Calling racks by sending prg chg?

[FantomXR]

Hey people!

As far as I know there is now way in using a live host as a real workstation. The thing is, every time I use a workstation like Kronos or Montage I start to play wiry different sounds and switch between them quick. On a DAW this is not possible because you have to build the whole environment by yourself.
So Id like to build such an evironment. But to not have every plugin loaded into ram from the beginning, it would be great if it would be possible to call racks by sending prg change. Is that even possible? Maybe there are other usecases for this function too.

Thanks,
Chris

[terrybritton]

Most of my plugins have ten-bazillion presets, so I use the states to affect which preset appears in a rack set to that state.

This is easy in plugins that expose their presets to the drop-down list, but others require you assign names to the slots in the drop-down to make this work. See this post for a good explanation on how to do that.

VST Presets don't appear in Presets List

So, I figured out how to do this. First, terminology. I’m naming this stuff 'cause I couldn’t find it in the user guides. Doesn’t mean it’s not there, I just couldn’t find it. VST Wrapper - called this because it’s different in every host (I’ve tried so far). This is the header and footer that the Plugin Editor’s UI is wrapped in. Preset List Dropdown - In the header, preset names with Program Change Numbers. Options Menu - the triple stripe thingy at the far right of the header. Procedure …

Also, this blog post shows the Program Change Remapping feature that might be handy for you if you have a pedal that increments by one as I do (using CC#12 and the program advance feature found in C3’s options).

Program Map MIDI Filter

@Neil_Durant also mentioned using “Load state by Program” in this post, which is a bindings trick, but I cannot find any other information on it at the moment:

First load/play of a session

As an aside, don’t forget that you can create a binding from Program Change to Song States “Load State by Program”, which uses the incoming program change, so you don’t need to have one binding for each state - you can just use one binding. Although perhaps you have a particular need to have each one listed separately. Neil

Terry

[brad]

Hi @FantomXR

Cantabile doesn’t have any built in support for loading racks on demand. But here’s a couple of things that might help:

• Set lists let you load songs on demand (and indirectly any racks they reference) if you leave set list pre-loading turned off. You can assign program change events to load songs from the set list.
• Plugins can be unloaded. (Right click and choose unload) in which case they use no memory (well just a copy of the plugin’s state is held). You can use states to switch plugins on/off and then control the state list via program changes.

Brad