I own Alchemy(and love it) and a bunch of Alchemy libraries. Alchemy sold to Apple this year and no PC updates to Alchemy are likely to ever occur again. Apple is offering an updated version of Alchemy plus what appears to be every library created for Alchemy in a product called MainStage for $30. I have a Mac Mini that I use mainly as a video slave for scoring, but I also have VSL installed on the Mac and occasionally use the Mac as a remote synth host.
 
Has anyone successfully used Sonar as a master that is used to control Mainstage (and Alchemy) through a LAN connected Mac? What was your approach?
 
Thanks!

Bump

OS X has a MIDI network driver built in. Help for it is in the help for the Audio MIDI setup application.
 
Windows, as far as I know, does not have a built in MIDI network driver. There is a third party MIDI network application available here - http://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/rtpmidi.html. It looks like it should do the necessary stuff at the PC end.
 
Another option is to put a MIDI interface on the PC and another on the MAC then connect them by MIDI cables. That should work, and is what OS X's help suggests if using a LAN isn't possible.
 
I don't have MainStage, but basically it's a live optimised version of Logic Pro which I do have. Logic's very controllable indeed via MIDI so I would imagine MainStage is as well.

Thank you for the response. I really appreciate you taking time to answer.
 
The midi aspect of this is not an issue because I already use the rtp-midi app you mentioned in order to send midi to the MacMini (that's how the MacMini is synced with Sonar when the Mac is used as a video slave). The issue is sending the _audio_ from MainStage over LAN to Sonar.
 
I sometimes use Vienna Ensemble Pro as a synth host on the Mac. It creates it's own LAN connection which carries both the midi data and audio data between the two machines. I can't use VEP for this particular application because the synths in MainStage are 'hardwired' to only be used inside MainStage.
 
Just hoped someone might have already tried using the MainStage synths remotely with Sonar.
 
 

Wish I could help you out , Yet,  I'm sure my approach is "somewhat probably not " what you are looking to do ..
I use my i Mac all the time w SONAR where it triggers instruments in MainStage …
Since I have no midi over Lan over here , I treat this combination as if I'm running my Mac as a hardware synth Via midi where SONAR triggers everything I want or need in MainStage ….
Over here both the PC and the Mac have their own USB sound cards . My MS synth renders are done in real time as audio going back into SONAR …
Since Logic is a DAW I also have , if I want to I can just send a stem mix over and work in Logic with all the instruments .
I get the feeling you may only have MainStage w out Logic at this point ? MainStage is a fantastic program , one of my all time  Fave's 
 
 
Kenny

Ah, audio over LAN.

You've got me a bit curious if this can be done now.

Don't know if it's any good for your purposes, but this claims to be able to do it -

http://www.kvraudio.com/product/wormhole_by_plasq

THANKS FOR THAT LINK TLW!!!
 
 

Thank you all for the suggestions. Thought I would follow up. Wormhole turned out _not_ to be the solution for me. In order to run the latest version of Mainstage 3 (the one that included Alchemy 2), I was forced to upgrade OSX. El Capitan is much less forgiving of Audio Units plugins. Several of my Native Instruments AUs disappeared along with Wormhole. I found an open source app called 'Jack' that looked promising. I was able to get it working sending audio from the Mac to the PC. Unfortunately, Jack on PC creates it's own virtual ASIO interface and prevents my 'real' ASIO interface from showing up in Sonar. So... that didn't work either.
 
I bought a Coboc s/pdif adapter from NewEgg. The optical out from the Mac is split into optical and coax s/pdif at the adapter. Optical feeds my digital line mixer (as was the case before) and the new coax s/pdif signal goes to the audio interface. So... I have low-latency monitoring through the digital line mixer _and_ the ability to record the Mac output in Sonar.
 
 
 
 

My upgrade to El Capitan went pretty smoothly. All the AUs worked (mostly Apple, Waves, BozDigital and Melda), but my MOTU MIDI interface's driver locked the cpu solidly to 100%. MOTU got a working beta out within a week, but plugin and hardware manufacturers know when a major OS upgrade is coming for months and really should be ready for it.

Windows isn't immune to the same sort of problems either of course. But we're now in a world of pushed OS updates, especially Windows 10 home version so I just hope the software and hardware producers get their collective act together. "Sorry, our expensive product no longer works, don't know when it will, yes we knew about the problems months ago" isn't the most reassuring approach to customer relations.

Still, you got things working. Old fashioned solutions involving cables, connectors and adaptors have a lot to be said for them.