I've never heard anyone express their love for ACT. It's horrible, counter-intuitive, unreliable, inconvenient and just plain DOES NOT WORK PROPERLY. Every time I try to use it I end up wanting to headbutt the screen. And I have an A-800 PRO, which in theory should work great with ACT. It doesn't! 
 
I get the idea and motive behind it. To be able to have your control surface automatically map to Sonar transport and mix controls. To be honest I haven't used it for this because I'm quite happy clicking at mix controls on screen during mixing. What I really want to do is map my control surface to synths and plugins so that I can perform the controls, for instance the cutoff filter on a synth. I want to be able to set up the mapping, write enable the track, and perform some automation data to an automation lane. ACT is horrible for this because oftentimes the mappings just don't work. And while you can also set up controls on the synth rack and remote control them, again this doesn't always work depending on the synth and besides it's just too many steps. 
 
I believe you should be able to make quick and easy mappings from your control surface to automation envelopes. Sonar can input data from your control surface, synths & plugins make their parameters visible to Sonar automation envelopes, so why not just connect the two and have a mapping from control surface to envelope? I believe you should be able to set a mapping on the automation lane itself and it should be as easy as clicking a MIDI learn button on the lane and twiddling your control. From then on, whenever that MIDI track has input echo enabled, the mapping is active. 
 
Performing synth and effect controls with control surfaces is a huge part of modern music (and synth music in general) and should be quick, intuitive, hassle free and foolproof. Right now it's not, and I feel like this is one area in which Sonar needs to improve immensely, especially if it wants to win favor with the emerging breed of electronic musicians. 

Hopefully somebody will merge all of the control surface support FRs ...

BobF
Hopefully somebody will merge all of the control surface support FRs ...

I hope not because this thread is about ACT, which is hopefully still of interest to Cakewalk
 
Control surfaces are dead outsourced to hardware vendors who don't do anything either unfortunately put as much effort into it as Cakewalk did in recent works

sharke
I've never heard anyone express their love for ACT. It's horrible, counter-intuitive, unreliable, inconvenient and just plain DOES NOT WORK PROPERLY. Every time I try to use it I end up wanting to headbutt the screen. And I have an A-800 PRO, which in theory should work great with ACT. It doesn't! 

 
very true. same situation here.
 
A-800 PRO and ACT just always ends in a lot of wasted time when you try to configure something. it's OK to use transport buttons, but apart from that it's not very helpful. I don't care too much about the automation and mix control as I use a VS-700 (but still this should work as advertised), but I would want to control the synth that are actively played on the A-800 PRO to be controlled via ACT from the A-800 PRO.
 

sharke
ACT is horrible for this because oftentimes the mappings just don't work. [...]
 
I believe you should be able to make quick and easy mappings from your control surface to automation envelopes. [...]

again very true.
 
ACT is horrible because there are several bugs in (A) the process of mapping parameters to controls and (B) save/restore of ACT mappings.
 
I reported several bugs/issues over the past few years, some again quite recently, but so far have never received any status updates on any of them which tells me that these reports are parked somewhere in a dead end street and ACT is "currently" not in the focus of Cakewalk support / development.
 
Since this may not change in the near future I read quite a few of azslow posts on his site (thanks for that info, mate!) and tried to understand the "logic" behind the garbled output in the ACT xml files. To me it seems that once you have a working configuration in these files, the control itself seems to work. However, it's very cumbersome to fix manually and programming a script to go from garbled ACT file to tabular editor back to working ACT file is not a matter of an afternoon, but unless I see ACT addressed in any of the near future updates, I think this is the only way to make it usable ...

+1000
 
It's unreliable and I can't trust it.  I've had to delete the config file (can't remember it's name) to get it to stop trying to map duplicate settings - of course losing all the mapping I did etc. 
 
It tries to do too much and anticipate what I want to do.  Just give me  a text file or something I can edit and setup the mappings instead of the "live" config that doesn't work.

cityrat
It tries to do too much and anticipate what I want to do.  Just give me  a text file or something I can edit and setup the mappings instead of the "live" config that doesn't work.

http://www.azslow.com/index.php/topic,5.0.html
 
The explanation of the bug and "Live" workaround to make it reliable. But most stable way is to edit  genericpluginparams.xml (text file ) and put everything in correct order manually (the only way for VST3). Delete the second file (sonaract.xml) and any surface will work as expected.

 
I would like to use ACT to quickly map a few parameters so that I can twist a knob during a performance. I am not super interested in creating permanent mappings because I can never remember what's mapped to what. Unfortunately, ACT (particularly the ACT MIDI Controller) is so unreliable that I can't use it this way. I mainly just use Automap for the task.
 
The biggest issues that I encounter are:

• ACT tries to combine the UI for configuring the MIDI input and mapping to the plugin. Let me see the MIDI CC coming from the hardware and verify that this works
• ACT consistently frequently fails to recognize the parameter being changed on the plugin. This is particularly noticeable in Reaktor Ensembles.
• ACT gives no way to manually set a parameter when it is having trouble picking up the motion of that parameter in the plugin

This works perfectly with Automap and it also works perfectly in Studio One. (Honestly, S1's implementation of this whole area is an amazing bit of work. Very fast, accurate, intuitive, and makes the details visible enough to troubleshoot with but not so visible that they overwhelm the real work going on.)
 
Edit: ACT not recognizing the parameters happens often, but not every time.

Also have tried ACT several times over the last 6yrs+ and each time gave up in frustration.. lost connections, lost mappings, you name it, its happened to me.. 
 
So a very large +1 to a reliable improved, updated or replaced control surface mapping feature with bidirectional communication.
 

AndyDavis
I would like to use ACT to quickly map a few parameters so that I can twist a knob during a performance. I am not super interested in creating permanent mappings because I can never remember what's mapped to what. Unfortunately, ACT (particularly the ACT MIDI Controller) is so unreliable that I can't use it this way. I mainly just use Automap for the task.

http://www.azslow.com/index.php/topic,206.0.html
 

The biggest issues that I encounter are:

• ACT tries to combine the UI for configuring the MIDI input and mapping to the plugin. Let me see the MIDI CC coming from the hardware and verify that this works

AZ Controller shows you incoming MIDI messages and what it does with them
 

• ACT consistently fails to recognize the parameter being changed on the plugin

I have never seen that, except with VST3 (Sonar has nasty bug) and parameters not exposed by plug-ins (there are several examples, and Automap is also can not work there)
 

• ACT gives no way to manually set a parameter when it is having trouble picking up the motion of that parameter in the plugin

AZ Controller does. You can use either ACT way (ACT Slider 7) or "direct" way (Track 5, FX 2, parameter 8). Tracks and FX/Synth can be referenced by name.
 

This works perfectly with Automap and it also works perfectly in Studio One. (Honestly, S1's implementation of this whole area is an amazing bit of work. Very fast, accurate, intuitive, and makes the details visible enough to troubleshoot with but not so visible that they overwhelm the real work going on.)

AZ Controller can not compete in simplicity with Automap. Its good side is flexibility, I do not think any other technology can beat it there. But that has a price, if you can do everything you can do nothing simple...
 

Mystic38
Also have tried ACT several times over the last 6yrs+ and each time gave up in frustration.. lost connections, lost mappings, you name it, its happened to me.. 

Read the link I have posted in #6. Once you understand where the bug is, you can work around it.
 

So a very large +1 to a reliable improved, updated or replaced control surface mapping feature with bidirectional communication.

I am just asking to fix several obvious bugs on Sonar side... I still see nothing in the Everett changes list. The rest I can do myself. And just for completes, AZ Controller is bidirectional.
 
I know that this post sounds like a self advertisement. But I do not sell anything. As you, I have found existing Sonar Control Surface mapping/integration/features not capable/not working/outdated. And I have asked myself either I can do that better (I am n00b in mixing, but not it programming, at least I think so). Simplicity was not my target (so far). But I like the freedom. I have realized that one-to-one mapping (as with "Midi learn" or MIDI mapping matrix in Synth) is not a good solution for general DAW control. After a year, something was ready to present in public. You can now see far advanced version of that. And the work is still in progress, thanks to ideas, requests and suggestions from other.
 

Although I do appreciate the effort you have put into developing and supporting AZ Control, I consider it a workaround for functionality that is badly broken in Sonar. My particular workaround is Automap.
 
I'd like Cakewalk to fix things so workarounds are not needed. They have such a wonderful core, it's distressing to see this sort of rot around the edges.