Silent Way in Sonar 8.5.2

[auricle]

Anybody using Silent Way successfully in Sonar?

There are a couple of issues I'm having:

1) If I tweak the settings enough in Silent Way (with eye candy turned off), it crashes Sonar. Os confirmed my graphics card is okay.

2) I can't get the LFO and Step LFO to sync to host tempo. If I switch these plugins to Tempo mode, it doesn't work at all - it is static. The only mode that works is the Free mode.

Anybody else having these issues?

[os]

So I installed the Sonar demo.

There is definitely something very odd with how Sonar implements its plug-in UIs. On my machine at least it's forcing Expert Sleepers plug-ins to behave as if eye candy was turned off all the time - i.e. you can't turn it on in Sonar, which is normally determined only by the graphics hardware.

Is this the same on your PC? Try a different host (e.g. the Ableton Live demo) to confirm how the UIs *should* look.

Haven't made it crash yet though. Is there anything more specific than 'tweak the settings enough' that will encourage it to crash sooner on your machine?

[os]

Looked at the host tempo issue. Simple answer - Sonar is not returning the tempo information to the plug-in when it's requested.

Seems like a major omission in Sonar, but that's the problem.

[whyterabbyt]

Looked at the host tempo issue. Simple answer - Sonar is not returning the tempo information to the plug-in when it's requested.

Seems like a major omission in Sonar, but that's the problem.

Sounds like you havent set up the plugin properly. Check the plugin manager; tempo-handling is enabled on a plugin-by-plugin basis from there.

[os]

Sounds like you havent set up the plugin properly. Check the plugin manager; tempo-handling is enabled on a plugin-by-plugin basis from there.

Do you mean the little 'VST' drop-down menu at the top of the plug-in window? If I access the Plug-in Properties dialog from there and tick "Configure as tempo based effect" that doesn't help at all.

[whyterabbyt]

Sounds like you havent set up the plugin properly. Check the plugin manager; tempo-handling is enabled on a plugin-by-plugin basis from there.

Do you mean the little 'VST' drop-down menu at the top of the plug-in window? If I access the Plug-in Properties dialog from there and tick "Configure as tempo based effect" that doesn't help at all.

Odd; the Plug-in Properties is indeed how you usually configure Sonar so that it knows that a plugin can receive tempo.

(as per http://www.analogindustries.com/blog/en ... 6270221644 , for reference)

[os]

Thanks for the link.

There is a particular flag you have to set that says "this plugin wants tempo information"

Odd thing is that I *am* setting that flag properly. Maybe Sonar wants some other flags set too. I'll check.

[os]

OK I can persuade Sonar to give me tempo information. Their implementation is a little broken, but I don't mind working around that.

I guess I'll update all my Windows versions at some point.

<sigh>

[auricle]

Yes, Sonar is strange in how it handles VSTs. I know a couple of developers who have had to make workarounds for it.

Okay:

1) I can run the plugins in 'eye candy' mode without any problems. I was having crashes when I was constantly changing the LFO speeds in both the LFO and step LFO plugins. Although after making some BIOS tweaks, I couldn't get them to crash today. I'll keep on testing this.

2) I couldn't get the tempo mode to work until I changed the plugin settings so that I had 'Configure as Synth' selected rather than 'Configure as tempo based effect'. Only then would it work.

As far as I'm concerned, everything is working now although it's a mystery why. I'll keep testing.

[os]

All good news, thanks.

I'll (eventually) make the change that allows things to work as tempo based effects, but I'll lower the priority of that if there's a workaround.

[auricle]

All good news, thanks.

I'll (eventually) make the change that allows things to work as tempo based effects, but I'll lower the priority of that if there's a workaround.

I'd just like to get the opinion of a developer. Is Sonar's VST implementation that bad?

[os]

There's some interesting insight on the analogue industries website linked above. Sounds like Cakewalk used to (is currently?) wrap VST plug-ins in a DX plug-in layer, which is a bit odd. The tempo thing is definitely a bug, and there's absolutely no justification for having to have the user set a check box to allow that information through.

The GUI hosting is odd but I don't really know what they're doing there. Again, it smacks of an unusual wrapper layer.

From other posts on this forum it sounds like the routing flexibility is very poor in Sonar too. The days when it was acceptable just to deal with mono or stereo plug-ins, with no cross-routing, are long gone.

[auricle]

Mmn, I always thought that VSTs were native from Sonar 6 onwards but after that article I'm not so sure. I know that I have problems with detecting plugins in Sonar that I never have in other hosts.

As for the routing, I agree - it needs an overhaul. However, when Cakewalk overhauls something, it does it properly. Take the MIDI tools for example, before Sonar 7, people complained that Sonar's piano roll editor was way below the competitors'. However, in Sonar 7, they added a load of features that pushed them past the competition (magnifier view, etc). There's been a few complaints over at the Cakewalk forum complaining about the routing so let's hope that they overhaul it and add routing features that are on par with at least Reaper.

Talking of routing. In many multi-out plugins, you can set the plugin to put each stereo pair of a plugin on it's own track. For some reason it doesn't pick up Silent Way Voice Controller as a multiple output plugin for some reason.

[os]

That would be a question for Cakewalk. The VST spec just lets the plug-in declare multiple outputs (six in the case of the Voice Controller) - how the host interprets them is up to the host.

[whyterabbyt]

Sounds like Cakewalk used to (is currently?) wrap VST plug-ins in a DX plug-in layer, which is a bit odd.

Sonar started off only supporting DX and DXi plugins in the engine; that was its 'native' plugin architecture, just like FL and other hosts have their own 'native' plugin type.
That was a decision Cakewalk made when VST plugins were really just in their infancy; they thought that suporting Microsoft's way of doing thing, rather than one of their competitor's, made more sense.
A couple of third-party VST-to-DX plugin wrappers existed, since it wasnt actually the only DX-only host at the time, and Cakewalk eventually licensed one and incorporated it into Sonar. Eventually (v5?) CW rewrote it so that the underlying engine was 'neutral' and no longer relied on an external wrapper.

The tool that Sonar uses to scan for plugins, though, still looks like the scanner for the original wrapper, but they use it because it allows them to scan and test (and configure) plugin behaviour more rigorously without crashing the hosts, something I prefer to the way some other hosts do it (eg Live or Kore2). Unfortunately the mythology persists that it still uses a 'wrapper'; it doesnt, any more than any other abstraction layer is a 'wrappers'.

The tempo thing is definitely a bug, and there's absolutely no justification for having to have the user set a check box to allow that information through.

That's legacy behaviour; dont know why they've kept it, but it maintains except backwards compatibility I guess. I was pretty sure it was set 'on' by default now, though.

The GUI hosting is odd but I don't really know what they're doing there. Again, it smacks of an unusual wrapper layer.

That may actually be their 'X-Ray' feature; user-controllable transparency on plugin UIs... Ive heard of that causing some problems before.

From other posts on this forum it sounds like the routing flexibility is very poor in Sonar too. The days when it was acceptable just to deal with mono or stereo plug-ins, with no cross-routing, are long gone.

Im not sure what you think is poor, but Sonar had completely customisable bussing and sidechaining and surround-capable plugins before just about any other comparable host out there (barring the modular hosts).

(There's a thread I think you might be talking about, but it was actually someone having a problem because Sonar doesnt record audio tracks post-effects-chain, and he was trying to find a way of achieving that with routing; it wasnt actually an intrinsic deficiency in Sonar's routing.)