I just bought a couple of the Blue Cat Audio plug-ins Cakewalk is promo-ing.  They are available as DirectX, VST, and AAX for Win-64 (what I'm using.)  The Blue Cat website recommends Direct X for Cakewalk platforms -- but don't I want to use the VST format?

SONAR should work equally well with both DX and VST. If it were my choice, I would use VST.

Cakewalk introduced VST capability by buying FXpansion's wrapper technology to make VST look like DX.
 
SONAR may have something new going on but I guess Blue Cat's recommendation is based on the notion that you can bypass the wrapping and get straight to the code.
 
 
best regards,
mike
 
 
 
 

That makes sense, thanks.  If it makes no difference I think I'll stick with VST for consistency in what I'm doing.

I consider the plugins my actuall tools - daws I can shift.
 
I would go VST - since in my experience is that DX is not so well implemented in other daws. Sudden freezes and such and format is pretty much abandoned.
 
Hopefully you can install any format - buying, or I would stay away. That you don't buy a particular format of the products from Blue Cat Audio, I mean.

I was under the thought that DXi did not work in 64-bit Sonar.
 
Bob Bone
 

robert_e_bone
I was under the thought that DXi did not work in 64-bit Sonar.
 
Bob Bone
 

I ran Dimension Pro as x64 DX in Sonar and had no real problems.
But in Reaper there were sudden freezes and such.
Finding the VST x64 version(a bit of a hassle) it runs fine anywhere.

robert_e_bone
I was under the thought that DXi did not work in 64-bit Sonar.
 
Bob Bone
 

64 Bit DXi runs fine, 32 Bit DXi will not run unless you use a wrapper. There are some posts on how to do this but I have never tried it.

mike_mccue
 
Cakewalk introduced VST capability by buying FXpansion's wrapper technology to make VST look like DX.

SONAR may have something new going on but I guess Blue Cat's recommendation is based on the notion that you can bypass the wrapping and get straight to the code.

 
As I understand it Sonar has had native VST support for a long time now. The wrapper is no longer required.

Some misinformation here. SONAR using a DX wrapper is ancient history.. We did use FXpansions wrapper way back because it was the easiest way at the time to get VST support quickly. That was changed about 7 years ago when we rearchitected the code to use a plugin abstraction layer. 
 
There seems to be pretty large misunderstandings of what the the term wrapper is to many users so I'll try and clarify what it is. In essence a wrapper is an adapter that converts from one protocol to another. Similar to getting an adapter to plug a 3 pin US plug into a European outlet. A wrapper doesn't make anything less efficient necessarily. To get more technical, like most other DAW's, SONAR has its own internal "abstration layer" protocol for communicating with plugins that is neither VST nor DX. We rewrote out abstraction layer back in 2003 to allow us to support more general plugin formats. That actually makes it easier for us to add new protocols as they come along, since the entire application doesn't need to change when a new protocol is added, just the lower level implementation. For example the code that inserts a plugin has no idea that the plugin is a VST or a DX plugin. Anything required that is specific to the VST protocol is handled via custom interfaces so there is no loss of custom functionality by using a generic abstraction layer.
 
Adapters are an extremely common technique that all modern software developers use. You can read an overview of it if you are interested here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adapter_pattern Adapters are used everywhere in software engineering. For example in SONAR we have one way to communicate with audio drivers and several implementations of the same - ASIO, WDM, MME. It would be pretty foolish and wasteful to implement multiple protocols all over the application each time something new comes along. Pretty much every plugin vendors follows the same technique as well. They have an internal plugin protocol and several implementation of the same for each format, AAX, VST, AU, etc. FWIW some years ago I spoke to one of the Steinberg developers and he was candid enough to say that they have their own abstraction layer on top of VST - so go figure<g>
 
Anyway to answer the OP's question, choosing a format to use is really a choice of how well implemented and tested that format is. In your case I would probably pick VST since its more likely that the vendor has extensively tested that. Also both DX and VST formats will work in both X64 and X86. In VST mode we have a 32 to 64 bit adapter but not for DX. This is why some 32 bit only DX plugins do not work in X64.

Thanks Noel.  I thought that was right.
 
To the OP, stick w/ VST since that seems to be the current standard.  Blue cat is probably copying and pasting old text w/o updating it.  You find help and manuals w/ all kinds of passe info in them.
 
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