OK, there are two editors prepared for A-PRO: one is Sonar Control Surface Plugin for Sonar and the other is A-PRO Editor for other daws.
I do recommend A-800PRO, but the Sonar Control Surface Plugin has these inconveniences:
- If you want to use the faders/knobs on the A-PRO to control the volume/pan of tracks and buses in Sonar, you can only control volume/pan of eight CONTIGUOUS tracks OR buses. This means you can't assign, for example, the first fader to the drum bus and the second fader to the bass track.
- If you want to control modulation (e.g. rotary speaker speed, vibrato) of your VSTi by connecting your expression pedal to A-PRO, you can’t do it by default. A-PRO has twenty built-in control maps (0-19), and Sonar Control Surface Plugin uses either 0 or 19, but the Control Surface Plugin won't let you assign modulation to the expression pedal (which is assigned Volume by default.) So if you want to record takes using your expression pedal for modulation, you have to manually switch the control map to the one that allows the pedal to control modulation (which is easy but you need to know how to use the A-PRO Editor, too).
- If you are going to use a non-Roland sustain pedal, it may not work with A-PRO. My Yamaha FC3 doesn’t. Roland tech support confirmed it. (Oops, this has nothing to do with Control Surface Plugin.)
The A-Pro Editor, on the other hand, has no trouble doing the first two, but it can't control Sonar's console and a plugin's parameters separately (You can't assign, for example, the first knob to the pan control of a track and assign the same knob to the Attack control of your VSTi).
If you don’t mind the above, I highly recommend A-PRO (I wish it had more pads, though).
Thanks