one of them.

I looked into the Genelecs with room correction but decided against them because they have a latency of about 4ms which is a lot for just room correction. Not an issue for playback, but a bad solution if you want to play guitar through them.
 
Sure, the best solution would be to put the room correction in the digital domain before the signal is ever converted to analog. The problem could be solved if these monitors that have room correction DSP, like the new Adams, had digital input. Somebody should make an audio interface that has one simple DSP function: apply room correction immediately before the D/A. It sure would be nice if FAS saw the potential of this feature.
 
discondition said:
I've had all kinds of issues with the Sonarworks Sound ID Reference app / plugin crashing / glitching out for the last couple of years. It's insane how expensive software like this can go unfixed for so long.

I generally quit Sound ID Reference, until everything is switched on and setup ready to go, then turning it on works (90% of the time for me).
Are you using a Mac or Windows machine?

The main issue I have now is that it randomly crashes for no reason (once a day at least).
The glitching in the plugin was fixed once I stopped using Rosetta mode in Logic Pro.
Click to expand...
Yes it is expensive but I have gotten so used to the "corrected sound" that I now rely on it. I am using Windows 10.
 
Hi everyone,

Marco here from Sonarworks support team!

There seem to be a variety of issues in multiple comments and it won’t be possible to get into all of them in detail here. That being said, I can indeed confirm that for macOS we are working on a complete driver rebuild to improve the overall stability. This should eliminate, for example, an issue where the driver loses connection after computer sleep/idle-time. It should also overcome some permission conflicts, along with process priority and other improvements. We have been working on this for over a year now, and the latest builds are performing well in-house. It should be available for a public Beta in the near future.

One comment was related to CPU and audio issues within DAW and indeed, as the plugin is fully Native, we recommend running DAW Natively to overcome this issue with Rosetta. For any other CPU issues, please reach out to our support directly for a closer look.

Regarding the initial question by David; it would be best to troubleshoot this issue directly with us too. Reach out to us by submitting a support request here. For any other assistance needed, please don't hesitate to get in touch!
 
Yeah, I used to use this, but things got royally messed up when I got my M1 Mac Mini. Away it went. I'm not mixing anymore, so it's really not that great of a loss for me these days. Hope that you can get it sorted out.
 
On Windows 11 you can go into your "sound" settings and pick the default option to turn the AxeIII driver as "always off".
 
Marco from Sonarworks said:
Hi everyone,

Marco here from Sonarworks support team!

There seem to be a variety of issues in multiple comments and it won’t be possible to get into all of them in detail here. That being said, I can indeed confirm that for macOS we are working on a complete driver rebuild to improve the overall stability. This should eliminate, for example, an issue where the driver loses connection after computer sleep/idle-time. It should also overcome some permission conflicts, along with process priority and other improvements. We have been working on this for over a year now, and the latest builds are performing well in-house. It should be available for a public Beta in the near future.

One comment was related to CPU and audio issues within DAW and indeed, as the plugin is fully Native, we recommend running DAW Natively to overcome this issue with Rosetta. For any other CPU issues, please reach out to our support directly for a closer look.

Regarding the initial question by David; it would be best to troubleshoot this issue directly with us too. Reach out to us by submitting a support request here. For any other assistance needed, please don't hesitate to get in touch!
Click to expand...
Hi there Marco,

Thank you for responding to this thread / my query. I have already been in touch with your support team regarding this issue. Ivars has made some suggestions which haven't worked. I will follow up again with him.

Much appreciated
David
 
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