What exactly IS "rewire"?

Two questions, actually: 1) What is rewire? 2) If I upgrade to Sibelius First 7 (which supports rewire), would I be able to use Sibelius as my notation program and completely bypass Sonar X1 or X2's notation? So, basically - if I'm composing an orchestral part, could I notate it in Sibelius and have it access Dimension Pro instruments within Sonar? I hope this makes sense. Thanks.

Essentially rewire just allows one DAW to pass audio into another DAW. In most cases the slave DAW is used like a vst in the host DAW. For example using Sonar as your host and Reason as a plug in via rewire. The link provided gives an accurate description but I think it was just too complex for the question asked. I don't know anything about your notation software but my guess is that it will work as a host for something like Reason and will send midi data to Reason via rewire to trigger Reason's synths which is what I do not think you want. When using Sonar Sonar will always be the host in the case of this notation software you want I think it will always be the host as well. Look into if works as a rewire slave and a rewire host or if its just a host as I suspect. You want it to be capable of being a rewire slave. 

I wrote an article on ReWire that's in Harmony Central's library;  I think you'll find helpful...the screen shots are all based on X1, so it's even somewhat Sonar-centric.

Thanks for all of your help..... but I still don't understand how I can "link" Sibelius and, say, Dimension Pro or Session Drummer 3 or True Piano..... basically, what I want to do is completely bypass Sonar's terrible notation and use a REAL notation program, like Sibelius. I want to notate parts in Sibelius, but have Dimension Pro (or another soft synth) play it. How would I do this?

Hey thanks, Fog, that makes more sense.... and, yeah, I'll try the Facebook page, etc

http://www.propellerheads...cle&article=rewire

anyway , Avid likes taking UK jobs and putting them abroad (Ukraine from what I've read) , so because of that, I won't be giving them any of my money

Rewrite doesn't send the midi notes, only audio (at least that I'm aware of). So you have to use the virtual instruments in Sibelius and send the audio to sonar. 

This is why rewire is not a good replacement for decent notation tools inside of Sonar. 

Ok. That's what I figured. I'm going to get a refund on Sibelius 7, then. I have Sibelius 5 and the only reason I upgraded was for Rewire capability because I thought you could do this. I wish Cakewalk would change this. Their notation SUCKS. I actually read music and compose my parts with actual notation..... I don't want to use their crappy notation.... I want to use a real notation program. Everything else in Sonar is fantastic.... but, allow us to use REAL notation programs if you're not going to do it yourselves.

I can understand the frustration. Personally, I can't read or write notation to save my life, so it doesn't much matter to me. Fortunately, it seems to be a lot easier to get a good visual result converting MIDI to notation and tweaking it than to get a good audio result the other way around. 

Yeah, thanks brundlefly.