Daw integration question

[Callidac]

I've been following the post regarding Sonar X2 and d8bridge.
I was curious if Sonar X1(ver.d) is free of such quirks (no track select, etc.) as I have no intention of upgrading anytime in the foreseeable future (if it ain't broke don't fix it mentality)
I have won a d8b on eBay but am reluctant to purchase if there's an issue.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[bitSync]

@Callidac

I've been whining about the track SELECT button for the Sonar X2a/D8Bridge integration, but just to be clear, many of the other D8Bridge control surface functions seem to work fine with Sonar X2 including faders, Vpots, MUTE, SOLO, REC, the LED meters, MCU select, the time code (both MBT and SMPTE), the VFD, fader flip, jog/scrub, transport controls, etc. I'm not claiming complete stellar D8Bridge integration in all other regards, but it's certainly very workable. You just need to mouse the track SELECT or use the QWERTY keyboard arrows until D8Bridge track SELECT is fixed for X2.

I can't respond directly to your X1 question because I jumped over X1 completely, from Sonar Producer 8.5.3 to X2 then to X2a. There was such vocal user angst over Sonar X1 that although I bought the license, I never installed it. I understand that X1d is in pretty good shape, but I assumed that X2 would be in at least as good a condition as X1d...

FWIW, it seems there are some Mackie MCU users (the real deal MCU SysEx protocol) who are having control surface issues with Sonar X2 and X2a, but the track SELECT button does not seem to be one of those issues. I would like to see Cakewalk do a complete scrub on their mackiecontrol.dll to confirm that it is fully compliant with the MCU SysEx spec and where it is not, to bring it into compliance. I'm really hoping for that in X2b.

Unfortunately, yet understandably, Mackie is unwilling to publish the MCU SysEx specification for all to use. They will share it under strict licensing agreements with other equipment and software manufacturers, but the better defined the MCU protocol is for a broad audience, the more competiton their MCU may face with competing control surfaces (the d8b/D8Bridge is essentially a competing control surface). They wrote the SysEx for the MCU so they understandably want to keep that market edge. What this means to developers without Mackie MCU licenses is that they have to sniff the protocol and interpret their findings to apply to their application. If, for example, Sonar changed the MCU initialization sequence between 8.5.3 and X1 in a way that was compliant with the spec but different than it was in 8.5.3, builders of MCU emulators (e.g., D8Bridge, Behringer, etc.) might get tripped up by a change in SysEx sequence - the new sequence may still be compliant with the MCU SysEx spec, but it may be different than what they coded to (their protocol sniffing).

Hopefully, Marc will be able to look at this Sonar X2/X2a track SELECT issue soon and let us know what's up. FWIW, I'm on the verge of buying a second d8b (they're cheap enough now to have a spare console or a even a second console for 48 contiguous tracks of DAW controller) because I'm confident that D8Bridge and X2 will at some point be extremely well integrated. It's already very good; perfect just isn't that far off. I'm betting on D8Bridge v1.2 and Sonar X2b.