Who hasn't opened an old Sonar song only to find there are missing plugins? You might no longer have those plugins installed. Or your new system doesn't have that plugin installed and you can no longer download it because the developer went out of business, or the new version isn't compatible with the old song. Whatever the reason, you no longer have the plugin and now you have a problem.
 
Since many plugins are portable, why not have an option to archive a song, including all of its plugins? Sonar would then save all those plugin DLLs into the project bundle so that years later when you unarchive it, it restores the plugins to some temp location and then re-scans them.
 
Of course there could be problems, not the least which are:

• Licensing and registration issues. Not sure plugin developers would allow something like that. The possibility exists that you can now give the song archive to someone else who then suddenly have plugins they did not pay for. Plugins that need to be registered/activated could revert to their trial state.
• Plugins often contain extra data stored in the registry or somewhere else. That will not be copied of course so will probably render the plugin unusable.
• Won't work with plugins that have more advanced installers that installs additional files. This includes samplers etc.

 
But even so, many plugins can be revived from the dead if it doesn't have any of those restrictions and consists of a single DLL. Maybe there should be some way for the plugin to have an "Archive Allowed" flag that indicates that the plugin can safely and legally be archived and then restored later. Most simple free plugins would work in this scenario.
 
Just a thought...

Or it could store it's own wrapped version with only the linked presets/files/samples and such so that you could at least replay anything required or remix the project at a later date.

I have hit this problem many times, I've yet to be able to resolve the issue with some of my projects sadly. Searching the CWP for the presets on the synths is the one way i've been told of to find them, but isn't always possible it seems.

I think the easiest/direct way to save against this possibility is to freeze/convert to audio all tracks...although it does lock u in...

Vastman
...although it does lock u in...

Just like tape
 
I've gotten into archiving to audio when a project is finished for two reasons. First, you avoid the "doesn't load later" problem. Second, I want to psychologically be able to say "That song's finished" and move on, not second-guess myself about "should I have used a different amp sim tone on the guitar?"
 
If all else fails, I figure I cut the track once before, I can probably cut it again.

Anderton

Vastman
...although it does lock u in...

Just like tape
 
I've gotten into archiving to audio when a project is finished for two reasons. First, you avoid the "doesn't load later" problem. Second, I want to psychologically be able to say "That song's finished" and move on, not second-guess myself about "should I have used a different amp sim tone on the guitar?"
 
If all else fails, I figure I cut the track once before, I can probably cut it again.

Yup, this is good but if you have a song you have forgotten about or have only started working on a few small sections utilising vst's, it would be nice to be able to go back and avoid the issue of "plugin not found".
I've done it in the past when having written a few tracks and due to time constraints and work, was unable to crack on and finish them. Then having some issues with the hard drive I had done a clean install on a new one, only to find after installing all my plugins and updates, that the plugin could no longer be found, even though it was installed and worked perfectly.

I move on - things more than 6 months past completion are archived off the hard drive, and if I ever needed to restore something from way back when and it had missing plugins, I would not lose a moment of sleep over it.
 
It's not really different than it used to be with analog effects and hardware synths, in the days of tape.  If gear was no longer available there was nothing you could do about it, and the entire industry survived in that mode for quite a long time.
 
Bob Bone
 

Other than plugins included in Sonar, I think Cake should just keep the plugins from previous versions in the newer versions instead of replacing them with newer plugins. It's a real pain to have to install the plugins from earlier versions if it's even possible for some versions.

I guess one way to get close to the same behavior is to manually archive your plugin folders from time to time and keep it around. That way at least if you do want to go back to an old song, chances are you have the missing plugins in one of your archives and can restore them to a temp location and do a rescan.
 
I do keep incremental backups of my DAW system so I could retrieve the plugins I need that way I guess, but it would be nice to have some sort of automated way to manage it via Sonar.
 
BTW the reason I ran into this problem was because I was going through some old Sonar project files and found an mp3 of a song I was experimenting with about 8 years ago. I thought it would be great to continue working on it but almost all the plugins are now missing.

One thing I think people forget is that this isn't "Yesterday" this is "Today" lol. It's nice to reminisce back to the times when you had to just suck it up or search for miles around to find the effects units/mics/synths or whatever if you wanted to rework a project as faithfully (sounds wise) to the original as possible, but with the ability to add more or tweak it up.
But this is today, where we should be able to recall pretty much anything, we shouldn't be hitting stumbling blocks like "plugin not found" just because you've updated your system or the plugins have become outdated and now have superseding versions which sonar won't pick up on....hell, if it did pick up on it, then I'd bet there would be no need for this or many of the other threads relating to that pain in the backside of a message.

Anyone heard of Documentation? Sonar has always had a means to keep notes. Nothing is stopping one from keeping settings and FX type as notes.  This can not be left behind and will allow one to deal with this issue. But you have to take notes.