I can certainly understand having locked plug-ins from the business point of view.
 
But what if I load Kore, Maschine, Bidule or some such (DAW-like) plug-in in Sonar and then try to put one of these inside it? No-go.
 
They say they won't work unless I am using Sonar, which I am.
 
I think this is wrong.

Well these plugins act like a host so from the point of view of the plugin it is not running inside SONAR.
Unless these plugins behave like SONAR there is no way around this.

kore you can load as a vst instead of sonar anyway.. and maybe maschine ?  if your using kore2 still , then you'll (like I have) issues with the cakewalk custom patch browser as kore looks for fxp's etc. and I can't create a patch list due to that.
 
other makers in some cases , do the same thing with the locking.. because it's a special version for that specific company...
 

It's not worth quibbling about this because I know I won't win, but shouldn't the license detector just check to see what process it is running under?
If it's 'SONARPDR.exe' allow it to run. 

Its not quite as simple as knowing what process its running in unfortunately since there is a handshake for the licence detection. So unless the handshake happens it wont work. I think most locking schemes like this will fail.
Bitbridge is an exception since it follows the same rules that SONAR does. 

can you achieve the same result with bus sends?

swamptooth
can you achieve the same result with bus sends?

I wish I could.
 
Perhaps it is my misunderstanding of Sonar Routing and someone can straighten me out.
 
As I understand it, Sonar has no MIDI busses, just audio busses. And busses have no record capabilities, just audio routing.
 
I would like to have a midi controller send to a VST instrument (or groups of instruments) and simultaneous send the data to a VST effect (or group of effects).
 
If I put a VST on an instrument track and place an audio effect in an FX chain on Prochannel for that track, I can never see the track midi data in the FX chain.
 
So I resort to Plogue Bidule to do the audio and MIDI routing and put the VST instruments and effect inside it in a Sonar track.
 
As a simple example: Put in a VST instrument and use the MeldaProduction MMultiBandComb. Try to get the comb filters to follow the MIDI data. Is it possible to do this in Sonar alone? I could not figure out how to do that. I would appreciate anyone enlightening me and be very grateful.
 
 

As I look at that picture I can't help but think that most DAWs are modeled on the old-style studio monitors with their hard-wired but switchable internal busses.
A more 'modern' approach would be like Bidule's graphical orientation - the busses could be connected visually and inserts added graphically.
It would be a nice addition to Sonar to replace all it's routing stuff with a graphical connection diagram. Probably a major, major impact, though.
What I didn't show about Bidule is that OSC connections work the same way.
 

Is Plogue the only plugin host you are using? I know the Plogue developers well. Maybe I can ask them to implement the plugin authentication protocol if its convenient for them.

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
Is Plogue the only plugin host you are using? I know the Plogue developers well. Maybe I can ask them to implement the plugin authentication protocol if its convenient for them.

+1