• SONAR
  • Enable Midi Out VSTi Issues - Attention Ryan Munnis
2013/11/08 08:04:51
auto_da_fe
Been a lot of traffic on these issues lately so I thought I would provide a separate summary to help out:
 
As a disclaimer - "enable midi out"  here is being used only on Vsti plug ins that self generate their own midi data.  There is no keyboard or any other hardware device needed to create midi data.  Such VSTi are Catanya, Harmonizer, Reaktor (there a bunch of different Arps in the suite), Jamstix, (and many others).  While you can turn enable midi out on any VSTi, that does not mean there will be any midi actually coming out (Dimension Pro, rapture, etc.) and therefore in these cases you would not see any issue either (unless you are trying to chain a bunch of synths together see issue 3)  It should be noted that other DAWs do not have these issues and that has fueled a certain amount of heat.  Also, every one of these below has a tech support case or multiple tech support cases already opened.  Finally, none of these issues below trigger cakewalk problem reporter so there is nothing to send in which I think has caused some churn as well.
 
1) Midi X-Talk - (Basically Sonar was not keeping midi data output from the vsti's separate and was mixing it all together)  this was diagnosed and reproduced in Sonar X1 and X2  (there is a youtube video showing this).  Supposed to have been fixed in X3c.  And.....I think it has been fixed....Yay !  At first it looked like it had not been fixed, i think that is because I was using old projects created before X3c.  Last night I started brand new test projects and inserted 3 instances of Jamstix and 1 instance of Catanya.  Jamstix was triggering Battery, EZ Drummer, Addictive Drums.   Catanya was triggering both Rapture and Dimension Pro.  It played perfectly.  And when I recorded midi on the soft synth simple instrument tracks, the midi recorded was only the midi output supplied by the correct Jamstix and Catanya midi in.   The recorded midi was not a jumbled up mix of all the midi VSTis together.   So it looks like the issue is fixed, but you may have to delete all the vsti's from old projects and re-insert.  Also not sure if an older vsti track template will bring the issue back with or not either, but I will try to confirm. So this is encouraging and will continue to check it out.
 
2) eMOFO (enable midi out freeze occurance) - this is an issue where having multiple instances of catanya or reaktor triggering a softsynth freezes Sonar to the point that you have to restart your PC. (even using task manager you cannot stop Sonarprd process)  Again search the forums for this issue.  Interesting thing I have noticed....Catanya and Reaktor still cause this issue in X3c.  However Jamstix, which is functionally the same idea  ( I think ?), does not crash Sonar X3c when you have more than 1 instance running.  Last night I had 3 instances of Jamstix triggering 3 drum synths (as noted above) and 1 instance of Catanya.  Stopped and started it numerous times, changed patches on the fly no issues.  However, as soon as I added a second instance of Catanya, Sonar crashed hard.  Maybe this is a clue as to why this happens, what does Jamstix do differently than Catanya or Reaktor when it is outputting midi data ?  Maybe it is not important ?  Don't know.  Users have shown that other DAWs can handle unlimited instances and run no problems.   
 
3) Enable Midi out as midi through put - This was only raised yesterday.  I have no experience with this, but a user was expecting that you could daisy chain multiple vsti soft synths together using enable midi out.  I confirmed that things do not work that way, but I do not know if that is a bug or designed that way or the vsti themselves that do support this.  Definitely Dim Pro and Rapture do not do this.  I was able to confirm that a single plug like catanya can trigger mulitple synths.  And of course, you can have a single hardware device trigger multiple devices, but that is not what the user was looking to do.  (at least this is how I understood things...)  Again, looks like other DAWs do this but not Sonar.
 
Fixing 1 is great, looking to see what happens with 2 and 3.
 
Hope this helps....
2013/11/08 08:32:22
Grem
Great post. Hopefully someone with CW will chime in here.
2013/11/08 08:48:44
lawp
wrt 2) noel explicitly stated somewhere that he used jamstix to debug this stuff, so maybe he introduced some jamstix-specific change that doesn't help the others?
2013/11/08 10:56:55
Foster Mansfield
Totally with you on this ! Midi out is a complete mess with Cantanya et al ....... Ableton is easy Ins/Outs/ Fl Studio easy ( Wrapper) . What gives ??? I at first also "thought" it had been fixed but nope . Here's Hoping - good blog by the way :)  
2013/11/08 11:09:21
lawp
yeah, i have no trubs in s1 or live... if the effort to update/fix the engine is "too much" business-decision-wise, maybe just a prevention of inserting more than one to avoid ugly crashing would be useful?
2013/11/08 11:21:45
stoutlyric
Thanks so much for pushing this, It has been an issue since before sonar 8.
2013/11/08 20:06:29
shmuelyosef
This all worked great in the Pro Audio series; originally Cakewalk was firmly rooted in MIDI...that was all they did in the early days, as I recall. 
2013/11/10 19:47:34
auto_da_fe
Wow this is really sucking up a lot of my time....
 
here is the latest weirdness with catanya using enable midi out.  Catanya will play in real time and sound just like I want it.  because I can only have one instance of catanya  (otherwise Sonar crashes), I have to record midi.  When I record the midi output from catanya and have the recorded midi trigger the soft synth, it sounds awful, not at all like catanya direct triggering.
 
So I start looking in PRV and see a whole bunch of tiny little midi notes.  They are so small I cannot even edit them, I can lasso and delete them and that is all.  Then I look in event viewer and see random notes showing up all over the place with various velocities but 0 duration. The notes are in the correct key.....WTF....once I delete all these 0 duration notes, things sound correct.
 
So I am now using a midi event filter on the recorded catanya output (filter out all notes with 0 to 10 ticks duration)  and it sounds like it should.
 
There is some seriouly weird sh*t going on with midi routing in Sonar X3c.
 
JR
 
 
2013/11/11 03:12:09
Living Room Rocker
+2 on the great post, Jeff.  I also had the same issue with the extra "hidden" MIDI notes with 0 duration.  However, I cannot recall how it came about.  I will check some of my recent projects and look into this.  Nonetheless, I can confirm this strange phenomenon.
 
Kind regards,
 
Living Room Rocker
2013/11/11 09:03:42
cliffr
Still having complete crashes in X3c if I enable Midi-Out on multiple instances of the MusicLab stuff. Haven't tried anything else.
 
Sonar completely locks up, and windows becomes very unresponsive with Sonar cranking the CPU.
 
I was hoping this would be fixed given the updates.
 
Cheers - Cliff
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