Weird midi problem

I have programmed several knobs of a hardware controller to send several cc messages to Cakewalk, and I have found out that for some strange reason, Cakewalk will not see cc 101, out of a fair bunch of them. The controller (an Emu Command Station, actually, but it does not matter) is sending cc 101, and it is correctly detected by Bome Send Syx and by Reaper, but Cakewalk does not see it. The midi activity lights in the midi track light up, so something is arriving there, but nothing gets sent out, or recorded. I have inserted a VST midi monitor in the track (Piz Midi Monitor), and it does not show anything. I have tried sending it from other knobs that work fine with other cc numbers, but cc101 just is ignored. I have also tried to draw the cc 101 in the Controllers pane, and it does not get sent out. Same with the Step Sequencer, cc101 gets ignored for some reason. I am sending 30 other cc numbers correctly, and as far as I can see, everything is fine with them, so I am really puzzled with this.

I have tried this with Sonar Platinum, and with CbB, with a blank project with nothing but a midi track, and same results. This is a new Windows 10 PC with less than one month. As I said above, this works correctly in Reaper, and Bome SendSyx. Any ideas?

Umm...but even so, if I wanted to send the RPN MSB to a synth, it should be possible to do it. It seems as if Sonar/CbB is filtering it. By the way, Rapture Pro standalone works fine with my knobby controller, cc101 included. Waldorf synths, at least a couple I have, use cc101 as fixed controller for Amp Envelope Attack rate. Something good to have a knob or a slider for.

scook
I believe CbB and SONAR expect CC 100 and 101 to be used together. If not sent together, the data is ignored as a bad insttruciton.

Could somebody confirm this? If so, it is an uncalled for limitation, since cc101 is not always reserved for RPN, and most modern synths do not even use RPN's at all. In my case, this just breaks the possibility of remote controlling and automating some synths. Waldorf Largo, Micro Q, Q, and possibly Blofeld use cc101 as fixed controller number for Amp Envelope Attack.

100 (LSB)  & 101 (MSB) are indeed used as 2 halves of a larger amount of data that needs 2 CC's to be able to send the required information (LSB = Least Significant Byte, MSB = Most Significant Byte)
 
Last used it with Roland MT32 sometime in the Last Milleniumn !!! 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
Most likely CbB is receiving the sequence for a valid NRPN and therefore interpreting it as such. You could try looking at this in MIDIOx. I bet you will see it interpreted as a NRPN as well. You can also look at it in the event list view.
 
The convention of a pair of controllers being used to denote RPN's and NRPN's has been in the MIDI spec for decades and every version of Cakewalk has implemented it this way historically. 
 
I suppose there could be a preference to translate CC's to NRPN's but its not like were hijacking them. This is the official MIDI specification behavior.
 
 

Thanks for answering, Noel. I am just sending cc101 values to the synths, not the whole combo needed for an RPN value, so CbB just ignores it. If I manually enter the data, using any method in CbB, those values are also ignored and not sent out.

My point is exactly what Chris above says, it should be converted on destination, if applicable, not by CbB. All those synths I mentioned above, including Blofeld, use controller numbers 38 (OSC FM), 100 (Filter envelope release) and 101 (Amp Envelope Attack). This implementation makes it impossible to automate or remote control those parameters from CbB (or Sonar). Every other program capable of receiving midi that I have currently installed, including Rapture Pro standalone, recognize those cc numbers as controllers by themselves.

I still have my Cakewalk 3.0 (MIDI only) installation files from '90-ties somewhere. Sometimes when working on more specific MIDI problems (like this above) in Sonar, I'm forced to go back to Cakewalk 3.0 to get the job done actually. Never let me down. The way it handles MIDI files always helped me solve the problems I otherwise had in Sonar. It's Event List is showing everything. I always did enter (N)RPN or MSB/LSB and Data Entry even SysEx messages manually there and it worked perfectly. For me it's foolproof when cleaning odd MIDI files or checking if there's something going on wrong or simply managing SysEx banks.