Acon Digital Media EffectChainer is a free DirectX and VST capable universal wrapper and multi-effect rack. With EffectChainer you can load, edit, and chain as many DirectX and VST plug-ins you want.

X1 still uses and can use DX plugins. They just have to be the same bit-ness. So 32 bit sonar can use 32 bit DX plugins, 64 bit sonar can use 64 bit plugins. You can install 32 bit sonar on a 64 bit windows system and it will run fine. As well as install and use 32 bit DX plugins on a 64 bit windows system. The problem comes when you want to use 32 bit DX plugins in 64 bit windows. For that you need a wrapper like DXshell or Acon Effect Chainer that will run DX plugins as VSTs, then you can bit bridge them.

But that's a bit of a hassle. If you really need 32 bit DX plugins, just run the 32 bit Sonar. No fuss no muss.

Although Cubase 4 no longer supports Direct X plug-ins, if you have Cubase SE, SL or SX songs that use them, place those DX plug-ins inside a DX-to-VST wrapper such as Vincent Burel's FFX4, shown here, and then you can load them into Cubase 4 perfectly. Direct X plug-in support has been dropped from Steinberg's Cubase 4 sequencing software - so what do you do if you have projects that use such plug-ins and you want to upgrade to the latest Cubase? PC Musician offers some solutions, as well as rounding up the latest PC news and information. As I write this, Steinberg's recently released Cubase 4 seems to be getting good user feedback for its stability, and its new VST3 format is to be commended both for allowing plug-ins to consume CPU overhead only when audio is passing through them, and for having dynamic I/O, so that the number of inputs and outputs adapts in context to stereo or surround use. However, the company seem to have upset some PC musicians by abandoning Direct X (DX) plug-in support in Cubase 4, partly because they didn't announce this fact until very late in the day. I can think of various reasons why Steinberg might want to dispose of Direct X plug-in compatibility, one of which is that Direct X plug-ins don't declare their latency to the host application, so it cannot, therefore, be compensated for. In addition, you can't automate Direct X plug-ins inside Cubase (although you can in Sonar if they comply with the Direct X v8 standard).

The majority of modern plug-ins are either shipped in VST format alone or as both Direct X and VST versions, letting the user choose one or both to install. Many musicians don't now run any Direct X plug-ins at all, and so won't be affected by Steinberg's decision, but some do, so I decided to gauge the scale of the issue by examining what proportion of my own extensive plug-in collection (several hundred in total) is Direct X only. Ironically, the easiest way to find this out is using Cubase SE, SL or SX, by opening up its Plug-in Information window and clicking on the Direct X Plug-ins page. The vast majority of my Direct X plug-ins are from Waves, but Waves PC plug-ins have had their own Waveshell-VST wrapper for years, that lets them appear as automatable VST plug-ins inside host applications, so I'd already disabled all the Direct X versions inside Cubase SX3.