I'm still struggling to get to know X2a Producer a bit better, but I keep running into road blocks. The latest is not being able to find out any information on a couple of Cakewalk synths beyond the sketchy details that are provided in the tutorials here and in Cakewalk's help and tutorials.
 
It states as plain as day on the page here listing all the Cakewalk synths that pressing F1 will access a synth's online help,
Well, I haven't tried doing it with all of them, but I have tried it with three: Dropzone, TTS-1, and Rapture. And none of them produce any sign of a help window or anything.  I've even tried doing a search here at the website for "dropzone help" and "dropzone online help" (w/o quotes), etc. To no avail.
 
So what's the secret?  How do I access a synth's online help?
 

Not sure about the online help but...
 
These softsynths are covered in detail in the book "Cakewalk Synthesizers" by Simon Cann.
 
There is a PDF manual for Rapture.

Hello Kev, thanks for the response. Before I go and invest in a book, I want to be able to exploit the resources that are supposed to be available. As it so happens, with the current project I'm working on, I need more info on Dropzone, but Rapture is definitely one that I want to know more about. However, I still want to be able to access its online help by pressing the F1 key. Or by pressing or typing whatever -- if there is indeed an "online help" I want to access it.

Hummm...  Interesting..
 
Dim Pro and Rapture don't seem to have any on-line help on my system.  I wonder if this is a distribution problem or a bug?
 
Glen

Try clicking on the program name in the right-hand side of the plug-in UI (brings up the synth splash page) then hit the F1 key. If that does not work, the help for DimPro and Rapture are in the install directories, "C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Dimension Pro\Documentation" and "C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Rapture\Documentation" respectively. Also the help file went missing a while back for DimPro so it was posted on the support page as a download http://www.cakewalk.com/Support/kb/reader.aspx/2007013200. Most other plug-ins have the help file in the same directory with the plug-in dll.

Scook, thanks very much for your tips. Getting the Splash screen to display and then clicking on F1 worked for Rapture and DropZone. I couldn't get a splash screen to dispay with TTS-1, and then I noticed a tiny little button on the bottom right of the device, just below the master volume slider, that says HELP. I clicked on it and it booted its Help file into my browser. I just tried Cakewalk Sound Center, and surprise, surprise, F1 works as advertized with it. It's help routine is very brief, however, and is of no help to me.
 
Unfortunately for my purposes, the Help routine for DropZone is also quite small. I just started reading through it about five minutes ago, and I've already completed scanning through it, looking to see if it addresses the question(s) I have. And it doesn't. So it looks like I'll get to post another set of noob questions to the group.
 
 

TTS-1 is a very old plug-in (still a very useful one that Cakewalk maintains) and as you have discovered has a unique approach for it's help.  The sound center is nothing more than a DimPro and Rapture preset player. I don't use DropZone, development stopped on that synth quite a while ago.

scook
Try clicking on the program name in the right-hand side of the plug-in UI (brings up the synth splash page) then hit the F1 key. If that does not work, the help for DimPro and Rapture are in the install directories, "C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Dimension Pro\Documentation" and "C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Rapture\Documentation" respectively. Also the help file went missing a while back for DimPro so it was posted on the support page as a download . Most other plug-ins have the help file in the same directory with the plug-in dll.

Thanks, scook! I have been searching for this and didn't think to look in the most obvious place :P

scook
TTS-1 is a very old plug-in (still a very useful one that Cakewalk maintains) and as you have discovered has a unique approach for it's help.  The sound center is nothing more than a DimPro and Rapture preset player. I don't use DropZone, development stopped on that synth quite a while ago.

Well, I don't have the perspective that you Sonar experts have. I'm not aware of the history or lineage of any of the synths or other add-ons for Sonar. Because of this I had to catalog all the sounds that my installed synths can produce -- well not all of them, but the ones that sounded like they could be halfway applicable to anything I might write. So I sat down with a pen and notebook and listened to every patch in every synth I have installed, and wrote out the names of the ones I liked, plus using a 1 to 4 star grading system, I assigned a value to each, with the 4-start ones being heavily biased toward my needs at present. It's a bit cumbersome, but it makes for a decent reference.