BEATSCAPE : Is there an equivalent plugin maybe more advanced ? Maschine, Geist, others ..

I own geist and can say it is unquestionably better at most functions than beatscape. It has a powerful step sequencer but you can use controller to play live and record as you play. It will also sample directly from various sound sources, including from your DAW. The only downsides are a few minor things like not displaying what kit you are playing, occasional sample rate confusion in standalone mode ( may be isolated to me) and lack of recent updates. There has been a hint new version may be coming.

Don't forget it also has a great manual. I'm still scratching the surface of what Geist can do and my biggest obstacle is working out glitches with my MPD26.

Thank you very much for your very appreciated precisions ! 
I hope Geist will be at a discount price for the next black friday or cyber monday !
Maschine is attractive but obliged to buy the hardware : It's a pity that they don't sell only the software like Arturia spark.
Anyway, thank you again !!

Thanks for the info ! I will watch closely.

+1 to the above. I bought Geist this time last year because of inputs from dub and sharke. Geist goes on sale for 99USD fairly regularly, and is definitely worth checking out. Be sure to run the wheels off the trial too. My favorite feature is "spitter" which allows you to pull audio samples from any track in a DAW (I.e. if it can be heard, it can be sampled/sliced as you see fit).

To me, Geist is a software version of Maschine, and I have lost interest in owning more hardware.

Geist is definitely a Read the Manual (RTFM) product. It is essentially a DAW unto itself, and some features are not intuitive (or even visible) unless you know they are there and what they do.
 
I made a post last year of the sampling/slicing by taking the first 5-seconds from Phil Collin's "In the Air Tonight." Geist sampled, auto-sliced, and immediately determined bpm for the clip so it was about as "easy" as it comes. Here is the post I made on that which has some detail for just this feature, but definitely RTFM for Geist.

Also, fxpansion put out a series of quickstart videos on youtube that are helpful for those who prefer a visual example approach.

peter434
Thanks a lot for every info you give !
I have some fun with building a pair of patterns with great results concerning the groove and dynamics  ! The quantize function is very efficient and maybe it's just me, but could you confirm that the Sonar quantize function is not as smooth as the Geist one ?
I had nevertheless some concerns :
- I froze Geist to get the audio track (and copy the rendered audio file to another track) : RESULT : there are kick transient missing. Any idea of the cause ?
- When I select  another virtual instrument,which, in principle, stop feeding the midi inputs of the other Vsti or midi program, Geist continues to respond to the keys of my controller ?? So if I want to play another VSTi, I still play Geist (yet unselected !)at the same time.
Thanks in advance if you could give me some ideas !

Honestly, i never compared quantize head to head to give a fair assessment.  Good question.
 
The freeze issue i have not encountered.  Closest i have come is once i had an issue similar to your second issue and realized it wads a midi echo issue and it was actually not freezing geist but another synth that I was layering. This brings us to the likely cause of your second issue.  Go into the track panel and make sure you are not echoing midi output to geist

mettelus
+1 to the above. I bought Geist this time last year because of inputs from dub and sharke. Geist goes on sale for 99USD fairly regularly, and is definitely worth checking out. Be sure to run the wheels off the trial too. My favorite feature is "spitter" which allows you to pull audio samples from any track in a DAW (I.e. if it can be heard, it can be sampled/sliced as you see fit).

To me, Geist is a software version of Maschine, and I have lost interest in owning more hardware.

Thanks for mentioning the sale price that might appear from time to time. I'll watch for that as we enter Black Friday mode and see if we get lucky.

Geist can generate MIDI output. If you are running X3, the "Enable MIDI Output" is enabled by default when inserting Geist in a project. By default input  on MIDI tracks in SONAR are set to Omni. This means the Geist MIDI output will be picked up by all the other MIDI tracks. To stop this, either turn off "Enable MIDI Output" when inserting the plug-in or by right-clicking on Geist in the synth rack or make sure the other MIDI track are not set to Omni.

Thank you very much Scook and Sharke for these precisions !! I certainly was a little bit confused with all the midi input/output combinations. The fact is it was more comfortable for me to have "omni" enabled because I had to use at least 2 controllers at the same time (one for playing a melodic instrument and another for its keyswitches, while listening the Geist groove)...
Scook (excuse me for my ignorance) but the "Enable MIDI Output" is a default Sonar X3 function or is a proper Geist automatic configuration , because I didn't notice this kind of problem with the other soft synths ?
 
Sharke : I have to deepen all the possibilities of Geist; now I'm just creating small rhythmic patterns! I hope that there are videos showing what you described about the melodic samples. In fact, is it to create realistic sophisticated arpeggios or "crazy" things like you can do for example with Egoist from Sugar Bytes ?
 
Just another questions which are rather worrying since it's related to system stability :
- Is Geist very CPU demanding or very light ? Is it reliable on your systems ?
- Last time, I tested very quickly the different mix presets of Geist, passing from one to another very quickly, and it crashed Sonar, ( there were Fxpansion crash report files that had been created automatically !)
- Now, I'm working on a project, so testing the Geist demo (with every 15 minutes, the Geist demo warning message that sucks !), maybe adding some Midi controller and everything was ok; I made a (long) rest without shutting down or touch anything, and when come back, I had Audio Engine drop outs every second continuously (with the well known message : the audio engine has stopped suddenly...) Given everything worked fine before and it was just a trial project, I closed Sonar and I could work normally. Weird, no ? I don't know if it this is directly related to Geist or its demo version, but if you have any idea or experimented similat things ? (I'm going to make a thread in the Sonar X3 section  because these "little" problems concern me anyway !)
 
Thanks again

I know I had a few crashes with Geist when I was using the demo version - perhaps they haven't updated it. I'm pretty sure there's been a Geist update since I installed the full version. It certainly never crashes my system now. I sometimes have 2 or 3 instances of Geist, each with all 8 engines running (i.e. 8 groups of 16 sample pads, each with their own effects chains, then effects chains on each engine as a whole etc). It seems pretty efficient. 
 
Don't forget you can also route the Geist engines to their own audio outputs so that you can use your own effects. Sometimes I like to process each pad with its own effects in Geist, but then I send the whole group of 16 pads (an engine) to its own audio output so that I can apply my own compressors, distortion etc. 
 
I don't know what you mean about creating sophisticated arpeggios, Geist isn't really a synth, it's just a very powerful sampler/drum machine. What I meant about using melodic samples is that you can work with them just like drum samples, slicing them up and rearranging them and triggering them from pads etc. You can edit the start/end points of each sample, pitch them up and down, time stretch them, apply envelopes etc. 
 
This is a nice video which shows a typical workflow in slicing beats, he also slices a synth pad part and some bass as well. 
 

There have not been many updates since i purchased, but they did release a beta to owners that resolves some of the issues some had with spitter.

sharke
I have it ingrained in me now to turn "Omni" off on new MIDI tracks I insert...

+1... MIDI Omni is your worst enemy! MIDI Omni is the "default" for everything... and any active synth will play what it receives (MIDI controller, synths with MIDI outs enabled, etc.). Develop a habit of assigning channels to MIDI components immediately when inserting things (and keep track of them).

Thanks mettelus !
Concerning Midi routing, but, maybe I'm wrong, it seems that even if I specify one specific midi channel input in other soft programs, Geist still is triggering them and all midi programs , whereas it's routed to nothing; So, as Scook suggested, it's necessary to unchek its "Enable MIDI output" because, indeed, Geist may be the first synth I have used which generates overall MIDI data.