I'm in the process of going through my old projects, some of which used hardware XG or GS synths and trying to get them to work with VSTi's instead.
 
What I'm seeing however, is that none of the program change or bank select messages are being sent to the VSTi's. This is true for both settings on the track inspector, and for embedded program change/bank select messages within the MIDI event list itself - i.e. some of my older projects have program changes mid way through tracks, and these are also being ignored.
 
I'm seeing this with both the TTS-1 and S-YXG50 plugins. To a point, I understand the issue with the S-YXG50 in that it doesn't publish any of its patches, however the TTS-1 does but it still ignores them. In any case, I'd have thought that keeping "Translate Bank/Program Changes" switched off within the plugin properties would mean that Sonar would NOT try to use the VST's published patches, but instead just forward the MIDI messages on.
 
To me, it's behaving as if the "Translate Bank/Program Changes" status within plugin properties is always on even though it's switched off.
 
To prove it's not the plugins themselves, I put them in an external VST host and set them up using a loop-midi port (so that Sonar thinks they're hardware midi devices). This works fine, but obviously the audio output is then not integrated into Sonar.
 
Is there any way around this?
 
If not, I'd like to suggest an enhancement to be able to:
(i) Force plug-ins to accept program/bank (and if possible sysex) messages
(ii) Optionally assign .ins files to VST synths
 
Thanks,
 
Mark.

You definitely can send patch changes to VSTs like the TTS-1. I just tried it and it works just fine.
 
Make sure you are sending the output of the track to the TTS-1 and the channel has to be set to the one you want the patch change to affect.
 
Also look at the event log to make sure you have a proper patch change control message. Click on the message and look at the popup: 
Bank Select Method should be set to Normal*
Bank: Should be one of the TTS-1 Banks, i.e., 15488-Preset Normal 0 
Patch: Should be one of the patches in the above Bank, i.e., SynthBrass1
 
 
 

doh - forgot to set the channel. Thanks daveny5.

Agree with Dave, especially the TTS-1 has always accepted the bank and patch info from track inspector boxes. 
It actually takes those over changes made in the GUI. 
 
Some VST's ignore patch changes and some don't. 
Example True Piano's SI Bass ignore. My Xpand II defiantly accepts as I often replace TTS-1 sound with XpandII. But it is not GM so I have to set the inspector to "none" and use the GUI to set.   
The day's of changing patches mid track are long gone as we have unlimited track count now so there's no reason to use that outdated method. 
 
Did you try toggling that setting your using? I've never used that and as I update my old songs I always change everything anyhow so I generally delete all old PG changes and start fresh. 

Changing the channel sorted the TTS-1.
 
It looks like SPLAT isn't loading up some of my old projects properly, so channel is sometimes going missing, pan is sometimes set to hard left, volume set to 0 etc. I've not seen bank select or program changes getting corrupted so far. Ensuring the others are all set seems to fix it.
 
The S-YXG50 is still problematic in that although it now accepts the bank select/program changes, there's no way of forcing a patch list - so I'm left with using numbers. As a workaround, I've set one of my loopback devices to the XG patchlist and I can toggle back and forth between the MIDI outs (i.e. choose the program with the track set to midiLoop1, then swap it back to S-YXG50 when I play). Having the ability to use .ins definitions on the VST itself would be really useful.
 
I did try toggling the "Translate Bank/Program Changes" setting, but it didn't seem to do much with these VSTs. I suspect it would have a greater effect on others.
 
I'm trying to go pretty much vst only and retire my hardware synths, so I've been going through all my other hardware and sampling my favourite sounds using SampleRobot. The instrument copier function on this is fantastic: I give it a patch list and basic loop settings, go through and change the settings for the one-shot type instruments / really complex pads, and let it do its thing. It takes literally hours (around 30 hours for the last synth I did), but the results are really good.
 
I've ended up using sf2 format (out of convenience more than anything) using SampleLord as the host. I could have used Kontakt or Dimension Pro/Rapture with sfz, but having all the separate samples is unmanagable for the amount of sounds I have (I've got at least 16 hardware synths to sample).
 
For the sampled sounds it's easy as I just load the relevant soundfont and go with it.
 
Most of the XG based stuff I have are just 8 or 16 bar sketches, so although it's a bit of a pain at the moment, moving forward I'll probably convert them all to MIDI clips and start using them from the media browser.
 
M.