Sonar and Vista - VST plugins

Hi Everyone,

I just upgraded my DAW to a Vista 64 machine and now I'm in the process of moving my Sonar software and other music-related plugins onto this new machine.

I am currently using Sonar 5 Producer Edition which has served me well on my older XP machine.
The new machine is a quad-core Intel machine running Vista 64-bit.

I am having a few issues with the machine recogizing my EZDrummer VST plugin. The weird thing is that I can run the EZDrummer application in stand alone mode and it works great, however Sonar is not recognizing it even when I point to it's plugin folder. It simply doesn't take it in and register it as a VST plugin, even though I can see the EZDrummer .dll there.

Another weird issue is that the Sonar application seems to go through a Windows configuration step every time I launch Sonar, as if it has been launched for the very first time each time I invoke it. I get the message "Please wait while Windows configures SONAR 5 Producer Edition" This process takes about 3-4 minutes each time I invoke Sonar. I don't know why this is happening. It seems that there is something in the install that is not being removed so it thinks that I'm running the app for the first time, everytime.

If there are any other Vista 64 users out there who have encountered any of these issues, any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks, -- Jim

Well, I thought that I was, I need to check for that. The weird thing is that I can install 32-bit applications such as Kinetic and they are working fine with my other VST plugins.

I just did an experiment.
I de-installed my Sonar 64-bit version and re-installed the 32-bit version and now it's working like a champ. It recognizes my EZDrummer VST plugin right away and the other issue of constant re-configuring on the Sonar install has dissapeared as well.

I suppose there is something weird with the 64-bit version and how it scans for VST plugins. maybe there is some incompatibility there or possiblly and old bug in this 5.0 version on Vista 64.

In either case, I am o.k. for now. I just need to get a new Midi USB adapter since my older one doesn't yet have a driver for Vista. It'm really suprised how spotty the Vista support is out there.

Thanks for the reply though.
-- Jim

Yeah, this is the way I expected it to work. When I first installed the 64-bit version it created it's own VST plugins folder inside the cakewalk install folder. The EZDrummer application installed it's VST plugin into a separate place under the "Program Files (x86)" tree. I figured that this would be o.k. if I could point Sonar where to find the 32-bit plugins. No matter how many things I tried, I couldn't get Sonar to pull in EZDrummer plugin using the VST wizard in Sonar. I finally gave up and installed the 32-bit version of Sonar. This is working fine for now, but I'm wondering what went wrong in the 64-bit version. Maybe installer didn't work quite right when I first tried the 64-bit version, since I had the other issue of Windows trying to re-configure it each time I invoked it. (not sure).

-- Jim

Try going into the Sonar shortcut properties and telling Windows to run Sonar as an administrator.

Back when v5 was new Windows lacked the user account restrictions and security it acquired with XP sp1 when MS finally merged "consumer" Windows with WinNT. Which made Windows very vulnerable to trojans and worms (and other users being able to look at your files which isn't a good idea). The down-side is that older software wasn't written to take account of user account level security so tries to write to places Window's won't normally let it. One result can be the kind of thing you're seeing, another is that you can't be sure Windows is saving some things where you think it is. You may also need to set the shortcut properties to tell Windows to pretend to be an earlier version.

Personally I can't imagine a reason to go back to "old Sonar" from X3....

Dave, the guy that resurrected this 7 year old thread is on W7

Golly.  I didn't actually notice how old it was ... found by a search.    Yes, on Win 7, 64 bit, very comfortable already there after xp for 12 years or so.   Can't seem to acquire sonar 7 or 8, can't so far (still trying trying trying) deal with X.