I watched recently cool Sonar tutorial with Analyst AN-879 (CW own) plugin used for playing with envelope automation - pretty creative tool. I think Analyst was included in X1 and X2 and then gone. Couldn't find explanation from CW why it was ditched neither what has replaced it. Any idea ?

If you've got one of those older versions of Sonar, you can still install it individually. Otherwise, Voxengo makes a great freeware spectrum analyzer, SPAN, though I'm not sure whether you'd be able to use it to do the trick you saw in that video.

Thanks, do you mean if I reinstall old X2 and grap just Analyst it's .dll file will end up on Platinum effects list?

No, you don't even have to install the program. You can do a custom install of the plugin only.

That would be cool, thanks. I just can't figure out why people here are not hollering about Analyst being ditched since you can do amazing creative things with it, that other analyzers can't.

i also don;t understand why they dropped it?

Neither do I. I keep lobbying to have it put back in but as I've pointed out, I'm not a Cakewalk employee so I don't have much leverage. The only reason I can think of is that they're trying to cull out the 32-bit plug-ins, slowly but surely. Running 32-bit plug-ins in a 64-bit environment is a kludge, and affects stability. It makes SONAR look bad compared to programs that run exclusively as a 64-bit environment.
 
I'd prefer they update the Analyst to 64 bits, but don't know what's involved in that.

Analyst is a 32 and 64bit DirectX plug-in. Dropping the plug-in could still be stability or maintenance related.