Important thread and hopefully will get some more attention and input. Keyboard players need some easy method to chain synths and effects on a single track, the one major downside to Sonar. Not that it can't be done native, but requires multiple tracks, copy pasting and templates.
The Blue Cat plug is nice. Good parallel and series flow.
Wanted to throw in my favorite contender for the job.
Energy XT.
They got a 30% off sale at the present bringing the price down to a bit over $48. This makes it a no brainer for the advanced feature sets and its place in the Sonaw workflow. It does not separate and route frequencies like MB-7 but has basic advantages over patchwork.
http://www.energy-xt.com/index.php Note that XT is itself an independent DAW which includes instruments and effects. I've never used it as a DAW, but use the modular layout as about the best chainer out there. Current version is 2.7 for the standalone. The two vst and vsti dll's are still at ver 2.6. These are what you need to open in Sonar.
The demos are fully functional except they won't save settings.
Simple license file to activate.
The advantage of XT over Blue Cat is the mixer, unless I missed it somewhere in the patchwork demo.
The mixer allows for panning the parts of a chain which I could not find a way to do with Blue Cat. Fast chaining in Blue Cat, but loses the pan ability of multiple tracks done the hard way in Sonar.
There is a trim control and area for sends and inserts in the Energy XT mixer. These inserts stay with the track. You can optionally manually ad a synth or effect to a chain in the modular window which then creates an independent track in the mixer with each effect for finer control. Volume, pan, mute,solo,trim, insert, send, etc for eack track.
Price wise, about $30 less than Blue Cat patchwork.
Others swear by two other chainers I don't have a lot of experience with. They do cost considerably more. Usine and Bidule.
http://www.sensomusic.org/usine/ http://www.plogue.com/products/bidule/ John