Sonar Rewired to Reason - MIDI latency issues?

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casimps1

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I am running Sonar 5 (yes I know it's old, but bear with me. Pretty sure that's not the issue) and Reason 4.

I have been trying to use Sonar as my main sequencer and just use Reason as a synth rack. So, in Sonar I insert Reason as a Rewire device. Reason then shows up as a MIDI output bus and the Reason devices I've created show up as the channels on that MIDI bus. That all works fantastically.

The problem that I have is that you can't assign which channels on the Rewire MIDI bus control which Reason devices. It just assigns channels as devices are created even if you don't want to control them through MIDI. This is problematic especially if you create a Combinator patch as it will eat up quite a few of your MIDI channels and you're limited to 16. Several times I've scoured the web for a solution to that problem but it seems to be a known issue.

Now, I have found a workaround. Basically, I first install a loopback MIDI driver (like MIDI Yoke). Then, instead of routing my Sonar MIDI track to output to the Reason bus I route it to the "Out to MIDI Yoke" bus. Then, I open Reason's Adv. MIDI Device and configure Bus A to respond to the "In from MIDI Yoke" bus. Then, I can configure exactly which device corresponds to which MIDI channel.

Perfect, right? That's exactly what I wanted! And it works! But...

Latency :mad:

When I play a Sonar MIDI track controlling a Reason device via MIDI Yoke and Reason's Adv. MIDI Device, the notes have very noticeable stutter. Interestingly, if I simply change the Sonar MIDI track to output to the Reason Rewire bus instead of MIDI Yoke, everything works great. No stutter at all. But then I'm back to the same problem - I can't control which device goes to which channel. Argh! And for the record I've tried other MIDI loopback drivers with the same results.

Any advice on this is much appreciated. Thanks!
 
Ugh... another problem with the MIDI Yoke solution. I just found that MIDI Yoke only works for live playback. Any time that I try to export audio the instruments controlled by MIDI Yoke don't trigger, so those instruments are missing from the final mix.

So, even if I could fix the latency it looks like it won't work. Any other ideas?
 
Curiosity has the best of me here ..................... why not just use the synth rack in Sonar?
 
I assume you mean the various synth plugins that come included with Sonar? (because the Synth Rack is really just a feature in Sonar where you can see what plugins you are using)

Simple answer - Reason is better. Reason is far more configurable, has lots more presets to browse through, it's not a resource hog like most other synths I've tried, it's well documented, has a large user base with good support, and has some features (like the graintable synthesizer) that are hard to find elsewhere.
 
Sorry to bump this, but I still haven't found any good solution and feel like other people may have had the same problem.

Actually, it would even be good to hear from people that have tried this kind of setup (or a similar one) successfully. So, if you control Reason via an external DAW using MIDI please let me know how you've done it and if you've gotten around the channel limitation I've mentioned above.

Thanks!
 
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