williamcopper
Thanks for the investigating.   I wonder if Finale would work this way too?   If all the VSTs are loaded into Sonar, it mightn't really matter that Finale was 32 bit ...

I think Finale can output to LoopBE, but cannot use Rewire.  What happens if you send MIDI into Sonar without Rewire happening?  Does it just render without advancing the time line?  Can you record any of that in Sonar?

Just for fun, I set up loopMIDI between Cubase 8 and Sonar Platinum.    With cubase sending midi, sonar receiving it.   Set input echo to ON for the  sonar midi track, routed that track to a VST (Kontakt 5) in Sonar.    
 
If I then record on the midi track, it captures all the midi data; at the same time the VST plays audio.   [edit] .. maybe not ... I can record the midi data OR I can route the midi data to the VST and hear audio; so far have not succeeded in doing both at the same time.
 
With an audio loopback, the audio could be directly recorded, or the midi as recorded in sonar could then be used in a bounce or freeze.     This is looking promising ... one reason I like finale (or sibelius) is that simple note entry is very fast.     Looking into midi sync now .. Sonar has an option to send sync messages, but no options regarding receiving them ...
 

As far as I know Rewire does the synchronising of transport and passes audio between applications.

Rewire will not work if the host and slave don't operate at the same bit depth. Having said that Loopbe1 is only presenting MIDI ports which should care less about the bit depth of either end of a virtual MIDI cable.

This is good stuff guys!

williamcopper
With an audio loopback, the audio could be directly recorded, or the midi as recorded in sonar could then be used in a bounce or freeze.     This is looking promising ... one reason I like finale (or sibelius) is that simple note entry is very fast.     Looking into midi sync now .. Sonar has an option to send sync messages, but no options regarding receiving them ...

So I can record the MIDI, but the measures won't necessarily line up?  Is that the gist of it?
 
And if I record the MIDI into SONAR, then I should be able to render it to a WAV from SONAR using all the normal features of Sonar, right?
 
This isn't a great solution for Finale, but I can see that working as a way to get access to more VSTis and VST effects while still composing in Finale.
 
BTW, as I recently upgraded to Sibelius 8 (from an ancient 1.2 release), I wrote up my observations about how Finale 2014 and Sibelius 8 compare today:
 
http://forum.makemusic.co....aspx?f=5&m=456655

williamcopper
I wonder if Finale would work this way too?  

I did some testing with Finale2014 and LoopBE.
 
I was able to get something, but basically Finale seems to be pretty close to useless in this area.  In Finale, MIDI Device Setup, it sees LoopBE, but when you try to assign your MIDI output banks to LoopBE, it keeps reverting to either <none> or Smartsynth.
 
Even though the dialog didn't show it setting to LoopBE, it actually did sort of set it to LoopBE, but would never save that setting, so you would have to go back in every time you loaded a document.
 
That's not the biggest problem though.  My Finale music was a quartet.  I set up 4 MIDI tracks in Sonar and mapped their inputs to LoopBE channels 1 through 4.  The outputs were sent to the first 4 channels of an Aria (multi) instance. And the outputs were each directed to a separate Sonar track (1/2, 3/4, 5/6, and 7/8).
 
In this configuration I could never get more than ONE channel to show in Sonar.  At first it was the 4th part (channel 4).  Then I set the second voice to channel 8 and adjusted the MIDI input in Sonar.  At that point, voice 1 (?!) began receiving MIDI, but not the other three.
 
Next I killed 3 of the Sonar MIDI tracks and set the Finale outputs back to channels 1-4.  For the one remaining MIDI track in Sonar, I set it to accept all channels from LoopBE.  And I set the output of the MIDI channel to go to all Aria channels.  At that point, all 4 voices came through and ended up on their separate channels out of Aria. 
 
In this configuration, I recorded the MIDI.  Then I looked at the event list, which showed indeed that the MIDIs came in on channels 1-4 exactly as expected, so I am completely at a loss as to why I couldn't do this with 4 individual MIDI channels.  There were not changes to the Finale setup between those two tests.
 
(Recording of MIDI worked OK.  When you start recording, the transport starts advancing.  The measures don't match Finale of course, so you can't do anything like quantize.)
 
Anyway, if I can't separate each incoming MIDI channel out to its own MIDI track, then I will only really be able to use one synth (i.e. Aria player) which really doesn't help much.  I guess I could test with LoopMIDI to see if that works any better.
 
I didn't have any of these quirks with Sibelius.  Sibelius worked as expected.
 
Are there any "pro grade" virtual MIDI packages out there?  I'd hope to find one that gives real time visualization of what MIDI traffic is happening and where it is flowing.