I think it may be a learning process .
I used to have a bunch of the free / low cost plugs and synths on my older computers .
it got to be a real pain weeding out the turds from the diamonds .
imho….sometimes "free " is the highest price a person can pay for something
On my current Win 8 machine I was very pleased to have done my best to keep my X3 install lean and mean .
the only 2 plugs that i added that to me were holdovers / keepers are the VC 64 and the MPL-1 ….
everything else that I added to my X3 install came from Cakewalk and IK …..( so far
)
I have a few other DAW programs that get a lot of use around here , many of their plugs have shown up in my plugin mgr…it is very rare that I use them in SONAR …they are there . I much prefer to use them in the apps they came with .
one nice thing that I'm pretty happy about …the stuff thats locked to X3 is locked and the stuff that isn't locked to X3 is free to roam around freely ..
I happen to like that because a number of the bread and butter Cakewalk plugs and synths do show up in my other music apps ..
Kenny