[Workaround] Problem opening Sonar 4 projects in Sonar X3

Hi,
 
I've just upgraded to Sonar X3 Producer, and I'm having trouble opening projects created in Sonar 4.  Seems that audio files work fine, but I'm getting a Missing Plug-Ins warning (Kontakt, Waves, Dreamstation, etc.).  I've added appropriate folders to the VST Scan Paths, but just can't get things to work.
I'm hoping someone out there may know what's going on....would like to move on from troubleshooting to making music.
 
Thanks!
 
-Brian

Its likely the old plugins were DX and the reason Sonar is not seeing them is its looking for DX plugins that are 64 bits if X3 is also 64 bits. 

SONAR 4 was released almost 10 years ago. Its not surprising to me at plugins referenced by those projects fail to load. Do you still have SONAR 4 installed on your machine and do the projects load with plugins intact inside SONAR 4?
If they do load within SONAR 4 that means that the plugins do exist on your machine. If not then you do not have the same versions of the plugins installed any more and will have to manually insert alternative versions. If the projects used VST plugins, SONAR 4 used a vst wrapper at the time. However X3 should generally still be able to load the plugin to the project, provided the plugins in question actually exist on your system in the VST scan path that X3 is using.

@wicked - that's a great idea.  Maybe you can submit a Feature Request for this.
 
Bob Bone
 

So Noel, please clarify - is the name of the preset displayed in situations where the proxy is in place due to the plugin not being found?  
 
Bob Bone
 

Noel, can you elaborate on "proxy plugin"? I don't understand that. It seems like it would be quite useless since the "Replace Synth" command doesn't try and pull the preset info when it loads. This has also proven to be quite troublesome because I can get a proper real updated version of a plugin to load fine but SONAR won't recognize it as the same one that's already loaded in a project. Thus, the preset it still lost. If that data still exists and is present in the project file, it would be fantastic to capture and be able to export it, even as a generic VST preset that we can manually open instead. We're not talking even simple synth sounds keep in mind, but these can represent complex sampler presets...which if unable to be recovered could totally kill a track. (hip hop guys back me up here!)
 

Its generally quite meaningless to try and load a preset from one plugin to another which is why replace synth does nothing with the saved info. Attempting to load one plugins data to another will either fail or crash that plugin. Even if its a different version of the same plugin its unlikely to work if the plugin ID was intentionally changed by the vendor.
 
The "proxy" is the placeholder missing plugin that SONAR uses when loading projets that contain missing plugins.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too, Bob.   And for an updated version of the same plugin, the preset name could be enough to restore the desired output.   Code-wise, of course, I'd no idea what it would take. 
 

Well, in general terms, they are already building a message box to post the fact that the plugin is missing, and to the best of my knowledge that preset info is stored within the project, so I would GUESS it would mean appending the preset name to the 'missing' message.
 
IF the above is correct, then I would not think it very involved to add, but I have no idea how they constructed the section of code that generates the plugin missing message.
 
In any case, I DO think it would be helpful to have that info presented, in that situation.
 
Bob Bone
 

OTOH, the preset info that Sonar stores, may only be able to be read by the missing plugin. Therefore, there would be no way for Sonar to know how to read that info.

This may be another case where a utility to read a cwp file and generate a document containing the project information would prove useful.

Having a mass plugin replace for all instances of a missing plugin would be useful. However regarding the preset data I'm not sure what that would achieve even if you could get an fxp for each missing plugin in the project.
 
As I mentioned earlier, the chances are very slim that a newer version would read it if the vendor no longer supports the old version so what would you do with that FXP? You have no way of reading the parameter information from it and translating to the new plugin easily.

It would be useful to have the facility to replace a missing DXi synth with an existing VSTi version and keep the same settings.  I have lots of projects in which I have used DXi versions of DimPro, Rapture, Z3ta+, SampleTank, Miroslav and Battery 3 and most of these synths are now VSTi only.