so is jamstix currently the only one that can do multiple instances?

That is what I have seen.  
 
I can confirm Jamstix does work, but catanya and reaktor to not allow  multiple instances.  That is on my own rig, Looks like there are others though from other threads that I cannot personally confirm.
 
JR

I wonder if midi from multiple instances would work better if Sonar were temporarily run with cpu affinity set to just CPU 0. And I don't mean as a workaround, but as an experimental data point.

I am travelling on business this week , but will certainly try this out when I get back.
 
I am going to do some stare and compare between Jamstix and Catanya and see if anything else stands out.
 
Thanks

I gave Catanya a test and found settings to reproduce the crash with multiple instances that is happening. I was also able to successfully run multiple instances using more specific MIDI settings. Let me explain...
 
The first track I created with Catanya was feeding true pianos and was set to All Inputs Omni. This caused the Keyboard Midi and The Catanya generated MIDI to be recorded on to the track and yielded the results mentioned where duplicate notes were being recorded and the playback of Catanya wasn't sounding the same as preformed. I then set the Catanya track to the correct A-Pro keyboard port and recorded again and got predictable results. So using "All Inputs Omni" is not going to work for this type of situation unless we make a massive change to our MIDI implementation.
 
From there I was able to get 3 other instances setup and working fine. After adding a 4th instance I ran into a crash on recording that still seemed to be related to the selection of a ports Omni input. I then created a new project with 6 instances going to Addictive Drums, Addictive Keys, SI-Bass, SI Strings, etc., and without issue when I did not use an Omni selection of any ports. The A-Pro was always set to the correct port and Midi Ch. 1 and the Catanya ports selected always corresponded to the correct instance of the plug-in and it's MIDI Ch. 1.
 
We'll continue to investigate and hopefully find a remedy for the crashes related to using Omni ports and plug-ins that send MIDI out but for the time being I recommend selecting the ports very carefully, Only use Auto Input Echo for the inserted instances of Catanya, and frequently saving your projects with these types of plug-ins.
 

good info lance thx

Thanks Lance.
 
I also try to use only single midi channel.  I never intentionally use all inputs Omni, or any input Omni.  I would expect that you would get midi recording where you do not want and possibly overload things or at the very lease cause confusion.
 
What I have noticed, and maybe this part of the issue, is that often times even though I select only single channel midi input to trigger a synth ((ie) Catanya-1 ch-1), Sonar seems to randomly switch the input to All Omni or the first device in the midi list Omni (in my case OCTA-CTRL Omni).  It seems that often times when you make a change on any midi track in a priject all the others will switch sometimes to Omni input.
 
When I am home I will try to confirm what you have seen on my rig.
 
JR
 

So long story short, a midi loop?

I have seen many, if not all of these symptoms on my projects.
 
Some involve Reaktor as a MIDI generator, others using Fractal Tune Smithy as an external MIDI source, others with Kontakt set up as a MIDI THRU device and with that channel having MIDI Out enabled.
 
Sometimes I need to exceed a magic number of tracks - one track or two always work, but three or four won't with crashes seemingly more frequent as the number grow.
 
I am quite careful to select MIDI in ports and channels on these types of tracks, but I swear that sometimes Sonar changes them to OMNI when I'm not looking, as JR notes above.
 
The crashes are almost always the same - everything works fine, then suddenly - no sound, no Sonar response, Sonar windows turns white and reports no response, can't kill it in Task Manager (or wait about 5 or 10 minutes and it may die). There is no indication of a MIDI Loop (in the sense that the MIDI levels seem normal and there are no note doubling or unnatural timings before the crash).
 
Every time I try to investigate to reproduce the problem, I seem to encounter one or more weird behaviors (Like the channels turning into OMNI or other ports getting altered).
 
Also, for the few times I tried to reproduce this in X2 I never ran into any crashes - maybe some things didn't work, but I never got a crash.
 
This has been very frustrating and I almost thought I was going bananas or having bizarre hardware problems or computer viruses until I read that others have something similar occurring.

bvideo
So long story short, a midi loop?

Or infinite MIDI loop.