First official SONAR 4 review is in!

[m0zart]

actually, they support neither natively, even DXi is wrapped in their own format

"Native support" is a bit of a misnomer. Unless you are Steinberg (which invented VST), and using it's own VST effects then you would have truly "native support". But then even Nuendo 2 has a VST-DX wrapper dll for third party VST's. So does ACID 5 (which now claims native vst support), with it's own VST-DX wrapper (sfvstwrap.dll). So does Magix with Samplitude 7.2, (FxVdx.dll), which coincidentally, is the same FXpansion wrapper that Cakewalk and the UAD-1 uses, except an earlier 3.x version. Cakewalk just released a new and improved version with the SONAR 4.01 update (v4.4.3.3). They are all using wrappers to some extent. As an end user, the bottom line is.....does your host app successfully use VST/VSTi & DX/DXi plugins or not. In SONAR 4's case, it most certainly does.

Billy Buck

Thanks for the details on this. I may need to check it out some. I know for a while I saw an issue where the wrapper that gets installed with Sonar took the place in Fruity Loops and would cause problems with trying to run VSTi within FL.

[dougsyo]

actually, they support neither natively, even DXi is wrapped in their own format

"Native support" is a bit of a misnomer...

Thanks for the details on this. I may need to check it out some. I know for a while I saw an issue where the wrapper that gets installed with Sonar took the place in Fruity Loops and would cause problems with trying to run VSTi within FL.

I haven't tried this with CW VST adapter yet, but I know that one or two DirectIXer-wrapped VSTI I tried in FLS did not work satisfactorily (hey, it was an experiment!) Once I ran the CW VST Adapter, all of them showed up as DXI as well as VSTI in FLS, but I just ignored them.

If I have a choice between VSTI and DXI in FLS, I always go for VSTI - regardless of whether it's native DXI, wrapped by the vendor, or wrapped with DirectIXer or CW VST Adapter (why would I want to involve Fruity Wrapper plus another wrapper anyway?)

Other than a few Sonar-provided DXI, virtually everything I have comes in VSTI also. And of the Sonar synths that will actually run in other hosts, the only one I have much use for is TTS-1 (a big improvement over VSC). I'd like to have the Roland GrooveSynth too, but that's Sonar/Kinetic only... makes me wonder if it'll run in HS2?

There's a note on the Instruments board about Synth1 as DXI (in the "synth1 skin" thread) in FLS being off-pitch, so perhaps it's FLS DXI support that's the problem in some cases?

Doug