Had a chance to some additional exploration regarding this issue, and found it is a function of which "Audio Device" is selected. I'm using an M-Audio device I'm quite fond of, and will be moving up to their Delta 10 series soon. The problem is that the Sony software - Vegas, SF, and Acid - have issues with the M-Audio drivers. At some random point in time, the programs will lock up and not play the timeline. Hit start the program goes into start, but no sound comes out and the cursor does not advance along the timeline. I haven't been able to figure out what the problem is here, and it has been a problem as far back as Acid 5, SF6, and V7 for sure.

The difference though, is to release it and get it working all I had to do was switch to a different audio device, say Classic Windows Driver, and the freeze on playing the timeline would be go away. In V8 it causes a stutter (rather a nasty series of clicks) in the audio at startup. It requires at least .5 seconds of silence to get around this, which is quite annoying when creating CD's in Vegas as this happens in the rendering process in pre-burn or direct burn too. In earlier versions of Vegas I could switch to another audio device and their wouldn't be any issues processing the audio FX.

I think this is something Sony needs to fix. When I passed it along to them back when I was still running V7 or maybe V6 I no longer remember, they suggested I remove all Sony software from my system, formatting and reinstalling the OS first would be even better. Of course then I would lose all of my "saved" FX settings as those are stored in the registry and as far as I know there is no easy way to back them up for a new installation. As sophisticated as Vegas is, it should be able to handle the M-Audio card without these kinds of issues.

Jim

Another update, I was wrong changing the Audio Device M-Audio ASIO doesn't completely solve the problem. It does remove the stuttering and splattering when playing tracks back, but it doesn't completely correct the rendering issues. There are errors at the beginning of CD's, rendering before burning creates errors as well. Even a straight out render doesn't make a correct file. For example, the file I was working with put the initial downbeat in twice. Fortunately, I was able to edit out the extra one, and burn the CD from the file. Otherwise, I have to render with at least a half second of silence prior to the start of the audio to make it work right.

Guess it's an email to tech support to see if they have any ideas besides totally wiping my machine to make this work the way it is supposed to. If anyone else has had similar experiences let me know how you got around the problem.