Hi!
Could anybody confirm please if there is finally support of VST MIDI plugins as inserts on MIDI track in New SONAR Platinum? (not MFX plugins which are hard to find these days!)
I am considering upgrade to Platinum from X3 Producer, and this feature would have good amount of weight towards doing so... (Well yeah, I know there is bunch of other great new features in Platinum, but at the moment I am almost okay with what I already have)
Thanks!

If not, this would be an awesome feature request.

Sadly there is not :(

Could you give an example of what you mean Hammerforce please.

Wookiee
Could you give an example of what you mean Hammerforce please.

There are tons of VST MIDI plugins out there. For example CodeFN42 CCStepper.
In most DAWs (as far as I understand it) such plugins can be used on MIDI track as MIDI insert plugin.
 
In SONAR we only can use such plugins if they can be loaded as usual VST plugins (as Soft Synth) and if they have dedicated MIDI In/Outs (that we have to route with MIDI track manually) and we must not forget to set Input Echo On (on MIDI track and/or Soft Synth track with such plugin depending on what we try to achieve). This work for some plugins and even for some chains of them. But it becomes really complicated to set up if you want 16 MIDI tracks with different chains of MIDI plugins for example...
 
SONAR only supports special MFX (DX?) plugins as MIDI inserts on MIDI track. And there are very few of them available now out there (especially 64 bit). =(

Thanks for the information Hammerforce now I can have a hunt around and see what I can find.

MFX has midi in and Midi out
VSTi midi fx have midi in and midi out.
 
So why not allow the option so VSTi midi fx to have equal status with MFX?
That would be great. Will really help midi workflow.
I do not think any DAW allows VSTi mid fx to be on the same list as the Cakewalk MFX or the proprietary midi fx.
In any case still allow the VSTi midi fx to be on an instrument track.
 
Here are my suggestions:
Make VSTi to MFX wrapper.
Make a modular environment that allows MFX and VSTi midi fx as modules.
 
 

Having VST MIDI effects and MFX plug-ins as peers in the MIDI FX rack might be handy. There may already be a feature request for it. I do not recall. The CodeFN42 CCStepper mentioned above is a different matter. Like several other sequencers, it uses MIDI note data for control. I am not sure it makes sense to drop this plug-in into an FX rack which also streams the same data to a synth.

I am "playing" with that staff for a while, so several comments (some I have already written before, but it is hart to find where exactly), the following is quite "technical", but I do not know how to explain that simpler:
 
1) Implemented in Sonar DX based MFX processing is a bit different from VST with MIDI processing. They are working with the same "material" but different way.
 
VST (at least in VST2) is strictly audio oriented. That means it process ( output / forward ) MIDI events in discrete audio buffer units. So before VST is asked to process/output next audio buffer size number of samples, it receives MIDI events targeting that particular time period. Either it can output MIDI at the same time is a good question, the standard is unclear there and in examples they are not doing that. But if you output MIDI during audio output, the output is "delayed" by the buffer size. Can be quite significant, especially with several plug-ins in a chain. At least that effect is clearly audible in Sonar with buffer size over 512 even with one plug-in.
 
DX is prepared to work with "MIDI Only". It has 2 queues, one is "Life" and another is "Recorded". In the second case (when you play MIDI from track) the events are "preprocessed" to form complete MIDI "messages", like Note with duration, RPNs, etc. Also they are sent to plug-in covering much longer buffer (there is such Sonar setting, if I remember correctly it is about 200ms). Since the whole processing is "filtering", there is no delay.
 
So, VST wrapper is going to be a VST host which imitate audio processing "speed" for the target plug-in. Not impossible, but not trivial either.
 
2) DX -> VSTi route and MIDI routing in general in Sonar is so to say "not perfect" (read extremely buggy). DX and VSTi concepts are disjoint. I guess rewriting it completely is quite some work and just "touching" it can collapse somehow working current schema.
 
3) writing MFX Dx plug-in is not so hard, I think the problem is quite small audience (for example as I see for my MFX Velocity plug-in).
 
4) Lua based MFX processor (as requested by wst3 in another thread) is in active development. There are such projects in VST format. I have not found the same as DX. There will be no GUI, but creating such effects as CCStepper should be manageable within an hour for anyone who can calculate the sum of numbers from 1 to 64 using Basic/Excel/Any other computer language. So, for enthusiast they will be some toy to experiment with 

scook
The CodeFN42 CCStepper mentioned above is a different matter. Like several other sequencers, it uses MIDI note data for control. I am not sure it makes sense to drop this plug-in into an FX rack which also streams the same data to a synth.

Not always. It can be used generates CC step sequences without any input. So there is no problem on generating additional notes when feeding it back, just CC data.
 

azslow3
3) writing MFX Dx plug-in is not so hard, I think the problem is quite small audience (for example as I see for my MFX Velocity plug-in).
 
4) Lua based MFX processor (as requested by wst3 in another thread) is in active development. There are such projects in VST format. I have not found the same as DX. There will be no GUI, but creating such effects as CCStepper should be manageable within an hour for anyone who can calculate the sum of numbers from 1 to 64 using Basic/Excel/Any other computer language. So, for enthusiast they will be some toy to experiment with 

That is really interesting, thanks!!
I have some programming skill. But never tried plugins programming. May be it is a good time to start it.. =)