John
Why not open a dozen drum synths for a MIDI drum track?  

Uhhhhhhh because I want the kick from EZdrummer's MetalHeads but I want the snare from a BFD2 kit and the cymbals from Addictive and the toms from Slate and the percussion from a Battery kit?

>> John
>> I don't see the point of opening many Kontakts for each simple instrument
>> track. That is a waste of computer resources.

Well, that's exactly what I was saying. And, that's exactly the point. What side are you on again?

Because right know, if you want to work with instrument tracks, every single Kontakt-instrument you use has got to be in its own instance. That's the very limitation we're talking about here.

One synth instance with multiple SITs pointing to multiple MIDI channels and audio outs from that one instance, correct?   The way I read it... one of the benefits was to have space-saving SITs for each MIDI/audio pair instead of individual MIDI and audio tracks, which is how multi-timbral synths are currently handled. 
 

Exactly.

Interesting topic. Internally in SONAR an ins track represents a pair of tracks - the audio source and the MIDI track. Of course its not quite that simple beyond that since there is a ton of logic in the UI that manages instrument tracks and its the bane of every cakewalk developer :)

As an experiment I hacked the code in the debugger to flaunt the rules a bit and was able to create 2 instrument tracks that feed the same instance of TTS1 each on a different MIDI channel and a different output port. It seemed to work ok as far as I could see. So its indeed possible to do. Of course there would be user interface implications and we'd need to update the insert synth dialog etc, etc. We'll think about it for a future version. Don't get your hopes up since it wont be X2 :)

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk
]

Interesting topic. Internally in SONAR an ins track represents a pair of tracks - the audio source and the MIDI track. Of course its not quite that simple beyond that since there is a ton of logic in the UI that manages instrument tracks and its the bane of every cakewalk developer :)

As an experiment I hacked the code in the debugger to flaunt the rules a bit and was able to create 2 instrument tracks that feed the same instance of TTS1 each on a different MIDI channel and a different output port. It seemed to work ok as far as I could see. So its indeed possible to do. Of course there would be user interface implications and we'd need to update the insert synth dialog etc, etc. We'll think about it for a future version. Don't get your hopes up since it wont be X2 :)

Glad to see that you guys have been thinking about this. It's easily in my top ten Sonar feature wishlist. I think you should entirely do away with differentiating between audio and MIDI tracks and just have tracks that recognize the content on them, and act appropriately. That said, that would present problems with existing projects. You'd probably need to have some sort of legacy mode. 


You'd also need to figure out how best to combine the MIDI FX and Audio FX bins into one.


Anyway, if you do it right, it will be a lot cleaner and could make Sonar faster to work with. 

How about making MIDI a bus? Make it look just like the audio buses. It could be a combined bus, or separated by channel, etc. Then we can route the MIDI data very generally.

And I'd really like to be able to put Reaktor in the MIDI FX bin, but I can't get it to happen.

Grent


>> John
>> I don't see the point of opening many Kontakts for each simple instrument
>> track. That is a waste of computer resources.

Well, that's exactly what I was saying. And, that's exactly the point. What side are you on again?

Because right know, if you want to work with instrument tracks, every single Kontakt-instrument you use has got to be in its own instance. That's the very limitation we're talking about here.

I said I don't work with simple instruments tracks.  I have no use for them.  That is no dig on them either. They are for a particular purpose and they meet that well. I am very happy with the normal way to work with MIDI. I also use hardware synths. Simple instruments tracks are useless with those. You don't need an audio track until you are ready to record audio from that kind of synth.

There is more involved here than just trying to reduce clutter. I'm not sure that applies anyway. Multiple instances of the same synth that is multi voice seems more clutter than one being fed by multiple MIDI tracks and outputting to multiple audio tracks.

Multiple instances of the same synth that is multi voice seems more clutter than one being fed by multiple MIDI tracks and outputting to multiple audio tracks.

 
Almost...   Picture those multiple pairs of MIDI and audio tracks as multiple SITs instead.  Half the physical tracks feeding the same multi-out synth.  Assuming that one wants/needs pairs of MIDI and audio tracks, of course.
 

An instance of Kontakt is 38Mb..that is ~0.5% of RAM on my small system.. so whereas YES to be pedantic technically it is a waste of resources, but practically its not the player than uses resources, its the instrument and the use of it that consumes resources.

Irregardless, at the end of the day, more ways to configure and see your tracks is better, as long as we dont start walking down the path of losing abilities we currently have.

However the discussions above have nothing to do with the OP request, which was a potential Sonar user wishing to arbitarily change the number of outputs from (say) Kontakt, after it has been instantiated because he a) does not know how many instruments he wants, and b) did not seem aware that he could simply hide tracks