Enable Midi Out VSTi Issues - Attention Ryan Munnis

Been a lot of traffic on these issues lately so I thought I would provide a separate summary to help out:
 
As a disclaimer - "enable midi out"  here is being used only on Vsti plug ins that self generate their own midi data.  There is no keyboard or any other hardware device needed to create midi data.  Such VSTi are Catanya, Harmonizer, Reaktor (there a bunch of different Arps in the suite), Jamstix, (and many others).  While you can turn enable midi out on any VSTi, that does not mean there will be any midi actually coming out (Dimension Pro, rapture, etc.) and therefore in these cases you would not see any issue either (unless you are trying to chain a bunch of synths together see issue 3)  It should be noted that other DAWs do not have these issues and that has fueled a certain amount of heat.  Also, every one of these below has a tech support case or multiple tech support cases already opened.  Finally, none of these issues below trigger cakewalk problem reporter so there is nothing to send in which I think has caused some churn as well.
 
1) Midi X-Talk - (Basically Sonar was not keeping midi data output from the vsti's separate and was mixing it all together)  this was diagnosed and reproduced in Sonar X1 and X2  (there is a youtube video showing this).  Supposed to have been fixed in X3c.  And.....I think it has been fixed....Yay !  At first it looked like it had not been fixed, i think that is because I was using old projects created before X3c.  Last night I started brand new test projects and inserted 3 instances of Jamstix and 1 instance of Catanya.  Jamstix was triggering Battery, EZ Drummer, Addictive Drums.   Catanya was triggering both Rapture and Dimension Pro.  It played perfectly.  And when I recorded midi on the soft synth simple instrument tracks, the midi recorded was only the midi output supplied by the correct Jamstix and Catanya midi in.   The recorded midi was not a jumbled up mix of all the midi VSTis together.   So it looks like the issue is fixed, but you may have to delete all the vsti's from old projects and re-insert.  Also not sure if an older vsti track template will bring the issue back with or not either, but I will try to confirm. So this is encouraging and will continue to check it out.
 
2) eMOFO (enable midi out freeze occurance) - this is an issue where having multiple instances of catanya or reaktor triggering a softsynth freezes Sonar to the point that you have to restart your PC. (even using task manager you cannot stop Sonarprd process)  Again search the forums for this issue.  Interesting thing I have noticed....Catanya and Reaktor still cause this issue in X3c.  However Jamstix, which is functionally the same idea  ( I think ?), does not crash Sonar X3c when you have more than 1 instance running.  Last night I had 3 instances of Jamstix triggering 3 drum synths (as noted above) and 1 instance of Catanya.  Stopped and started it numerous times, changed patches on the fly no issues.  However, as soon as I added a second instance of Catanya, Sonar crashed hard.  Maybe this is a clue as to why this happens, what does Jamstix do differently than Catanya or Reaktor when it is outputting midi data ?  Maybe it is not important ?  Don't know.  Users have shown that other DAWs can handle unlimited instances and run no problems.   
 
3) Enable Midi out as midi through put - This was only raised yesterday.  I have no experience with this, but a user was expecting that you could daisy chain multiple vsti soft synths together using enable midi out.  I confirmed that things do not work that way, but I do not know if that is a bug or designed that way or the vsti themselves that do support this.  Definitely Dim Pro and Rapture do not do this.  I was able to confirm that a single plug like catanya can trigger mulitple synths.  And of course, you can have a single hardware device trigger multiple devices, but that is not what the user was looking to do.  (at least this is how I understood things...)  Again, looks like other DAWs do this but not Sonar.
 
Fixing 1 is great, looking to see what happens with 2 and 3.
 
Hope this helps....

wrt 2) noel explicitly stated somewhere that he used jamstix to debug this stuff, so maybe he introduced some jamstix-specific change that doesn't help the others?

yeah, i have no trubs in s1 or live... if the effort to update/fix the engine is "too much" business-decision-wise, maybe just a prevention of inserting more than one to avoid ugly crashing would be useful?

This all worked great in the Pro Audio series; originally Cakewalk was firmly rooted in MIDI...that was all they did in the early days, as I recall. 

+2 on the great post, Jeff.  I also had the same issue with the extra "hidden" MIDI notes with 0 duration.  However, I cannot recall how it came about.  I will check some of my recent projects and look into this.  Nonetheless, I can confirm this strange phenomenon.
 
Kind regards,
 
Living Room Rocker

so is jamstix currently the only one that can do multiple instances?

I wonder if midi from multiple instances would work better if Sonar were temporarily run with cpu affinity set to just CPU 0. And I don't mean as a workaround, but as an experimental data point.

Thanks Lance.
 
I also try to use only single midi channel.  I never intentionally use all inputs Omni, or any input Omni.  I would expect that you would get midi recording where you do not want and possibly overload things or at the very lease cause confusion.
 
What I have noticed, and maybe this part of the issue, is that often times even though I select only single channel midi input to trigger a synth ((ie) Catanya-1 ch-1), Sonar seems to randomly switch the input to All Omni or the first device in the midi list Omni (in my case OCTA-CTRL Omni).  It seems that often times when you make a change on any midi track in a priject all the others will switch sometimes to Omni input.
 
When I am home I will try to confirm what you have seen on my rig.
 
JR
 

I have seen many, if not all of these symptoms on my projects.
 
Some involve Reaktor as a MIDI generator, others using Fractal Tune Smithy as an external MIDI source, others with Kontakt set up as a MIDI THRU device and with that channel having MIDI Out enabled.
 
Sometimes I need to exceed a magic number of tracks - one track or two always work, but three or four won't with crashes seemingly more frequent as the number grow.
 
I am quite careful to select MIDI in ports and channels on these types of tracks, but I swear that sometimes Sonar changes them to OMNI when I'm not looking, as JR notes above.
 
The crashes are almost always the same - everything works fine, then suddenly - no sound, no Sonar response, Sonar windows turns white and reports no response, can't kill it in Task Manager (or wait about 5 or 10 minutes and it may die). There is no indication of a MIDI Loop (in the sense that the MIDI levels seem normal and there are no note doubling or unnatural timings before the crash).
 
Every time I try to investigate to reproduce the problem, I seem to encounter one or more weird behaviors (Like the channels turning into OMNI or other ports getting altered).
 
Also, for the few times I tried to reproduce this in X2 I never ran into any crashes - maybe some things didn't work, but I never got a crash.
 
This has been very frustrating and I almost thought I was going bananas or having bizarre hardware problems or computer viruses until I read that others have something similar occurring.

Or Self Feeding Infinite Midi Loop Death Spiral   (SFIMLDS)
 
This may be caused by some type of persistence issue where Sonar is not keeping midi inputs locked on channels and devices selected and making everything all - OMNI ???
 
I continue to play with this but I see exactly the same thing that Arachnaut sees.
 
JR

I will see if I can recreate this evening and see what could be the problem.
 
JR

Yes is a very old issue that some of us have been struggling with for a long time. Many users on this forum are probably sick of this issue and of me complaining about it (especially those that don't understand the issue or the severity of this bug).  But now that this issue is finally getting more attention, I think giving some history of this bug is appropriate.
 
I actually noticed this issue more than 5 years ago when I was using various plugins that sent out MIDI (crashes, dropped/stuck notes, MIDI crosstalk etc). I always wrote it off as buggy plugins, but when I started developing some of my own plugins I started realizing that there is something wrong with Sonar's MIDI implementation. So to repost a brief summary of what I did (sorry for the repost from another thread, but I was told this thread is more appropriate):
 

• CWBRN-1336 -Multiple MIDI bugs, all related to VSTi MIDI output (filed on 02/24/2009)
• CWBRN-2504 - Bugs related to the "Enable MIDI Output" functionality (this refers back to 1336 and gives additional info on how to reproduce it)
• CWBRN-2534 - Can't record from two MIDI keyboards at the same time 
• CWBRN-2533 - MIDI notes cut short when a different source sends notes
• Created a web page in Feb 2009 that details clear steps, including:
  • A VSTi that reproduces the issue, including source code
  • A Sonar project used to reproduce it
  • Very clear steps on how to reproduce it
• A very long email discussion with Willey Jones regarding this issue where I provide great detail on reproducing it. All I got back was empty promises that it will be fixed.
• Endless threads about this issue, usually met with arguments how this really isn't a bug, just user error. See here, here, here, here. There are more.

 
One of the things that really ticked me off is how difficult and futile it was to work with CW support. As an example, asking for an update 2.5 years after filing CWBRN-1336, I get this response back:
 

Thank you for contacting Cakewalk Technical Support. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. We were unable to create the issue with the steps provided.
 
Please submit this issue to our problem reporter within the link below... 
http://www.cakewalk.com/Support/ProblemReporter/
 
Some things to remember... 
1. Provide your instructions starting with a blank SONAR project. 
2. Please only use/reference plugins that are included with SONAR (no 3rd party plug referenced please). 
3. Include every step, even the ones you'd think to be obvious (there are many ways to get to the same results, I'd like to make sure we're both following the same workflow).
 
Thank you for choosing Cakewalk! 
Best Regards,

 
Hey OK those are great tips! I'll make sure to remember those things when filing the error report!!! Again
 
And then people wonder why I got so upset about this issue. This bug has been a complete showstopper for me in my workflow, which is why I eventually just gave up and switched to another DAW.
 
To Ryan... I'm seeing conflicting reports from various people whether this issue has been fixed in X3c. Can you confirm either way? As I said I got off the bus during the X1 bugfest days and have been out of the loop ever since then. Given the bad experience I've had with CW and Sonar, I find it hard justifying putting down yet more money to get something that should have been fixed over 4 years ago.

Hey st,

No - not completely fixed. I see that my video comparison of reaktor midi outs in sonar and studio one has been reposted in a couple of these threads and that behavior still exists in x3c.

I use multiple daws as well. Sonar is my main one though because it does most things very quickly intuitively and efficiently. If i want cv routing i use reason or rewire it into sonar. If i need to search for samples (setting up the metadata for their media bay takes forever but is very worth it) or do synth midi generation like in this post or use release velocities or vst note expression i use cubase.
Scoring is sibelius. Algorithms = pure data.
I do the majority of my work in x3 though. It has crashed less on me than cubase 7 as well. And no 64 bit video support in studio one was a deal breaker so i didn't take long removing them from my short list. Different tools for different jobs.
Considering craig anderton said he'd never really taken a deep look at midi out from vsts and now might play with it a bit i think is a great step in the right direction. It took me by surprise that he hadn't played with this, but i think he'll see its usefulness and become an advocate in the future.