John
I hope this will finally put to rest that Sonar still uses a VST wrapper. 

I actually thought the whole DAW was in a wrapper

Thanks for the info Noel. Wrt silent buffer flagging, is that related to why the .ini file zero fill buffers option parameter setting in Sonar no longer seems to be present?

This should be a sticky.

I'm not sure what ini file setting specifically you are referring to. There may have been an earlier setting that is now obsolete since I don't see anything configurable related to zero filling presently.
The silent buffer flagging actually relies on our internal zero fill flag that we have had from the 90's! Our old DX SDK had this capability much before VST, so the engine was already silent buffer aware. All we do now is propagate that state to the VST3 plugins so that they can take advantage of it.

Guitarmech111
Thanks Noel, can you specify what vendors you sent this to, if any?

I haven't sent this directly to many vendors since I only wrote this last week. I have shared some of this info on a piecemeal basis with a few of them in the past while troubleshooting, so figured it would be better to have this info in a central place.
 
BTW I updated the article yesterday to include some more information on how to get logging information from the scanner. The next update will also include some more extensive logging that was added to the scanner.

Man, if all this is true then why does SONAR have so much trouble picking up VST changes? Updated plugs, newer versions, upgraded SONAR versions...they all seem to produce random loss of attachment to the VST. And then your presets are totally hosed. Even if just that piece of data were accessible you could recreate projects in case of total meltdown. I've had several instances of even something like Rapture, in a rebuilt DAW it simply will not recognize Rapture. Hitting "replace synth" will do that, but you lose all the patch info. 

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]

Guitarmech111
Thanks Noel, can you specify what vendors you sent this to, if any?

I haven't sent this directly to many vendors since I only wrote this last week. I have shared some of this info on a piecemeal basis with a few of them in the past while troubleshooting, so figured it would be better to have this info in a central place.
 
BTW I updated the article yesterday to include some more information on how to get logging information from the scanner. The next update will also include some more extensive logging that was added to the scanner.

thanks Noel.

Is it OK to mix VST 2.4 and VST 3 plugins in the same project? 

In general yes from SONAR's point of view it makes no difference if you mix and match VST2 and VST3 plugins. 
However some vendors such as Waves don't support simultaneously running VST2 and VST3 versions of their plugins.

Thank you Noel very much. I was trying to avoid the mixing but I do not have Waves plugins. I did vaguely recall that there was a problem with VST 2.4 and 3 being together. Now I recall the full thing as referring to Waves.
 
Thanks again. Now I can go hog wild with mixing and matching. LOL